The Universe of Discourse

I owe my life to a 1913 road rage incident

This is my great-grandfather, born Dominusz Andor in Szeged, Hungary in 1886. In the picture he is in Brooklyn, New York, probably sometime in the early 1950's.

By 1911 Andor had moved from Hungary to Vienna and had changed the spelling of his name to “Dominus” to save confusion. He worked as a goldsmith, and owned his own jewelry shop, so he must have been doing OK.

There's a family legend about why Andor left Vienna for the USA, and I was never sure whether I believed it. But thanks to the Wonders of the Internet, I was able to find out the details, which were all over the Viennese papers in the spring of 1913, and were even reported as far away as Budapest.

In 1913, Andor owned a motorcycle with a sidecar. On March 24 he was driving around Vienna with his wife Rosa when the sidecar came detached. Andor stopped to repair it, and a crowd gathered to watch. Some local youths offered to “help”, rocking the motorcycle and honking its horn.

After the sidecar was re-attached, The youths demanded a tip, which Andor refused to pay. But he asked the boys to push the motorcycle forward, which they did, but they also hit him and Rosa in the back of their heads; Rosa responded by punching one of them in the face. The boys jeered and shouted insults. As Andor started to drive away, some people in the crowd threw rocks.

Andor, frightened or angry, took out his Browning pistol. He later claimed to have fired two warning shots into the air. Whatever he meant to do, one of his shots his a 22-year-old butcher's assistant in the chest. Fortunately the bullet lodged in the young man's breastbone. The second shot went through the hat brim of a 12-year-old boy without hurting him. Andor fled the scene.

The police caught up with him that evening at his home, having traced the owner records of the motorcycle, whose license plate number had been noted by people in the crowd. He was arrested and, as he was a foreigner, was deemed a flight risk and jailed pending trial.

In May he was tried. His claim of self-defense was rejected, since by the time he fired his gun he was already about twenty paces from the crowd. He found guilty of assault, mitigated by the circumstances, and sentenced to a week of prison time, which he had already served several times over. However, the butcher's assistant, by then out of the hospital, announced his intention to sue in civil court for lost wages and for pain and suffering.

I haven't yet found the ship manifest that says exactly when Andor arrived in the U.S., but it was no more than four months later. He either fled to avoid the suit, fled to avoid paying the judgement, or, perhaps, just decided he had had enough of Vienna. (I would have been pretty annoyed too, after serving two months of a one-week sentence. Also, his goldsmith shop had been robbed two years before, by thieves who used the shop's own electric drill to break through the back of the safe.)

Rosa and their son Sándor, then four years old, arrived in October 1913 and the family settled in Brooklyn. Andor was naturalized in 1920, and his mother came over in 1921.

Sándor's parents changed his name to the more American-sounding “Samuel”. Samuel remained in Brooklyn until he retired in the early 1970s, by which time he was my paternal grandfather.

It's a good thing for me that the second bullet didn't hit the little boy in the head, or I wouldn't be here to tell you about it.

[Other articles in category /history] permanent link