Sunday Rerun: Look Out!

 Irony! We don't see it coming and that's what makes it so fun. Irony is when you steer your car away from a pothole ahead in the road, only to have your car swallowed up by an unseen crevasse about the size of Delaware, just down the road a piece.

Irony is NOT when you go to a movie and see your friend in line to see the same movie. That is coincidence.

Call this what you will, but the death of English daredevil Bobby Leach (1858 - 1926) was odd.  Bobby was the second person to make his way over Niagara Falls in a barrel. He was ten years late to be first to do so;  Annie Taylor did that very thing in 1901, while it took a decade for Leach to make the plunge (1911). 

That nutty feat does not come without medical complications. Leach was in the hospital for six months, getting over his two broken kneecaps and his one fractured jaw.  A veteran stuntman with the Barnum and Bailey Circus, Leach owned and operated a restaurant where he would hold forth with his customers, bragging that "Anything Annie can do, I can do better."

Bobby Leach the barrel he rode over Niagara Falls, 1911.

To capitalize on his local fame, Leach moved to Niagara Falls, New York and opened a pool hall in 1920. When he was in his sixties, he thought it would be a great idea to swim the noted whirlpool rapids around the Falls. He never succeeded in this endeavor, but one William "Red" Hill, a local riverman, saved his bacon every time. Perhaps Hill should be famous for this.

For all his derring-do, it was a piece of fruit that ended Mr Leach's life. He slipped on an orange peel, the cut became infected, gangrene set in, the leg was amputated, and complications from all this killed him two months later.

So, riding over the huge falls in a barrel, minimal injuries. Orange peel, death.

Life's like that sometimes, and then it isn't.