Howard Swain considered himself an unlucky man, so much so, that even when he was lucky, he saw it as unlucky.
For starters, he was 40-year-old divorced man. It wasn’t a situation he would have wanted, but there you have it. He was unlucky, although the marriage probably wasn’t a happy one, so ending it could have been seen as lucky.
Swain was a carpenter by trade, but business was slow so he was forced to live with his sister and brother-in-law in their spare bedroom at their home at 10 N. Pearl Street in York, PA. Again, Swain saw this as unlucky, although he was lucky to have a place to live while he got back on his feet.
Then there was the auto accident in August 1925. Swain was driving a car in which his sister and another woman were passengers. They were driving down a straight hill above Dover, “when suddenly probably due to the condition of the road, for it was raining, the car skidded and was turned over several times,” according to the York Dispatch. Luckily, no one was killed, but everyone got thrown about pretty hard.
Of course, seeing the negative in everything, Swain said that he had internal injuries. He was examined at the West Side Sanitarium and no evidence of an injury could be found.
The following morning, near noon, Swain’s sister heard a gunshot. She ran upstairs and found her brother lying on the floor bleeding. She called to her husband, W. R. Jackson, who rushed to the Reliance Fire House and notified the police officer there. The officer and Jackson went to the office of Dr. W. H. Horning, only to find that he was out. They then went to the office of Dr. L. W. Fishel, who returned with them to the house on Pearl Street.
Someone had already notified Dr. Horning. He examined Swain, loaded him into his car, and driven him back to the West Side Sanitarium, where Swain had been the previous evening after the auto accident.
It was determined that Swain had placed a .32-caliber revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger in an attempt to kill himself. The newspaper reported, “the bullet of which was deflected from its course by the upper half of a set of false teeth, which was found by the side of the bed in his room in which the shooting took place.”
The bullet had exited at the bottom of his jaw just below his chin. Swain eventually recovered from the accident.
The newspaper noted that “Despondency had been a constant companion of Swain.” He had even threatened to kill himself over the preceding weeks. The closest he had come to acting on that threat was when he brought home a rusty .32-caliber pistol that was so in need of repair that the hammer could not even be pulled back.
Most likely cursing his bad luck, Swain had tossed it into the cellar.
At some point, he must have cleaned it up enough to use because this was the revolver that he had shot himself with.
Although Swain’s broken plate had saved his life, he probably saw it as unlucky that it had broken.
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