Just recently, a friend indirectly reminded me of my short-lived experience in the St. Louis theatre scene. Moved by my daughter’s success in this genre, I was inspired to try my pen at it. At that time, I had thought the word was spelled playwrite. To my surprise, my first three efforts found their way to full production and the stage. My three subjects were dementia, abortion and suicide. Of the three, my third remains my favorite. While there have been a few in my family, dating back to my paternal grandmother, who was driven near crazy by menopause in 1908, I thought it such a glaring problem that I should explore it in a dramatic circumstance.
The play revolves around a late middle age college professor and a pediatric nurse who randomly meet in an elevator. Each one plans, or at least flirts with the idea of jumping from the top floor of an 18-story building in a mid-sized city in the mid-west. The elevator gets stuck between floors 12 & 13. For the next 45 minutes two complete strangers bear their souls to one another. I called it A Moment of Grace because God’s healing grace is all over the elevator’s three visible walls.
I felt the hand of God directing me in drafting this essay. But finding the idea was not that easy. I have never been struck by writers’ block but recently I have found that I’ve had nothing percolating in my memory tank. For me, the best way to cure that is to clean off my desk. I hate cleaning off my desk. I am not saying I am messy like the late William F. Buckley, who could have walked across his small study, using just his mammoth desk, littered with piles of notes and intellectual minutiae without his feet touching unoccupied space. But I am not too far behind.
Before my unpleasant task had been completed, I discovered a yellowed column, written by the late New York Times columnist, Dave Anderson. The piece was his half-century reminiscence of a football drama that has been a Holy Cross legend ever since it happened. His special column, which appeared on November 22, 1992. The essay was entitled The Biggest Upset, The Party, the Fire. This article lit my creative furnace and I started thinking about events in my life that were variations of this familiar theme.
The assassination attempt of Donald Trump is just the most recent example of God’s Divine Providence interceding in the affairs of mankind to change a result or at least remind us just how vulnerable our earthly existence is. I do not know if the former president has made any personal changes in his life but I am certain he is deeply aware of his life’s fragility. I also believe Ronald Reagan had similar thoughts about the same thing after an assassin’s bullet came within an inch of his heart. I can only imagine how different our country’s history might have been if either bullet had been fatal, instead of a near miss.
I have had a handful of such close calls in my own life. I used to write a blog I presumptuously called, The Gospel Truth. Surprisingly, it is still available. I wrote one I called the Accidental Kamikaze, which has also appeared in these pages. (March of 2017) In it I detailed all the close calls my immature behavior had caused me. The most dangerous and potentially fatal was my three boys on a bike stunt. Then there was my head-first trip into a small set of concrete steps. I am really surprised that I did not break my neck. The accident fittingly occurred on December 7, 2011, the 70th anniversary of the Kamikazes’ attack on Pearl Harbor.
I am also aware of the near fatal mishaps of other people, for whom some circumstances caused them to change or alter a planned event that turned fatal. I am constantly reminded of the late TV star, Fran Allison, who appeared for many years in the children’s show Kukla, Fran and Ollie. She missed her TWA flight to Chicago from LaGuardia airport in August of 1965. The plane crashed into Lake Michigan, killing the 30-40 people on board. I had a personal interest in that plane, since I was to make the same trip, the following morning. My flight was delayed until the airline got a replacement for my plane. I was en route to join my fellow volunteers for the Catholic Lay Extension and the beginning of the next stage of my life. It was also my very first time on a plane.
Another example happened near the conclusion of a cruise to Alaska with my late wife many years ago. The trip’s sponsors were my St. Louis travel agency, Altair Travel and Cruises. Its two female owners had joined us for the trip. I remember we all were at a cocktail party near the end of the tour and were looking out the aft window at the placid waters. Somehow a rumor, which proved to be true, started circulating among us.
A tourist plane, carrying the pilot and five passengers had crashed in the icy waters not far from us. There were two swimmers, two floaters and two divers. In layman’s language, this translates to two survivors, two dead who had surfaced and two still in the plane. The story also included the fact that one of the passengers from the Carnival Cruise line, anchored near us, had decided not to go and gave her ticket to see the Glaciers from the air to a Filipino mother who worked for the cruise line. One person dodged a bullet, which killed another person.
The most dramatic incident I know of is featured in Holy Cross alumni Dave Anderson’s aforementioned article on the half-century anniversary of a football game and its tragic aftermath. The Big Game involved two Jesuit colleges and their 1942 annual football game. Holy Cross, my alma mater and Boston College, were fierce rivals, until the early 1980s. BC went into the game with a perfect 8-0 record and another invitation to the Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day.
Holy Cross was mired in mediocrity for much of the season with a 4-4-1 record to BC’s eight straight wins, including five shutouts. As a result, the Eagles were huge favorites to win the game, but there was a mitigating factor. During their annual game, anything could happen on game day. However, BC felt no fear and confidently planned a victory celebration at the famous Cocoanut Grove restaurant in Boston on November 28th, following the game at Fenway Park, the home of the Red Sox.
As only diehard purple and white fans could hope for, a miracle took place on the Fens. The Crusaders walloped the Eagles by the surreal score of 55-12. The 41,350, mostly BC fans sat, silent and completely stunned. It was all Holy Cross from the opening kickoff as the Cross led 41-6 after three quarters.
For the unbelievers, who did not think God had a hand in this historic upset, the captains of their respective teams appeared on the cover of the game’s program. While the Holy Cross captain’s number was obscured, Mike Holovak, BC All-American quarterback wore #12 while his fellow co-captain sported #55 in that order. As Yankee manager Casey Stengel used to say, you could look it up.
While Holy Cross held its post-game celebration at the renown Parker House, BC cancelled the Cocoanut Grove party. Holovak said after the fire that losing probably saved our lives. However, many did not get the memo and the place was crowded to the gills, with not only BC fans, but also many from Holy Cross.
Anderson wrote that nearly 1000 people had jammed into the Cocoanut Grove, more than double its legal capacity of 460. This was a disaster just waiting for someone to strike a match. It is estimated that 492 people perished in one of the greatest disasters in American history. For a few days it chased the war news off the front pages.
The post-mortem analysis revealed that if proper safety rules had been in place, the fatalities would never have approached this number. Exit doors were not marked, and those that were, had been locked on the outside. There was a revolving door that quickly became inoperative because it was jammed with bodies. The lighting was poor, there was no sprinkler system and most of the draperies and building materials were highly flammable as were many of the party decorations.
As the story unfolded it seemed the fire started in the lower level, in the popular Melody Bar. To develop a more romantic atmosphere, the lights were always dimmed. The inside story alleges that wanting even more intimacy, a couple unscrewed the bulb atop an artificial palm tree. Management sent a busboy to change the light bulb. The darkness forced him to strike a match and before he knew it the palm tree and surrounding party decorations caught fire and the room quickly became engulfed in flames.
When the flames reached the stairs, a fireball burst in the main dining room and the Foyer. In situations like these, panic can be as deadly as the toxic fumes that invaded the restaurant. The spreading inferno instilled a mad dash toward the exits. Dozens were crushed by the pressing crowd as the bottleneck of available exits quickly became clogged, trapping countless victims.
There were other strange coincidences, which occurred that added credence to my premise. At 10:20 the Fire Department near the Grove received a handful of alarms for the same area. Not before too long, the streets and approaches to the Cocoanut Grove were clogged with fire vehicles. By the time the cavalry arrived it was already too late.
Of the thousand people who were in the restaurant nearly 80% of them either perished or were hospitalized. One patron who appeared on both charts was famed western film and radio actor Buck Jones. Jones was not feeling well but his friends encouraged him to go to the restaurant. The 50-year-old actor originally survived but eventually succumbed to his injuries in the hospital, two days later.
Events, such as this small sample, invite each of us to meditate on the ever-presence of God and His healing grace. These isolated episodes raise more questions than they may answer. Why was one person saved and another taken? It is an age-old question that I believe has caused many to lose their belief in an all-loving God.
Sometimes it is difficult to reconcile free will, and grace with God’s eternal will. The key to remember is that our earthly lives are temporal. We all have an expiration date, the missing bracket for our tombstones. For example, my first wife completed her bracket on October 8, 2016, the day her earthly life ended. The secret is to pray that we will be able to faithfully accept God’s inexorable will for us when the bracket closes on us. Near Misses are just His way of reminding us that someday we will get a direct hit.
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WILLIAM A. BORST has taught at virtually all levels of education from elementary school through university, published commentaries in many local and national publications, and hosted a weekly talk show on WGNU radio for 22 years. Having recently served as editor of the Mindszenty Report, Dr. Borst is the author of two prominent books: Liberalism: Fatal Consequences (1999) and The Scorpion and the Frog: A Natural Conspiracy (2005). He holds a PhD in American History from St. Louis University. This essay originally appeared at Catholic Journal.
