Harry R Truman Was Vaporized

[Cassia]

All this anti-science sentiment reminds me of Harry R Truman who would not leave the mountain. Claimed he wore spurs to ride his bed during the pre-eruption shocks, LOL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_R._Truman

On May 17, they attempted one final time to persuade Truman to leave, to no avail. The volcano erupted the next morning, and its entire northern flank collapsed. Truman was alone at his lodge with his 16 cats, and is presumed to have died in the eruption on May 18. It is likely that he died of heat shock in less than a second, too quickly to register pain, before his body was vaporized. The largest landslide in recorded history and a pyroclastic flow traveling atop the landslide engulfed the Spirit Lake area almost simultaneously, destroying the lake and burying the site of his lodge under 150 feet (46 m) of volcanic landslide debris. Authorities never found Truman's remains. Truman's cats are presumed to have died with him; he considered them family and mentioned them in almost all public statements.

[drunkenshoe]

LOL... Poor cats. 

[Shiranu]

Not a bad way to go, honestly.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Not a bad way to go, honestly.

You speaking from experience or supposition?

Fuck the asshole for killing his cats.

[Shiranu]

You speaking from experience or supposition?

Fuck the asshole for killing his cats.

I've nearly drowned, which I can say from experience isn't pleasant... been in a building hit by a tornado, which was a panic-filled experience and I'm going to take a stab at guessing being bludgeoned and pierced to death by debris hurts a lot from my experiences being hit and cut on a smaller scale... watched my dad suffer for a year of constant pain before his body gave out from lung cancer and treatments...

Yeah, I think I'll take instant vaporization any day of the week over those or something like a heart attack, old age, whatever.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

My turn: I did 2 years, three months and thirteen days in a combat zone, followed by three years of physical therapy. I had a house drop on me near Tokyo and came out without a scratch, which earned me my nick of "Godzilla" in 1982. I'm only 70 years old, so I pity those old geezers. And I have this thing growing not from my my corpus collosum. Not going to get that out easily.

And Harry's still a dick. I was hemorrhaging from every available orifice when I drove 700+  miles round trip to rescue one of my cats that had been left behind when they moved me to my new house back in '07. I spent a week in the hospital with daily whole blood transfusions.

[drunkenshoe]

LOL, oh yeah he is a piece of shit. The cats. Nobody is questioning that. But Shiranu is right that it is probably a fairly sudden, so a painless death. Other than that who cares how he chose to kill himself.

[Cassia]

I think many Americans have a reverence for people that have shit-for-brains as long as they appear to be rebellious. Plenty of our folk heroes boil down to shitheads who made over-confident decisions such as the celebrated George Armstrong Custer. It would be an interesting exercise to compile a list of them, LOL.

[Mike Cl]

Our history seems to be jammed with those who tout conspiracies of one sort or another.  The Know Nothings were a forerunner of the current crop of conspiracy groups.  It would be nice if this group follow the trajectory of The Know Nothings--they started slowly, gained momentum by gaining some governors and congressmen.  Then they fell apart.  But then, maybe they never really went away and went underground, sort of like racism. 

[drunkenshoe]

You guys have a huge celebrity culture and add that the the importance of the reference element in general culture, it is inevitable that characters like these will become history in many different context.

This Truman guy. I had no idea who he was before reading this thread, but my first impression was  'ah he wanted to go with a bang'. Because honestly, it looks like that from what was posted here, but the reading his wiki page makes you sure about it. He was in WWI, came back worked a lot of different jobs, married a few times, lived in there for 52 years. He is bootlegger and a prospecter.

He is one of those people who are avoided as 'the village idiot', but sounds like a bit more crazy than idiot because he sounds like a conman and mentally unstable too. (Apparently, he wanted to throw his first wife into the lake although he knew she can't swim. Could be a rumour. Nohing happened.) Anyway, he looks like a bad prankster too, someone who did reckless, dangerous stuff. ...

America is very suitable with everything it has for this kind of a man to be recorded as a 'folk hero' esp. considering the times. Vast space, nature, too many place to be territorial, not enough people to stop it, lol. There is nothing on the land. An old stubborn man; a soldier (a war hero ), a bootlegger, a treasure hunter... headbutting authority for his mountain and literally dies on the hill. Obviously, after becoming a minor celebrity when this happened, as he was very old, he wanted to die as one. It also looks like his family pushed the stories after his death too. Yeah..

I think it annoys you because it is perpetuated by being replaced in bigger contexts. It's nothing but a loud exit.

[aitm]

If it wasn’t for one journalist...nobody would know...or care.

[drunkenshoe]

If it wasn%u2019t for one journalist...nobody would know...or care.

Yeah... well, suicide by volcano tends to get attention. But seriously, if it'd been the only case, old Truman would have stayed in the local news archives even with the family's push. And at the most, kids from the region would be saying things like "listen, my dad used to tell the story of this old guy, some WWI veteran bootlegger back in 80s. He lived near this mountain and he refused to leave knowing it will erupt and he died there with his cats! It's crazy man...what a trip. He was even in the national news. He got a forest ranger drunk once to make him burn a pile of brush...he poached, stole from the State... he is this old counrty kinda mad menace...yeah" sipping sneaked beer in some dorm room.

Instead, although you guys have a president with the same first and last name, 40 years later, he is at the top there on the net. Because people have responded to this story, kept rewriting and transforming it into some cultural element. Otherwise there are countless characters like him everywhere around the old world, historical and new.

It's pretty interesting. It's not unique or anything. Just the way it sticks and grows maybe a bit partial to American culture.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

"You guys". LOL

[drunkenshoe]

"You guys". LOL

Well, it's a short cut, even some sort of a term of endearment. While talking of culture in this sense, nothing more than that is implied obviously. Yours is the old same story everywhere, Zilla. That's the point. So yeah...'you guys'.    

[SGOS]

Harry wasn't the only guy that died that day.  There was a government observer, whose last words were recorded in a radio message as the mountain exploded.  I believe his words were something like "This is it!"  And then silence.  There were many others climbing around on the sides of the mountain who were never heard from again. Volcanoes have associated dangers, but few people expect explosions of this magnitude.  Our government warned people to stay away, but obviously weren't prepared either.  Otherwise their dead observer wouldn't have been placed at what was considered a safe distance. Had it not been on a Sunday morning, an area deemed safe but farther away than Harry, would have been teeming with logging crews, and that area was buried too. 

I lived 300 miles from that explosion and heard it that morning in my time zone around 10:00 AM.  The falling ash arrived that evening around 8 hours later.  I was riding my bike and had no idea what was happening when the ash arrived because I had not been listening to the news all day, and I didn't know what it was until I met some kids on the road who told me what had happened.  They were arguing with each other and in typical 7th grader fashion, one boy pointed at his friend and said derisively, "He thinks it was Mt. Saint Helens," and I laughed and replied, "But Saint Helens would have had to explode in a massive eruption for that to be what caused this," and they both said together, "It did!  It exploded this morning."  I was stunned, and said, "Oh, that's what this is then."  One kid look kind of dejected because he started considering that he may have lost the argument with his friend.