Of All the Luck

It’s kind of incredible that Frane Selak reached the age of 87 (He passed away on November 30,2016.), especially considering that Ripley’s Believe it or Not has called him, “the unluckiest man alive.”

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Frane was a retired music teacher who lived in Croatia with his wife, Katarina.  He led a pretty normal life for the first 33 years of his life, but that all changed on an early January day in 1962. 

It was cold and rainy outside the train he was aboard as it chugged through a canyon between Sarajevo and Dubrovnik.  Selak was relaxing in his seat, almost dozing, when he was jerked suddenly awake by a lurch and felt himself lifted into the air.  The train had jumped the tracks and dropped down to crash into the river at the bottom of the canyon.

Somehow Frane made it to shore and was dragged from the water, suffering from hypothermia and a broken arm.  He survived while 17 other passengers lost their lives in the accident.

That was only his first of many brushes with disaster.

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Only one year later Mr. Selak received word that his mother was ill, prompting him to take his first ever airplane ride, from Zagreb to Rijeka to be by her side.  The last flight was already booked solid, but, because of his family emergency, the airline let him sit in the back of the plane, with the flight attendant.

Airline representatives tell us that riding in an airplane is statistically safer than driving, but this was Frane’s time to prove that the exception is sometimes true as well.  Shortly before landing, a door of the plane malfunctioned and was blown open.  Selak and a flight attendant were sucked out into wide-open sky.

During an interview with The Telegraph in 2003, Frane said, “One minute we were drinking tea and the next the door was ripped open and (the flight attendant) was sucked into mid air followed shortly by me.”

I can only imagine what he was thinking as he plummeted toward the earth and watched his former first-ever airplane ride spiraling to the ground before him…that is, if he was even conscious.

It must have been horrifying to see the ground rushing up to meet him.  But, shades of a Saturday morning Three Stooges rerun, what raced up to meet Frane was not the cold, hard ground, but a comparatively soft and pillowy haystack which saved his life with relatively no injury. 

Really.

The plane crash claimed the lives of the flight attendant, two pilots, and 17 others.

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Busses are a common form of transportation in cities around the world.  Three years after the airplane mishap it was 1966 and Frane was sitting in a bus seat.  Suddenly he felt that all-too familiar feeling of being lifted from his seat as the bus skidded off the road and plunged into (Are you ready for this?) a river.

Four passengers drowned but Selak managed to swim to shore with just a few cuts and bruises.

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What was the name of this post again?

Oh yeah, Of All the Luck.

Is it making sense now?

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Perhaps Selak was a little leery about riding mass transportation after his unfortunate experiences with a train, an airplane, and a bus, but this time it is him who was driving when, in 1970, his car’s fuel tank exploded.  He managed to escape before the vehicle was completely engulfed but…

Three years later, he was again driving himself when a malfunctioning oil pump sprayed oil onto his vehicle’s hot engine. The oil burst into flame, sending fire erupting from the air vents. 

With his hair crisped by the blazes, Frane was able to escape the vehicle, again, with only minor injuries.

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OK, our friend had undergone bad experiences with a train, a plane, a bus, and now, with two automobiles.  He was running out of ways to get around.  Oh, yeah, he still had the old “shank’s mare.”

Yes, he could walk. 

I really don’t know if he had actually given up other forms of transportation but, hey, it sounds good.  Anyway, twenty-five years after his second car fire, in 1995 Frane was walking through downtown Zagreb.  As he stepped from the curb to cross the street, Selak was hit by a bus. 

Again, he survived with only minor injuries.

Holy cow!  He was hit by a bus, for crying out loud, and survived with only minor injuries?

Wow!

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Except for maybe riding a bicycle or a horse, Frane was pretty much out of ways to get around, so he was back to driving when, in 1996, it happened again.  Selak was driving through the Croatian mountains.  As he negotiated a curve he found himself facing a United Nations truck barreling directly toward him…in the same lane.

With reflexes honed by a lifetime of narrowly avoiding death, Frane swerved his car (a Skoda) to evade the truck, only to run into a guardrail which first caught the vehicle then released it.  

Frane was able to squeeze out the door just as the railing gave way.  He lay on the roadside and watched as his car plunged down the 300-foot cliff, to crash almost unrecognizable at the bottom…and explode.

Yeah.

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Now, with all those times he narrowly avoided death…by the skin of his teeth as they say, some would point out that Mr. Selak’s bad luck has thus far been pretty well evened out by his good luck.  Not all his friends saw things that way, however.

“There came a stage when I was lucky to have any friends at all,” he said. “Many stopped seeing me, saying I was bad karma.” 

As one of his neighbors said, “Put it like this, if I heard Frane had booked (the same) flight or a train (as me), I would cancel.”

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One could hardly blame them, but then there’s the other side of luck, as may be borne out by the fact that, on June 16, 2002, luck smacked good ol’ Frane again, but this time it was of the good kind.  Yes, believe it or not, whereas many of us would have locked ourselves in the house and shuttered the windows after all the bad times he’d had with transportation, Frane ventured outside.  This time he bought himself a lottery ticket and, believe it or not, he won.  Our good ol’ unlucky/lucky friend became an instant millionaire.

Good guy that he is, after buying a couple houses and a boat, in 2010 Frane chose to live a more frugal lifestyle and gave most of the remainder of his fortune to friends and relatives, spending the last of it on a hip operation and a shrine to the Virgin Mary, in thanks for his good fortune.

As Frane said, “All I need at my age is my Katarina (his wife). Money would not change anything… when she arrived I knew then that I really did have a charmed, blessed life.”

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So, some would call Frane the unluckiest man in the world, while others would point out the fact that he most recently won the lottery and say he’s not the unluckiest, but the luckiest man in the world.  What do you think?

Before you decide, let me add one more thing.  Remember Frane mentioned his wife, Katarina?  Well, around the same time he won the lottery, Selak married his fifth, yes I said FIFTH, wife.  That makes me think that maybe, just maybe, his negative experiences had less to do with bad luck and more to do with bad choices.

Of course, I could be wrong.  For Frane’s sake, I sure hope so.

That could be his best luck of all.

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