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Louis Wagner Racecar and Other Weird Connections |
Seacoast History Blog #83
Feburary 19, 2010
Each time I revise that article on my UNH Prof Max Maynard my head starts to spin. When you show up at a guy’s house 3,000 miles from home on the day he almost dies, you gotta wonder. Was it fate or coincidence? Maybe the brain just spins more in winter in New England, but suddenly it seems like weird little connections are popping up all over. Like the other day, when I was reading a great biography of naval hero Stephen Decatur and a gentleman came up to me at an Athenaeum party. “I read what you wrote about my father in your last book!” he said, and I gulped. His nametag, amazingly, read “Stephen Decatur”. His father, whom I did write about, had the same name, and is descended from two similarly named Decaturs, heroes of the American Revolution and the War of 1812. (Continued below)
That’s freaky and it happens to me a lot. Like yesterday when I was watching a weird film about Lord Nelson, the British naval hero, on the Turner channel. The movie is called “That Hamilton Woman” and stars Vivian Leigh and Lawrence Olivier, and it ends with a wild sea battle from the Napoleonic War. The ending cuts between studio shots and a raging fight between what are clearly model ships exploding and bursting into flames in a giant Hollywood bathtub. I read on IMDB.com, the database for film addicts, that this was Winston Churchill’s favorite movie. I can see why. It came out in 1941 and works as a huge patriotic call to arms to defend Great Britain from a tyrannical power.
I turned off the TV, walked downstairs, got the afternoon mail, and found a package of junk I won in an eBay auction. It was a stack of 1904 copies of the Book Lovers Magazine that I had purchased on a whim. The first page I opened was a shot of a very young Winston Churchill as he looked four decades before he became the growling bulldog of WWII.
Okay, maybe not too weird, but look at this one. A copy of a 1925 Girl Scout manual popped up in one of my eBay searches. Instantly I knew whom it belonged to. I wrote to the seller and asked if there was a name on the manual and he wrote right back. Sure enough – Dorothy M .Vaughan – the woman who went on to become the local Portsmouth, NH librarian for 53 years and died recently at age 99. She is featured in my last book along with Stephen Decatur and I’ve become her biographer, of sorts. The idea that I knew it was her booklet among billions of eBay items makes me dizzy.
Here’s one more. For a decade I’ve been researching the Smuittynose Murders of 1873 and hoping to find more about killer Louis Wagner. We know a lot, but I feel there is more data out there, so I keep tapping his name into eBay. Nothing new ever comes up. But my pulse always quickens when the Internet churns up a detail about Louis Wagner the early 20th century racecar driver. No connection except this fairly common name – until now.
There are two known images of the Shoals murderer, one portrait taken after his capture, and another of him in a carriage. Now look at this picture of the racecar driver with the same name. He looks similar and he is sitting in a very similar position in an old vehicle. I know nothing but my twisted brain links these two figures, but I’m fascinated all the same.
Welcome to my seething brain. It’s like a local history version of Alice in Wonderland in here. Alice, would you please pass the tea?
Copyright © 2010 by J. Dennis Robinson and SeacoastNH.com All rights reserved.
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