Ron Simon: Bad disasters make good reading

Mansfield News Journal
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I’ve been selling old books. Thousands of them actually.

The numbers fill most of my shelves and it was time to clean house.

Hundreds of old books lay stashed away on nearly hidden shelves upstairs. And that’s where the big surprise was lurking.

A beaten-up hardback entitled, “Disaster,” had been hidden from sight for a long time. It was published in 1948, and told the story a lot of multiple American disasters from the 1780s to 1948.

From page one to page 318, I read one fascinating disaster story after another. They held my attention for hours on end.

The longer title may have read as “The Nation’s Blackest Hours.”

Some are stories of blizzards and super rainstorms, and all the death and misery they wrought.

Some that caught my attention included the Galveston Tidal Wave” of 1900 to the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

Most of the stories are about natural disasters, and the death and destruction they caused. You need strange nerves to work though these stories.

The San Francisco Earthquake was perhaps the longest story and the best for the great heroism of the city’s citizens in rebuilding their torn-apart city.

There were stories of forest fires, train wrecks, airplane crashes and even a great flu epidemic.

Many disasters, including the greater fires, have no particular cause. They just happen and tear lives and communities apart. Others, included the fatal crash of a huge plane into the side of the New York City’s Empire State Building is chilling. Only the fact that the crash happened on a holiday kept a greater number of lives from being lost.

And so it went, from one awful moment to the next.

Two authors, Ben Kartman and Leonard Brown, put this book together along with dozens of other writers.

Some of the stories date back so far that the book itself has an ancient feel to it.

But still it caught my attention from start to finish. I wonder how many books of that kind are still lurking in the still untouched stacks.

This book sales business is turning out to be far more interesting that I thought it would be.

It’s going to take longer than I ever thought it would.

And that’s a lot better than I ever thought it would turn out to be.

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