<v Speaker 1>I'm Jerry Broadway, and this is Anonymous America where we

<v Speaker 1>dive a little deeper into American history to look for

<v Speaker 1>those untold stories of amazing Americans who did amazing things

<v Speaker 1>and then were lost to the sands of time. Everybody

<v Speaker 1>has a story about a close call. You probably have

<v Speaker 1>one yourself, that near miss on the Interstate, the flight

<v Speaker 1>you almost took, the ladder that wobbled but didn't quite fall.

<v Speaker 1>Staticians will tell you there's nothing mysterious about any of that.

<v Speaker 1>Given enough people and enough time, the improbable becomes inevitable.

<v Speaker 1>Somebody somewhere is gonna win the lottery twice. Somebody's gonna

<v Speaker 1>get struck by lightning and walk away from it. The

<v Speaker 1>math demands it. Robin Williams once said that if you

<v Speaker 1>live long enough, everything that could possibly happen to you

<v Speaker 1>would happen to you. But every once in a while,

<v Speaker 1>the math produces a result that is so absurd, so

<v Speaker 1>perfectly staged, that even the most edge cadd statistician just

<v Speaker 1>has to sit back and go. This is the story

<v Speaker 1>of a street sweeper in Detroit, a man whose name

<v Speaker 1>would have vanished completely if it weren't for two of

<v Speaker 1>the strangest minutes in the history of American coincidence. He

<v Speaker 1>was a man with a broom and he got hit

<v Speaker 1>in the head with a baby twice. From Hey Dad Productions.

<v Speaker 1>This is anonymous America. Now, to understand this story, at first,

<v Speaker 1>you have to understand Detroit in the late nineteen thirties.

<v Speaker 1>The city was huge. The auto industry had pulled in

<v Speaker 1>hundreds of thousands of workers, and they were stacked into

<v Speaker 1>apartment buildings like firewood, three four five stories of brick,

<v Speaker 1>packed shoulder to shoulder, block after block, big families in

<v Speaker 1>not so big rooms. And here's the detail that really matters.

<v Speaker 1>There was no air conditioning. When summer came and the

<v Speaker 1>heat settled into those brick buildings like a fever, there

<v Speaker 1>was exactly one solution. You opened the windows, all of

<v Speaker 1>them wide. Now, windows screens were flimsy in those buildings,

<v Speaker 1>if the building even had them at all, And guardrails

<v Speaker 1>on windows, well, those wouldn't be required by law for decades.

<v Speaker 1>And toddlers then, just as they are now, were fearless

<v Speaker 1>little climbers with zero concept of gravity. So sadly, a

<v Speaker 1>kid falling from a window wasn't that unusual. An occurrence

<v Speaker 1>in nineteen thirties America. In fact, it was a recurring tragedy.

<v Speaker 1>Newspapers of the era are full of these stories, and

<v Speaker 1>most of them ended badly. A few ended with a miracle.

<v Speaker 1>A passer by in the right place arms out at

<v Speaker 1>exactly the right second, which brings us to that guy

<v Speaker 1>with the broom. His name was Joseph Figlock. Joseph worked

<v Speaker 1>for the Detroit Department of Public Works. His job was

<v Speaker 1>about as anonymous as a job gets, sweeping out the

<v Speaker 1>alleys behind those crowded apartment buildings day after day, block

<v Speaker 1>after block. Nobody ever looked twice at the guy with

<v Speaker 1>the broom until the day something looked down at him.

<v Speaker 1>In nineteen thirty seven, Joseph Figlock was working an alley

<v Speaker 1>right off John R. Streek, doing what he'd done a

<v Speaker 1>thousand times before, head down, sweeping away another day's worth

<v Speaker 1>of trash mine, probably somewhere down around Key West. But

<v Speaker 1>four stories above Joseph, there's an open window, and in

<v Speaker 1>that window is a baby girl. And she fell. Now

<v Speaker 1>four stories is roughly forty feet from that height. A

<v Speaker 1>fall onto pavement is almost always fatal for a small child.

<v Speaker 1>She had one chance and that chance was standing directly

<v Speaker 1>beneath her, completely oblivious to the situation, holding a broom.

<v Speaker 1>The baby hit Joseph square on the head and shoulders.

<v Speaker 1>He saw it coming. He didn't catch here so much

<v Speaker 1>as he became the landing zone. His body absorbed the

<v Speaker 1>force that the pavement would have delivered without mercy. Now,

<v Speaker 1>both of them were hurt, but neither of them died.

<v Speaker 1>Think about the precision required here, Not just the right

<v Speaker 1>alley on the right day, the right square foot of

<v Speaker 1>that alley at the exact right second, a step in

<v Speaker 1>either direction, a pause to check his watch, and this

<v Speaker 1>is a very different story. Joseph and the baby both

<v Speaker 1>recovered from their respective injuries. The baby went back to

<v Speaker 1>the fourth floor of the apartment building, where we assumed

<v Speaker 1>she was watched like a hawk from that day forward,

<v Speaker 1>and Joseph Figlock went back to work, back to the alleys,

<v Speaker 1>back to being invisible. And that should have been the

<v Speaker 1>end of it. One really incredible story to tell it

<v Speaker 1>family dinners for the rest of his life, But life,

<v Speaker 1>as it so often does, had other plans. Fast forward

<v Speaker 1>to September twenty seventh, nineteen thirty eight, almost exactly one

<v Speaker 1>year later, Joseph is back in the alley. A different alley,

<v Speaker 1>this one just off East Canfield Avenue in Detroit. It's

<v Speaker 1>a different neighborhood, it's a different building, it's a different family,

<v Speaker 1>but it's the same heat in the same situation. Open

<v Speaker 1>the windows, We're all gonna have a heat stroke. And

<v Speaker 1>four stories up, a two year old boy named David

<v Speaker 1>Thomas climbs up to an open window and falls out

<v Speaker 1>forty feet straight down, right onto the head and shoulders

<v Speaker 1>of the one man in Detroit and possibly the one

<v Speaker 1>man on earth who already knew what it felt like

<v Speaker 1>to be hitting the head with a falling toddler, Joseph Figlock.

<v Speaker 1>Now little David was banged up. He went to the

<v Speaker 1>hospital with some fractures, but he lived. And he lived

<v Speaker 1>because Joseph Figlock happened to be standing once again on

<v Speaker 1>the exact square foot of pavement where a child's life

<v Speaker 1>would be decided. The Detroit Free Press ran the story

<v Speaker 1>the next day, and when the reporter talked to Joseph

<v Speaker 1>about it, Joseph mentioned, almost casually, yeah, this wasn't the

<v Speaker 1>first time this hat. A few weeks later, Time Magazine

<v Speaker 1>picked it up in their October seventeenth, nineteen thirty eight issue,

<v Speaker 1>filed under a one word headline that couldn't have said

<v Speaker 1>it better coincidence. And with that, a street sweeper nobody

<v Speaker 1>had ever heard of, much less noticed, became a national curiosity.

<v Speaker 1>Now in the interest of being straight with you, because

<v Speaker 1>this show deals in true stories, and true stories deserve

<v Speaker 1>honest handling. That second catch David Thomas in nineteen thirty eight.

<v Speaker 1>It's documented newspaper accounts, names, dates, the address solid the

<v Speaker 1>first one. Well, that one rests on Joseph's own word

<v Speaker 1>to the reporter. Researchers have gone digging for a nineteen

<v Speaker 1>thirty seven news story about it and came up empty.

<v Speaker 1>Maybe it just never made the papers. A street sweeper

<v Speaker 1>and a tenement baby weren't exactly front page material in

<v Speaker 1>those days. Or maybe the story grew a little into telling.

<v Speaker 1>We'll never know for certain, and over the years the

<v Speaker 1>Internet has done what the Internet does. You may have

<v Speaker 1>seen versions of this story claiming it was the same

<v Speaker 1>bait be from the same window both times. That part

<v Speaker 1>is pure fiction. It was two different kids, two different buildings,

<v Speaker 1>and one very unlucky or lucky man with a broom.

<v Speaker 1>But here's what I keep coming back to. Joseph Figlock

<v Speaker 1>never asked to be remarkable. He didn't run into a

<v Speaker 1>burning building, he didn't dive into a river. He just

<v Speaker 1>showed up every day to a job nobody respected, in

<v Speaker 1>alleys nobody wanted to walk through. But because he showed up,

<v Speaker 1>at least one child and probably two grew up, grew old,

<v Speaker 1>and got to have a life. And maybe that's the

<v Speaker 1>real lesson behind the coincidence. You never know which ordinary

<v Speaker 1>day is going to be the one where it matters

<v Speaker 1>very much to someone else that you are exactly where

<v Speaker 1>you're supposed to be, exactly when you're supposed to be there.

<v Speaker 1>That's what happened to Joseph Figlock, and that is Anonymous America.