Florida Man Paul Cole was not planning to be famous, but it's the old thing about right place, right time. The right time was August 8 of 1969, and the right place was on a street in London when four men he later called "kooks" "went across the street like a row of ducks."
Holler out when you figure what I'm talking about here.
Mr Cole was on a European vacation with his wife at the time. She wanted to go see an aviation museum; he didn't, so he stayed out walking about, talking to a policeman he met when the kooky ducks walked across the street before him.
The four were later identified as John Lennon (white suit), Ringo Starr (mod black suit, white shirt), George Harrison (two-tone denim) and Paul McCartney (blue suit, no shoes) - The Beatles, strutting their way into history.
Mr Cole didn't even see a photographer taking one of the most famous pictures in music history. He didn't even know anything about The Beatles, other than he didn't like them (“If they were on television, I’d flip to something else," he told interviewers) and had no idea about any of this until he and his wife had returned to their home in Deerfield Beach and she, an organist, bought a copy of the LP to learn a song for a wedding for which she was hired to play.
Looking at the album cover, he reported, “I did a double-take and said, ‘Hey, that’s me!’ "
For years until he left this earth, he was able to say, "You don’t realize it, but you’re talking to a person whose picture is in millions of homes throughout the world."
That autumn, the rumor about Paul McCartney being dead ("slain in a bloody car crash") since 1966, replaced by the winner of a Paul McCartney Look-Alike Contest, went around. Part of the proof some of its proponents proffered was that Paul was in the picture not wearing shoes, because in some faiths people are buried barefoot.
McCartney was seen out of step with the other "ducks" in the picture, but that can be explained if you ask yourself what it's like to cross a paved street in August.
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