ROSS SIMPSON
Shortly after leaving a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Senator
Edward “Ted” Kennedy of Massachusetts drives an Oldsmobile
off a wooden bridge into a tide-swept pond. Kennedy escaped
the submerged car, but his passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo
Kopechne, did not. The senator did not report the fatal car
accident for 10 hours.
Celebrated actress Jayne Mansfield was killed instantly on June
29, 1967, when the car in which she is riding struck the rear of a
trailer truck on U.S. Route 90 east of New Orleans, Louisiana.
Mansfield had been on her way to New Orleans from Biloxi,
Mississippi, where she had been performing at a local nightclub;
she had a television appearance scheduled the following day.
Ronald B. Harrison, a driver for the Gus Stevens Dinner Club, was
driving Mansfield and her lawyer and companion, Samuel S. Brody,
along with three of Mansfield’s children with her ex-husband Mickey Hargitay, in Stevens’ 1966 Buick Electra.
On a dark stretch of road, just as the truck was approaching a
machine emitting a thick white fog used to spray mosquitoes
(which may have obscured it from Harrison’s view), the Electra
hit the trailer-truck from behind.
Mansfield, Harrison and Brody were all killed in the accident. Eight-
year-old Mickey, six-year-old Zoltan and three-year-old Marie, or
Mariska, had apparently been sleeping on the rear seat; they were
injured but survived.
Eddie Cochran, the man behind “Summertime Blues” and “C’mon Everybody,” was killed on April 17, 1960 when the taxi carrying
him from a show in Bristol, England, crashed en route to the
airport.
SANDY KOZEL
She stopped in Cherbourg in France and Queenstown in Ireland
to pick up passengers, crew and supplies.
The Titanic was carrying about 1320 passengers and 907 crew on
the ship. She struck an iceberg near Newfoundland and sank with
the loss of 1,523 of her 2,200 passengers and crew.
Ralph Dale Earnhardt (April 29, 1951 – February 18, 2001)
Dale Earnhardt is widely regarded as one of the greatest drivers in NASCAR history and was named as one of the NASCAR’s 50
Greatest Drivers class in 1998.
