Recent content by MelmothTheLost

Indeed, but almost the entire route was either over long stretches of open ocean with very limited options for dealing with an emergency or over potentially hostile Japanese-held territory. Of course a seaplane can if necessary put down on water but there's a big difference between putting down...

Back to the gold certificates: if the wording I quoted in an earlier post says what I think it says (but I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong), Choy acquired the certificates and then carried them half way around the world intending to hand them over to someone who would then have had to...

Another thing which has been not exactly bothering me about this whole gold certificates thing but, well, I dunno but .... Choy's business interests were in NY and NJ on the East Coast, so would it maybe make more sense, and be safer, to cross the Atlantic and then use one of the European air...

Thanks for a very comprehensive response, which I've clipped purely for brevity. I must admit that I don't know much about WWII in the Pacific and Japan's build up of aggression. I read that Japan was trying to exclude other countries' shipping from the South Seas territories they held in the...

The radioed flight reports in post #7 above give no indication of bad weather during the flight so that seems unlikely. Since the plane had 4 engines, would failure of one or even two of them have been able to bring it down?

How would this have worked in practice? The wording on the certificate reads "Redeemable in gold on demand at the United States Treasury or in gold or lawful money at any Federal Reserve Bank". Could these certificates have realistically been redeemed and the gold they represented obtained...

It's weird, I agree. Usually gaps in the ages of children are explained by miscarriages or children who die in infancy, but you say you've not found evidence of this in Ken and Barbara's case. It's certainly strange for a couple of have one child, followed by a long gap followed by a batch of...

See, I don't understand how the Japanese could have "hijacked" the plane. When we talk of hijacking we mean a passenger taking over the plane and demanding its diversion to a different destination, but there were no passengers on it who were Japanese or likely to be an agent for them. All of the...

How would the Japanese authorities know that Choy was to be a passenger on the flight, and if they did how would they know he was carrying the certificates? Was this publicised before or after the flight went missing? TBH this whole conspiracy thing seems far less likely than sudden mechanical...

Do we know if the couple were both the parents of all the children? The age gap makes me wonder whether Donald was the child of an earlier marriage who was pushed out in favour of a second family.

This is an interesting article on the treatments and medication available for treating heart disease in the 1950s. https://www.rbht.nhs.uk/blog/history-heart-attacks

Not to mention, different times. Adults of both sexes, but especially men, were much less likely to show negative emotion in public than they are today.

At first I wasn't sure where to put this as although the child was severely abused and the story could therefore fit into the Crimes Against Children forum, I thought it a better fit here in view of how her life has turned out. Whatever happened to the Child of Rage? A 1990 documentary about an...

The netting I have seen used in the UK does seem to be sufficiently loosely woven to allow a fair amount of daylight through, though behind it is likely to be quite shaded - a sort of green twilight perhaps. It appears that this stuff is not necessarily fire resistant. Looking at some UK...

RIP Sir Tom Stoppard: The woman-loving wordsmith who fled Hitler to become the greatest (and wittiest) playwright of his generation Nobody seemed to have quite so much fun with the English language as Sir Tom Stoppard. And few British playwrights were as revered or decorated. Not bad...