100 Years Ago Today: A famous photo...

Taken moments after New York City Mayor William Jay Gaynor was shot by a recently fired civil servant. The Mayor was on the deck of the ocean liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse preparing to depart on a European vacation when the unhinged former city employee tried to return the favor to the mayor. The mayor survived, though he never fully recovered.

In one of those eerie but fascinating coincidences of history the man directly behind the mayor was Robert Lincoln, the only son of the assassinated President to live to adulthood. Robert Lincoln declined his father's invitation to join him at Ford's Theater on the fateful night. He would later be in the immediate proximity when President Garfield was shot by an assassin in 1881 (he died some months later) and again when President William McKinley was fatally wounded in Buffalo NY in 1901.

Not the sort of man I would want standing near me in a lightning storm.

You can read the background on Mayor Gaynor and his brush with death here. He was a rather remarkable figure in New York politics for that era.