May 9, 2007
Near Misses Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:50 AM EST Reader Thomas Engel, in the Discussions section of this website, brings up the subject of near misses, people who just missed the train that crashed or the ship that sank and thus lived to become famous and important. He mentions Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the poet (and father of the Supreme Court justice), who missed a train, and the future Duke of Wellington who was too sick to take a ship home from India, a ship that vanished. I have another candidate, the great Broadway composer Jerome Kern. Kern, a notorious night owl, failed to get out of bed on time on May 1, 1915, to catch the ship he was scheduled to go to Europe on. The ship, of course, was the Lusitania. Had Kern been less of a slugabed, there might have been no Princess Theater shows, no Show Boat, no “Smoke Get in Your Eyes,” or “Remind Me,” or “I’ve Told Every Little Star,” or “All the Things You Are,” or “The Last Time I Saw Paris.”
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