The dead returns to life (a true story). When I was a young child my mother would occasionally mention her older brother Bob, whom the family believed to have died in the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. Bob (who was much older than my mother because he was the third of fourteen children and my mother was the twelfth) had been, to put it charitably, unfocused. After holding various jobs around the family home in North Carolina, he took off for the Canadian Yukon Territory Klondike region soon after gold was discovered there in 1897; like most of the 30,000 men said to answered the call of the Klondike, he found little or no gold.

Bob then went to San Francisco and remained there several years, doing what for a living I don’t think the family ever knew. They never heard from him after the quake and, thus, assumed that he was one of its victims; after a seven-year period when no trace of him could be found, his life insurance company paid his policy benefit (I don’t know who in the family was the beneficiary).

Fast-forwarding to the year 1938, my mother went with a group of her bridge club friends to a restaurant for dinner; after dinner, a fortune teller entertained the group. When the latter asked my mother what question she would like answered, she came up with the question "What became of my brother Bob? Unhesitatingly the fortune teller responded, "He is alive and you will see him soon." Naturally, my mother and her friends thought that this was just feel-good fortune teller talk and soon forgot about it.

However, early in 1939 my mother received a phone call from one of her bridge club friends to tell her that she had just heard on the radio that a long-lost man, presumed to have died, showed up at the home of his oldest sister in Durham, N.C. The friend had remembered the fortune teller incident and thought that the returned man might just be my mother’s brother.

Indeed it was long-lost Bob. He had moved from San Francisco before the quake to the Los Angeles area. As he told it, he had earned his living in various ways in the L.A. area, sometimes doing well and then not so well; he had wanted to communicate with his family but decided to wait until his life was stable–which never happened. He had never married. Finally, in his seventies, he decided to return to his family. (His last employment before his return was raising and harvesting date palms; I don’t know whether he owned the palms or was just an employee.)

Shortly after his return, he moved in with his two widowed sisters who maintained a home together in Greensboro, N.C. He died some time in the 1940's.

The only time I saw him was in September 1939 just as Hitler had invaded Poland and World War II had begun. I remember him saying, "This war won’t last long; it’ll be over in ninety days." I don’t recall why he thought that. He was a Joe Blfstk (the Li’l Abner character who had a rain cloud over his head wherever he went.), who just couldn’t get anything right.