The story of Joe Arridy comes to mind, marked by misfortune from the very start.
Born to parents who were related and faced with severe learning difficulties, having an IQ of just 46, Joe didn’t even start talking until he was five.
School was a bust; after just one year, the principal told his parents to keep him home.
His family life was rocked when his dad got laid off, and unable to cope, they sent Joe to a state institution. But that place offered no refuge, instead, Joe found himself the target of cruel bullying.
Life threw another horrific punch when, as a teenager, Joe was attacked by a group of boys. That awful incident got him sent back to the institution, where he’d already suffered so much.
At 21, Joe hit the road, riding the rails like many did during the tough times of the Great Depression. It was a rough existence, and sadly for Joe, it led to the most unjust chapter of his life.
Accused of a gruesome crime; the r*pe and murder of a young girl in Pueblo, Colorado. Joe’s fate was sealed by a confession that was disjointed and filled with inaccuracies.
No physical evidence linked Arridy to the crime scene. His conviction was based solely on the questionable confession and the loose testimony of witnesses and was only pardoned posthumously.
He went to death row but carried a strange kind of joy, one that stood out in the grimness of prison life. He was fond of a toy train, a symbol of his childlike innocence, which he spent most of his days playing and kindly gave it to a fellow prisoner right before he was executed.
On the day of his execution, Joe didn’t grasp the finality of what was happening. He left behind a bit of ice cream, which he requested for as a last meal, asking for it to be refridgerated for later, not realizing there was no coming back from where they were taking him.
The sobering story of Joe is a stark reminder of life’s unpredictable harshness and the importance of compassion and unwavering justice in our society.
And to also remind people who have it a little easier in life than others to be eternally grateful.
Tarrare, the hungriest man to live.
Tarrare was born to a poor family of French peasants in 1772. What made him unique was his seemingly unlimited hunger, being able to eat his own weight every day in his early teens. At age 17, his family couldn’t afford to keep his gargantuan appetite and kicked him out.
For the next few years, Tarrare would work as a street performer, with crowds giving him many things to eat, ranging from Apples, to live animals, to corks, to flints, and many other things no one else could digest.
He was relatively normal appearance-wise, except for his large mouth, which was reported he could fit 12 apples inside at once.
Despite his monstrous appetite, he only weighed 100 pounds (45.3 Kg), probably due to his quick digestion. He was also known to smell horribly, even by 18th Century peasant standards, with the London Medical and Physical Journal writing that,
“He often stank to such a degree, that he could not be endured within the distance of 20 paces.”
In 1792, Tarrare would grow tired of being a circus freak, and decided to enlist in the French army, trying to find a new purpose in life. Unfortunately, his hunger persisted, and the quadruple rations he was granted and constant digging through the garbage like a raccoon could not satisfy him.
Due to his exhaustion, he was sent to a French Military hospital, where he would be experimented on. One of those experiments involved him swallowing a live Eel, and being able to digest the needle-like ribs of its skeleton just fine.
French Officers would take notice of his abilities, and would make Tarrare into a reconnaissance soldier, with him eating boxes with notes in them, so they could be “delivered” later on.
He would be sent to Prussia, but was quickly captured after he drew attention through his lack of German and mutilating small animals and eating them. He was constantly beaten and when he wasn’t, he was chained to a latrine until his note passed.
If the constant torture wasn’t enough trauma, he was almost executed, with having the noose tied around his neck just before his execution was called off.
Being sent back to France, Tarrare was begging medical professionals to find a cure for his condition. Even with a regulated diet, Tarrare’s hunger would get the best of him, sneaking outside and fighting stray dogs over trash to eat, or consuming amputated limbs as his hunger was growing out of control.
Eventually, the doctors had enough of him, and he was kicked out.
The next four years of his life remain a mystery, but he came back to the hospital, suffering from a severe case of tuberculosis. A few days later, he would die at the age of 26.
During his autopsy, it was discovered that what made Tarrare the hungry monster that he was, was his grossly enlarged digestive system. Medical experts to this day still can’t figure out what made his system like this, making Tarrare the only recorded instance of his condition.
What could be more unfortunate than to be born with a constant and relentless hunger that could drive a man into a monster just to satisfy himself?
This Darrell Simmons of Morley, Alberta in Canada. Not only was he unlucky enough to have been born in Canada, but his luck never improved throughout his life.
He was forced to be chemically castrated after he was wrongfully accused of multiple sexual assaults in the 1980s. Once he was released from prison, he was given a pretty substantial sum of money.
Through bad investments though, he sadly lost everything. While working at a saw mill to try and get his life back together, he lost his hand in a freak accident.
One night while was out hunting with a friend, he was shot three times after being mistaken for a charging elk.
After recovering from the shooting, he was at home shoveling his driveway when he was struck by lightning in a snow storm. Darrell ultimately died that night, but it was determined that he survived the strike and actually froze to death.
I’ve always liked the story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi who I consider both one of the luckiest AND unluckiest men in history.
Yamaguchi was a resident of Nagasaki who was visiting Hiroshima on business on the morning of August 6th 1945 – where he experienced (and survived) the atomic bomb dropped on the city at 8:15 am. Yamaguchi was injured but never-the-less returned home to Nagasaki where he returned to work on the morning on August 9th 1945 – just in time to experience the second atomic bomb.
He survived again.
Hence he is the luckiest man in history (survived two Atomic bombs) and unluckiest man in history (had two atomic bombs dropped on him).
He actually lived for many years after the war, passing away only a few years ago in 2010.
