Ok, so some things in the golden era were not too cool...

[LizzieMaine]

Fifty-four-year-old Barney Doyle of Fairview, New Jersey was looking forward to the Fourth of July 1950 -- he had scored excellent tickets to see his beloved New York Giants take on the Brooklyn Dodgers in a doubleheader at the Polo Grounds. It was a beautiful summer day, the stadium was packed, and as the Giants were about to take the field for the start of the afternoon's first game, Barney turned to speak to his companion. And then his face went blank, and he fell over dead in his seat.

Barney Doyle was shot in the head by a .45 buillet fired by a bored teenage boy from the roof of 515 Edgecomb Avenue, atop Coogan's Bluff, overlooking the ballpark. The 14-year-old gunman had found the pistol, with one round in the chamber, on the ground in Central Park, and took it home, planning to use it as a noisemaker to celebrate the 4th. The slug went straight from the gun into Barney Doyle's brain. He never knew what hit him.

As police carried Doyle's body under the stands for examination, standing-room-only fans fought for possession of his vacated seat. The doubleheader went on without interruption, and Doyle's seatmate complained to the officers that he really didn't want to go along for questioning, because he'd been looking forward to the games for weeks. The Giants won the first game 5-4, but the Dodgers took the nightcap 5-3.

It was a kinder, gentler time...

 

[dh66]

I lost a windshield out of my truck (thankfully that's all it was) to some dumbass using a pistol as a noisemaker one 4th of July. I guess no matter how much things change.......

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk

 

[Stearmen]

Fifty-four-year-old Barney Doyle of Fairview, New Jersey was looking forward to the Fourth of July 1950 -- he had scored excellent tickets to see his beloved New York Giants take on the Brooklyn Dodgers in a doubleheader at the Polo Grounds. It was a beautiful summer day, the stadium was packed, and as the Giants were about to take the field for the start of the afternoon's first game, Barney turned to speak to his companion. And then his face went blank, and he fell over dead in his seat.

View attachment 53752

Barney Doyle was shot in the head by a .45 buillet fired by a bored teenage boy from the roof of 515 Edgecomb Avenue, atop Coogan's Bluff, overlooking the ballpark. The 14-year-old gunman had found the pistol, with one round in the chamber, on the ground in Central Park, and took it home, planning to use it as a noisemaker to celebrate the 4th. The slug went straight from the gun into Barney Doyle's brain. He never knew what hit him.

As police carried Doyle's body under the stands for examination, standing-room-only fans fought for possession of his vacated seat. The doubleheader went on without interruption, and Doyle's seatmate complained to the officers that he really didn't want to go along for questioning, because he'd been looking forward to the games for weeks. The Giants won the first game 5-4, but the Dodgers took the nightcap 5-3.

It was a kinder, gentler time...

And people try to say we are far more cold and callous then in the Good Old Days!

 

[SurfGent]

They didn't have the fadora lounge :'(

 

[Stanley Doble]

No doubt there were plenty of veterans in the stands who were used to shooting and being shot at.

 

[Fading Fast]

There will always be jerks in the world - always have been / always will be - but the guy next to you gets shot dead and you grumble about having to help the police - really? I can understand an unstated feeling of frustration as you "just wanted to see a game," but come on, doing the right thing as an adult requires prioritizing - it isn't that hard.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The thing that always gets me about that incident is the sheer insane randomness of it all. There were almost 50,000 people in the ballpark that day, and 515 Edgecomb Avenue was almost half a mile away. The chances that that bullet would travel from that rooftop directly into one specific man's brain had to be astronomical. But poor Barney's number came up.

I'm also winning to bet that when the story came out in the papers the next day, hundreds of policy players around the city put their money on "5-1-5."

One more twist -- the companion who complained about missing the games was a 13-year-old boy, the son of one of Barney's neighbors, whom he was treating to a day's outing.

 

[Fading Fast]

The thing that always gets me about that incident is the sheer insane randomness of it all. There were almost 50,000 people in the ballpark that day, and 515 Edgecomb Avenue was almost half a mile away. The chances that that bullet would travel from that rooftop directly into one specific man's brain had to be astronomical. But poor Barney's number came up.

I'm also winning to bet that when the story came out in the papers the next day, hundreds of policy players around the city put their money on "5-1-5."

One more twist -- the companion who complained about missing the games was a 13-year-old boy, the son of one of Barney's neighbors, whom he was treating to a day's outing.

So much is random, so much is a bad long shot that came in. Very random that the bullet was fired, but once on a trajectory to the ball park - with the density of fans - good chance it would someone (but not necessarily in the brain). Tens of pedestrians get killed in this city every year by cars, buses, etc. jumping the curb. When I read about those events, I always think about how their friends and family must think with great frustration about that person being in just that spot, at just that moment. Sometimes it's all up to chance.

I can see a 13 year old not having the maturity of an adult, but maybe because my father was so serious and drilled respect, discipline, "doing the hard things when no one is looking" into my head and character so much, that I think I would have responded differently - but who knows, maybe I'd have just been angry that I'd have to miss the game.

 

[LizzieMaine]

And the other thing that gets me is that the games went on with no delay or interruption. Jackie Robinson once discussed the incident and said that before the first game was over, all the players knew what had happened, and it was the only thing they were talking about in the clubhouse between games. Granted, July 4th was the biggest baseball box-office day for the season, and especially for the Giants it was a much-needed goosing of their attendance, but jeez....

If something like that were to happen today, it's hard to imagine that the park wouldn't immediately be evacuated/locked down, or that there wouldn't be a panic/stampede among the fans.

I remember watching a Red Sox-Twins game on television long long ago, when the Twins played in Bloomington, and a bomb threat was called into the park. All the fans were herded onto the field, and the game suspended for what must've been a couple of hours while the stadium was searched. The announcers and camera crews for telecast stayed at their stations, though -- if there was an explosion, they were gonna broadcast it live!

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^ Our collective response narrative has changed for the better - lives over baseball makes sense, but as with everything, a balance has to be struck. It's great to have "zero tolerance," but what does that really mean. We could have zero tolerance for highway deaths by either banning driving or enforcing (really, truly, seriously enforcing) a ridiculously low speed limit. At the end of the day, the public will vote for more highway deaths over very low speed limits (of course promoted with a better slogan than I just said) - and I'd agree even though I might be one of those deaths.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Here's a view from the top of 515 Edgecomb as investigators point out the approximate spot from which the shot was fired. Barney Doyle was seated in the third row of Section 42 in the left-center field upper deck, which is visible in the photo as the next-to-last section before the left-side end of the grandstand, just below the light tower. Barney would have been sitting just a little ways down from the visible entrance portal to the section.

If the shooter had been standing just a bit further to the right, the bullet might have gone thru one of the clubhouse windows, and hit Giants owner Horace Stoneham, who watched the games from a private apartment in the upper level of the building.

 

[BlueTrain]

And another thing, they didn't have air pollution in the good old days.

 

[p51]

Makes you wonder how they figure out where the round came from at all. Most kids of any era would have ditched the pistol and lied to the face of anyone who asked about it...

 

[BlueTrain]

I was wondering how it took for them to figure out what had actually happen. If someone in a crowded stadium just slumped in his (apparently very valuable) seat, you would not necessarily immediately think he had been shot unless you saw blood. Even then you might have to think about it. The caption with the photo says a rifle bullet but it would be more likely to find a pistol in Central Park but how likely is even that happening? Especially one with one round remaining in the magazine. How did they find the kid? Someone snitched!

 

[LizzieMaine]

Basically, they looked up at the top of Coogan's Bluff -- the Polo Grounds was located in Coogan's Hollow, directly below the bluff, which is a tall cliffy hill -- and saw 515 Edgecomb looking down at them. They searched the building and actually found another pistol and a rifle in the apartment where the kid was living. The rifle was a .22, not a .45, but when they questioned him he admitted he'd shot the .45 and then ditched it when he heard what had happened. His name was Robert Peebles, and he ended up spending about two years in reform school for the shooting, on a charge of "juvenile delinquency."

At the time 515 Edgecomb was kind of a run-down tenement type of building, but it was renovated into an upscale co-op in the '80s, and still stands atop Coogan's Bluff to this day. The ballpark, however, was torn down in the mid-1960s to build a housing project.

I'd imagine there were a lot of random handguns floating around New York in 1950 -- organized crime was at its peak then, and there was a lot of shooting going on. Or somebody had used the gun to stick up a liquor store or something, and tossed it under a park bench when they were done with it.

A lot of rusty guns wash ashore at Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn, from a landfill that had been capped in 1954 and is now eroding into the bay. I imagine when futuristic archaeologists excavate the ruins of New York a few thousand years down the line, they'll imagine it was the world's aresenal.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

The strangest thing is that the distance is almost insane for a .45, which is intended strictly for close-range self-defense. By the end of its trajectory the impetus of the gunpowder would have been all but gone and gravity would have taken over.

As to the presence of guns, this was just after WWII and all sorts of men came back from the war with souvenir guns. Also, many sort of "forgot"to turn in issue weapons. Officers often purchased their own .45s and brought them home legally. Fully-automatic weapons like the German Schmeisser had to be disabled, usually by spot-welding the bolt to the breechface. Otherwise, they were free to bring in weapons. "War trophies"was a recognized legal term. When I was a boy at that time, it seemed all my friends had fathers who owned Lugers, Nambus or even hand grenades (disabled). My father disliked guns and didn't bring any back but he was in the minority.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I imagine the height from which the shot was fired had something to do with that -- Peebles shot from the roof of a five-story building, and Coogan's Bluff stood about a hundred and seventy-five feet above the ballpark, which, being built in a hollow, was actually below sea level. So figure the building is about fifty feet high, add a hundred and seventy five feet, and then whatever apogee the bullet reached in its flight before coming back down, and there was a lot of gravity coming into play.

Note also the height of the parapet of the roof. Peebles had to be pointing the gun upwards at a fairly steep angle, and couldn't see exactly where it was going to go. He knew the ballpark was down there, but when he fired he couldn't see it and couldn't really know where the bullet was going to come down in relation to it.

The Polo Grounds had the weirdest geography of any ballpark ever built, and because of that it's likely the only park in the major leagues where an accident like this could have occured. Doyle remains the only fan ever killed in his seat at a major league game. (Thirty years earlier, in the same ballpark, shortstop Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians was hit in the head by a pitched ball, and became the only major league player ever to be killed during a game.}

 

[BlueTrain]

General Julian Hatcher, a U.S. Army ballistics and arms expert, did a number of experiments with high-angle fire from machine guns, including firing straight up, partly in an attempt to learn more about the effectiveness of long-range machine gun use. I don't recall what the results were but I don't think he did anything of the sort with a .45. But it's a heavy bullet and obviously still lethal at any range.

 

[Stearmen]

General Julian Hatcher, a U.S. Army ballistics and arms expert, did a number of experiments with high-angle fire from machine guns, including firing straight up, partly in an attempt to learn more about the effectiveness of long-range machine gun use. I don't recall what the results were but I don't think he did anything of the sort with a .45. But it's a heavy bullet and obviously still lethal at any range.

MythBusters took up where he left off. What they found, firing far more rounds then Hatcher did, there was very little penetration of the ground after the pistol was fired straight up. However, at an angle, I can't remember how many degrees, the bullet penetrated very deeply, even fatally! They were confirming a victim driving a car that was hit at extreme range. The opposite of what I would have thought!

 

[EngProf]

MythBusters took up where he left off. What they found, firing far more rounds then Hatcher did, there was very little penetration of the ground after the pistol was fired straight up. However, at an angle, I can't remember how many degrees, the bullet penetrated very deeply, even fatally! They were confirming a victim driving a car that was hit at extreme range. The opposite of what I would have thought!

Both Hatcher's and Mythbuster's results fit aerodynamic theory (as you'd expect). A bullet has a relatively high drag coefficient after it turns sideways or begins to tumble, and not that much weight, so it's terminal velocity (and lethality) is not much as long as things are kept vertical.
However, if you shoot it with only a moderate angle it keeps the x-component of velocity pretty well and that's what killed the unfortunate Mr. Doyle. As LizzieM points out, the kid likely fired the gun at or near an optimum angle for maximum long-range danger.