http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2012/11/11/missing-the-boat/?singlepage=true
The Smithsonian magazine has an article about seven famous people who might have sailed on the Titanic but who, for some reason or other, missed the boat. They included Theodore Dreiser, Guglielmo Marconi, Milton Hershey, J. Pierpoint Morgan, Henry Frick, and Alfred Vanderbilt.
Dreiser had shifted to the Kroonland to save money. Hershey, of candy bar fame, had the money and had actually made a deposit on a ticket, but some business matter detained him and he had to cancel. What seemed like bad luck at the time actually turned out to be good fortune. Had things proved otherwise, the Titanic would have proved an even bigger disaster; our grandfathers might have grown up in a world without Hershey’s bars.
Lefty Gomez once remarked, “I’d rather be lucky than good.” What constituted good or bad might have been obvious on the baseball diamond, but things were less obvious in the more complex arena of everyday life. The Chinese had a story to describe the ambiguity of fortune.
… there lived an old man on the northern frontier of China. One day, his horse disappeared … few months later, his horse came back with another horse that was even better. His neighbors came to congratulate him on his gain. But … the old man … said this “good luck” might turn out to be misfortune in the end. Strangely, he was right again. A few days later, his son fell from the new horse and broke his leg … since his son was lame after that accident, he was not chosen to be a soldier to fight in the following war so that he lived with family safely.
Fortune into misfortune. Misfortune into fortune. The loss of the USS Lexington in the Battle of the Coral Sea was the down payment on the victory at Midway. In exchange for Lexington‘s loss, the Zuikaku and Shokaku were too mauled to sail with Nagumo on that fatal 4th of June. But you wouldn’t know it as the Lady Lex was going down. The role that event played in the greater scheme of things had yet to be revealed.
Of course, if Nimitz had lost at Midway the Lady Lex’s loss would have been just a loss.
When Mariano Rajoy followed socialist leader José Luis Zapatero to become Spain’s prime minister in 2010, he may have thought he had won the electoral lottery. But what he may actually have done was replace the metaphorical Edward Smith as captain on the Spanish ship of state.
Voters turned to him in hopes of alleviating the pain of Europe’s debt crisis. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Mr. Rajoy’s longtime rival, had stepped down as prime minister as the elections approached in the face of widespread resentment over Spain’s economic woes.
