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Show ODD ACCIDENTS OVER NATION COSTLY TO CARELESS AND UNWARY By Paul Jones - National Safety Council Are you, perchance, the adventurous type? Do you 'earn for the unusual, the new and different? Then you may find, just what you are dreaming of in the odd happenings rounded up by the National Safety Council in its annual search for freak accidents. Would you like, for example, to toss a time bomb back and forth with a gopher? Or to be shot by a moody dog? Would you care to smoke a firecracker instead of a cigarete? Those and other dizzy doings were turned up by the council. To-wit: The gopher that kept pestering pester-ing farmer Paul Thomas of Las Vegas was no fool. When Thomas Thom-as shoved a lighted concussion bomb down the gopher hole, the gopher shoved it right back. Thomas frantically hurled the bomb away. It landed near his i barn, exploded, and burned up rifle and bang! Down went Stanley with a bullet in his knee. Patrolman Fred Golden of Talahassee, Fla., is glad his pants aren't as good a shot as a dog or a deer. He was holding hold-ing the trousers with one hand and brushing them off with the other when a loose pistol bullet bul-let went off in one of the pock-its. pock-its. It missed him. And in Knoxville, Tenn., Goden Gibson reached absent-mindedly absent-mindedly for a cigaret, -stuck a two-inch firecracker in his mouth and lit it. From his hospital hos-pital bed he announced he had given up smoking. Roger Cole of Alpena, Mich., wishes people who drive houses on public highways would stay on their own side of the road-Cole's road-Cole's car was parked in the 12 tons of hay. The gopher loved every minute of it. You can hardly blame the dog that shot John Beyreis in Pawnee City, Neb. After all Beyreis, the city dog catcher, was taking the pooch to the pound to shoot him- Riding morosely in the back of the panel truck, the dog looked meditatively at Beyreis' shotgun, shot-gun, reached out a paw, discharged dis-charged the gun and shot the dog catcher in the foot. Neither can you be too harsh on the deer that shot Ed Stanley Stan-ley of Weed Heights, Nev., for hunter Stanley had drawn first blood by shooting the deer. As Stanley bent over his prey, the deer gave a lusty kick, hit the shoulder o'f US 23 when a house moving crew approached. The side of the house clipped the side of Cole's car. In Dallas, Mrs. Edward Lee Cowart investigated a noise in the bedroom, reported back to her husband, "Honey, there's a car in your bed." There was, toao! The auto had missed a turn in a skyscraper parking garage next to the hotel where the Cowarts lived, leaped six feet through space and crashed (Continued on Page Two) to see what her sons were up to, found and rescued Jeff in the nick of time. In Chicao. Earl Heffley cut himself while opening a Christmas Christ-mas package he had received in the mail. He found it contained con-tained a first-aid kit. On an icy highway near Richmond. Inch, Mrs. Pauline Ellison crashed into a truck, was thrown from her car, and cozily and securely skidded 200 feet on her briefcase. And it wouldn't be a vintage year for odd accidents if a certain cer-tain gentleman in Los Angeles I didn't make the news. This time he was charged with driving driv-ing thru a red light. His name? No kidding, folks, it's Safety First! Here's More About ODDITIES Continued from Page One through the wall of the third-floor third-floor berircom. No one was injured, in-jured, but Cowart made the car set oul. Mrs. Loretta Lewis, of Charlotte, Char-lotte, N. C, considered herself lucky to be alive and conscious when her car landed at the bottom bot-tom of a 50-foot embankment alongside a railroad track alter plunging ci'f the highway. She ielt luckier a few seconds later after a train roared by, side-swiped side-swiped the wreckage of the car, and Mrs. Lewis lound she had escaped from double danger dan-ger with only a broken arm and a few bruises. No one was injured when four cars piled up in a collision near Des Moines no one, that is, until Patrolman Elmer Van Note, investigating the crash, slammed a car door on his linger. Marvin Seamster. a butcher in Richmond, Va-, was understandably under-standably confident as he took' at Lansing, Mich, when a batter bat-ter hit a screaming liner straight at him. The ball hit pitcher Trosper squarely on the forehead, bounced high in the air and was caught by the first baseman for a putout. Benjamin Norris became so annoyed at a tree limb blowing against his house in Kansas City that he got out of bed in the middle of the night, found a saw and climbed the tree to cut off the branch. A few minutes min-utes later he was back in bed again a hospital bed. You guessed it. He was on the wrong end of the limb when he did the sawing! After 10 years and 750,000 miles of accident-free driving, Lou Murdock of Maywood, Cal. was given an award by his insurance in-surance company. He accepted accept-ed it in the hospital. He had broken his leg in a fall down a flight o'f stairs in his home. James R. Clark of Palatka, Fla., had gone through his. driver's driv-er's license test with flying colors and, with Examiner Earl Gore as passenger, pulled triumphantly tri-umphantly into the parking lot. He hit a car. It belonged to Gore. License postponed. Two year old Jeff McGuire i should have been the dry est boy in Cleveland, but he wasn't because of his tears. That was j the clay he crawled into the family laundry, dryer and his younger brother very obligingly obliging-ly flicked the switch. Mrs. McGuire, Mc-Guire, making the usual rounds on the assignment of carvint, the turkey at a food dealers' banquet. But before he could even disjoint the drumstick lie cut his finger so severely he had to turn the job over to his wife Mrs. Mary Hastings Bradley, author and big game hunter, survived six African safaris without injury. Bui ii the calm o'f her own trophy room in Chicago she tripped over a lion's head and broke her arm. The lion had been shot by her husband, without incident. Many a golfer shoots a birdie but not as literally as 12 year old Kick Pickard of Baldwins-ville, Baldwins-ville, N. Y- Playing his first golf game, Rick teed off on the third" hole, hit a bird in flight and killed it. Eugene Cromwell of Milwaukee Mil-waukee was uninjured when i his auto swerved off the high-j high-j way. He steped out to survey ' the wreckage, fell into a 50-ioot 50-ioot limestone quarry, and broke his arm. Ralph and Cecil Mason are brothers and live near each other in Covert, Mich. So it was not surprising that they ran into each other on a wintry day last January. The trouble was, each was driving a car at the time- Leroy Henderson, a janitor at the Wyoming statehouse in Cheyenne, had ahvaps felt he was a pretty good window polisher. pol-isher. But he never realized ' how good until, just after diligently dili-gently cleaning a window, he saw some boys running thru the statehouse lawn, stuck his head out to yell at them and poked it thru the spotless pane. It is doubtful, of course, that Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy, wife of the U S Senator from Massachusetts, Massa-chusetts, ever had any serious intention of trying out for varsity var-sity football at Harvard. But she is less than ever so inclined in-clined since she broke her ankle playing touch football with her brother-in-law, Teddy, ! a Harvard end. : When 4-II Club girls modeled . self-made dresses at a style review re-view in Salina, Kan., Sandra Shilling wore something no other model had a sling. Sandra San-dra broke her arm when a zipper zip-per stuck on the dress she had made for the exhibit and she gave a yank to loosen it. The dress won second prize. The sling didn't place. Richard Fleming of Woodland, Wood-land, Calif., had a good reason for momentarily losing his head while driving. A woodpecker wood-pecker was pecking away at it! The bird, a family pet, was in the lap of Flemin's son when it mistook the elder- Fleming cranium for a tree and went to work- The car left the highway and rolled over twice. Neither of the Flemings was hurt- The woodpecker found itself a tree. One of the big things in baseball base-ball is to use your head. And that's exactly what piicher Chuck Trosper did in a game |