Chances Can Defy the Odds
By
M. Ray Allen
In mathematics, “chance” means how likely an event is to occur, with zero meaning impossible and one meaning inevitable.
Three situations that defy probability began along the roadside of I-75 between Richmond, Ky. and Cincinnati on my way home from a squirrel hunting trip that entailed camping overnight in a dry stream bed near the Kentucky River.
Ernest Stumbo, my great uncle who was a coal miner from McDowell, Ky., was an avid squirrel hunter as was his brother, Buck. The three of us were heading back to Floyd County when they decided to stop at a nearby fruit stand. After Ernest parked his car, we got out, and to my disbelief, my father’s sister, Edythe Allen O’Hara, and her husband, Jim, were purchasing fruit at the fruit stand.
On their way from Detroit to Atlanta, they had stopped just before we arrived at the fruit stand, and there we were face to face in the late 1950s marveling about the chance meeting we were having.
Superstition has it that things happen in threes, including celebrity death, the erroneous conclusion that three celebrities will die during the same short period of time. Three strikes and you are out!
The word that was coined in 1980 to account for the totally subjective phenomenon is “apophenia” that means the act of one who exhibits errors in one’s perspective, errors that tend to lead one to interpret random patterns as meaningful, such as misperceptions about gambling and superstitions.
Consider the summer of 1970. After landing in Honolulu following a flight from Los Angeles, I spent a short time in Hawaii before boarding a flight to Osaka, Japan, to attend the World’s Fair. Staying with friends while in Honolulu, I visited a nightclub to enjoy the performance of Don Ho who had made, “Tiny Bubbles,” a huge hit.
As Don Ho was singing “Tiny Bubbles,” I looked across the room and spotted Jack Snow, a wide receiver for the Los Angeles Rams. He and I had served as guest speakers for the opening day ceremony of the Huntington Beach Little League shortly before meeting him there by chance. He was as surprised to see me as I was to see him.
After attending the World’s Fair in Osaka, I flew to Hong Kong before catching a flight to India. My next flight was scheduled for Katmandu, but while the pilot was searching for a break in the cloud cover near the Himalayan Mountains, he found that the aftermath of the monsoon that had recently struck had left weather conditions that prevented him from attempting a safe landing. The pilot instead arranged for an unscheduled landing in Calcutta.
While waiting in the line to show officials in customs my passport, I looked at the line a few feet away where people were heading in the opposite direction to exit the Calcutta Airport. There was Delores Del Castro, an English teacher from Marina High School. We were members of the MHS English department at the time, and neither of us knew that we had made travel plans for the summer. Besides, I had not planned to visit Calcutta.
There we were, halfway around the world, chatting as she moved toward her point of departure and as I eased forward to legally reenter India. Still today, 51 years later, I wonder what the odds of our greeting one another there in Calcutta could possibly be.
What are the chances? Three unlikely encounters, one in Kentucky, one in Hawaii and one in Calcutta may lead one to think that perhaps there is something to the number, “three.”
After all, even soldiers have come to believe that lighting three cigarettes by using the same match is a bad omen that serves as the warning that one of the three will be killed or the third who lit his cigarette will soon be shot.
However, just last week while interviewing James Mundy, a fourth highly unlikely situation manifested to help debunk any superstition that lends any credence to the number “three.” Mundy was born in Indianapolis, In., on August 8, 1959, the same summer that I lived nearby the hospital in which he was born.
Having graduated from McDowell High School in 1959, I accepted the invitation of Sylvia Stumbo Rhinehart, my double-second cousin (Ernest’s eldest daughter) who had been my third grade teacher, and Lloyd, her husband, to live with them in their new home near the East Gate Shopping Center, in Indianapolis. The summer job placed me near Mundy at the time of his birth.
No one could have ever dreamed that our paths would cross some 62 years later following my job as a salesman’s helper, working for my cousin’s neighbor, a Procter & Gamble salesman assigned to cover the company’s Southern Indiana territory.
By 1978, Mundy had moved with his mother back to the Covington area, and he graduated from Alleghany County High School in 1978, the same year that I moved from Los Alamitos, Ca. to accept the varsity basketball coaching position at ACHS where I taught physical education and health.
Some 43 years after graduating from ACHS, Mundy wound up renting an RV lot at the Buckhorne Country Store and Campground on Douthat Road in 2021, the campground that Cherie Davis Allen, my wife, and I purchased in 2000. We owned and operated the business for 20 years prior to selling our corporation on April 1, 2021 to my youngest daughter, Anmarie and her husband, Scott Herald.
After renting the lot for his RV for more than a month, Mundy decided to open Willow Creek Outpost near Exit 27 off I-64 across Douthat Road, from Wholesale Tire Company in Alleghany County where he moved his RV. We did not learn until the interview that I was living near the hospital where he was born in 1959 and began coaching and teaching at ACHS the year that he graduated from ACHS.H
As for chances, what are the odds of two grade school students competing in a track event at Alleghany High School before becoming teammates on the AHS cross country team where each one finished first or second for the varsity team during the 1994 and 1995 seasons ever meeting on an aircraft carrier?
Add to the fact that after graduating from AHS, both became officers in the military, one an F-18 Hornet pilot for the U.S. Marine Corps and the other, a U.S. Navy officer who was using his video camera aboard the USS Harry S. Truman, the eighth Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, to videotape the other one landing his jet on deck without any knowledge that his former teammate was there to videotape the event somewhere off the coast off the coast of Florida.
What are the odds that Jeremy Bartley would be on board to videotape Landon Ray Allen, my son who completed his first landing on an aircraft carrier that day? Neither Landon nor Bartley knew that they were about to be reunited that day, and after Landon landed to qualify as an F-18 Hornet pilot, Bartley was there to greet him, much to the surprise and pleasure of both former teammates.
One thing that odds do not govern and have not governed for more than a century is “three strikes and you are out at the old ballgame!” Except, however, if the catcher fails to catch the pitch in the air on a third strike in certain situations governed by the rules of baseball, the batter can run to first base and be counted safe via an error on the catcher.
However, with the astronomical numbers of times catchers catch the third strike without dropping the third strike, Mickey Owen, catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, dropped the third strike in the bottom of the ninth with two out and no one on base that allowed the batter to reach first base safely during the 1941 World Series.
Playing against the New York Yankees, Owen could have avoided becoming the goat of the series by catching the ball. However, his miscue led the way for the Yankees to rally to win the game in what would have been a Dodgers’ victory to even the series at 2-2. The Yankees went on to win the World Series 4-1 the very next day, leaving the Dodgers’ fans with the age old question, “Was it meant to be or just bad luck?”
CUTLINE
AHS Graduate Noe Pilot
Landon Allen poses in front of a Boeing airplane. After graduating from Alleghany High School, Allen became an F-18 Hornet pilot for the U.S. Marine Corps..
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