A lift-jockey’s lament and The horns of a dilemma

Writer: Murray Stewart.

The articles in the For Fact’s Sake columns are – according to Google and the Duck ’n Fiddle’s Explanation of Everything – based on facts. Occasionally though, names and places have been changed to protect innocent people involved.

Take a plunge

On a muggy summer’s day in 1945, twenty-year-old Betty Lou Oliver arrived promptly at work as an elevator operator in the world’s tallest sky-scraper back then – the Empire State Building in New York City. Lift-jockeys experience more ups and downs daily than we would in years, but little did she anticipate one of her downers would get her into the Guinness Book of World Records.

As fate (and a dollop of pilot error) would have it, a B-52 service plane smashed into the 80th floor, a couple of levels above where she was working, and dislodged a concrete slab which crashed through her lift’s ceiling. Only slightly injured, she managed to crawl out, thankful to be alive, and after some medical treatment, was deposited into another lift to the ambulances waiting below.

Click below to read more. (The full article can be found on page 6)