Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. People are more than just what we see every day. They're made up of successes and failures. Books they've read, films they've watched, music they've listened to, and schools they've attended.
Under a comedian's jokes might be pain and anguish. Behind a teacher's quiet demeanor could reside someone outgoing and spontaneous. In other words, people have layers to them. Benjamin Kubelski, for sample, was full of layers. Born in Chicago, Illinois, in eighteen ninety four, Kubelski was raised by Jewish immigrant parents who wanted the best for him. They got him started on violin lessons when he was just six years old, with a dream of him playing professionally as he got older.
Kobelski loved the violin, he just hated practicing. In fact, any kind of mental work was off putting to him, to the point that when he was a teenager he was expelled from high school for doing so poorly in his classes. But he eventually found his calling playing violin for vaudeville audiences. He made pretty good money at it, too, about seven dollars and fifty cents per week in nineteen eleven.
At the same time, he met a group of brothers well on their way to superstardom, led by their mother Minnie. There was Julius, Adolph, Milton, Herbert, and the eldest of them all, Leonard, although the world would come to know them one day as a different title, the Marx Brothers. Koubelski and the Marxis built up a long and lucrative friendship, which he needed at as he worked his way up
the vaudeville ladder. In nineteen twelve, he found a musical partner and started striking out on his own, which upset another violinist by the name of Jan Kublik. It seems that vaudeville just wasn't big enough for two violinists with very similar names. Fearing a major lawsuit, one that he could not afford, Kubelski changed his name. He continued to perform for several more years, although he didn't do too
well on the circuit. As the US entered World War One, Kubelski enlisted with a navy to serve his country, and he took his violin with him. He would often entertain his fellow sailors during recreational times. Unfortunately, not everyone loved his performances, and one night they almost booed him right off the stage. Thinking on his feet, he started telling
jokes and add libbing to the audience. He had them rolling on the decks, and it was then that he realized that he could combine two things that he loved to make a living music and comedy. After the war, Koubelski ran into yet morely trouble regarding his name and was forced to change it yet again, but this time it stuck. He continued to perform, playing in theaters and even making the jump to films in the nineteen twenties. But the nineteen twenties marked more than just a career
change for Kubelski. In nineteen twenty two, at a passover Satyr he attended with a friend, Zeppo Marx, he met the woman who would one day be his wife. Sadie Marx, unrelated to the Marx brothers, but they didn't hit it off at first. He upset her when he tried to sneak out while she was playing the violin for other guests. A few years later, though, in nineteen twenty seven, they did fall in love and married. She eventually joined him on his routines and took on the stage name Mary Livingstone.
Not long after, the pair had a daughter, Joan, and Benjamin continued to climb in popularity with American audiences, except by this time he wasn't known as Benjamin Kubelski anymore. He'd gone on to great acclaim as radio, television and movie star Jack Benny. Over the course of their lives, Jack and Mary Mary built their marriage on love and tolerance. He loved her deeply, but he also had a wandering eye. Still, he knew how important she was to his success in
show business and in life. Thanks to her involvement, Benny's character became something of a family affair. Her brother even produced several of his radio and TV shows. So when Jack died in nineteen seventy four from pancreatic cancer, it was understandable that Mary was despondent. She had lost the love of her life in the worst possible way. But then something happened. A day or two after he had died, she got a knock at the door. It was a courier with one red rose just for her. The next
day another rose arrived, and after that another. She called up the Flores to ask what was going on, and that's when she learned the truth. The Flores told her that Jack had put a special clause into his will following his death. Mary was to receive one rose every day for the rest of her life, and she did until her own passing in nineteen eighty three. Jack Benny wasn't just a comedian and an entertainer. He was also a romantic. Like I said, he had layers. Some people
don't wait for opportunity to strike. They go out and make their own luck. They bootstrap their ideas, they risk their money and reputation, and they work hard to become successful. Others simply wait for their moments. For them, luck is all about timing and coincidence, like waiting for their lottery numbers to get called. But Japanese businessman Sumotu Yamaguchi didn't make his own luck, and he didn't wait for it
to come around either. Depending on how you look at it, he was either the luckiest man who ever lived or the unluckiest. Yamaguchi was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in March of nineteen sixteen. He served as a naval engineer before joining the Mitsubishi Corporation in their heavy industries division. Yamaguchi's main office was in Nagasaki, but in the summer of nineteen forty five he was sent just over two hundred
and sixty miles to Hiroshima on a business trip. The plan was to work there for three months before returning home. On August sixth, Yamaguchi left the Hiroshima office along with two of his coworkers, bound for the train station, but as he started walking, he realized that he'd forgotten his identification back at his desk, so he ran back up
to grab it. With his ID firmly in hand, he was on his way to the docks around eight fifteen in the morning when he looked up to see an American bomber fly overhead, along with two parachutes drifting toward the ground, and then suddenly there was a bright flash of light, Yamaguchi was sent flying. His ear drums ruptured and his vision blinded in the process, and the upper
left side of his body was burned. He didn't realize it at the time, but he had just witnessed the detonation of the Little Boy atomic bomb from two miles away. The blast had blocked out the sun and the mushroom cloud rained fire over the city. He eventually regained his sights and got to his feet, finding a place to hide and wait out whatever might come next. It took some time, but Yamaguchi eventually went back out into the
city to look for his colleagues. They were okay, but they knew that they had to get to safety, so the three of them found their way to an air raid shelter for the night. The next day, Yamaguchi made it back to Nagasaki, where he had his injuries treated in a local hospital. Two days later, he was back at Mitsubishi ready to work. It was eleven am on August ninth when he was called into his boss's office. Yamaguchi told him about what he had witnessed, how a
bomb had melted bodies and rained ash over everything. It had destroyed. The city, but the supervisor couldn't believe it. He accused Yamaguchi of lying, saying that there was no bomb strong enough to wipe a whole city off the map, and then, just at that moment, as though it had been summoned by the supervisor's disbelief, another flash of lights went off outside. Yamaguchi leapt out of his chair and dropped to the floor as the windows exploded, with broken
glass all over him. He would later tell a reporter that he thought the mushroom cloud from Hiroshima had followed him back to Nagasaki, but what had actually happened was that another American bomber had just flown by and dropped the fat Man atomic bomb about two miles away. Still, Yamaguchi was well within range of the bomb's effects. His bandages were contaminated and he was hit with another dose of radiation, but he wasn't worried about himself at that moment.
He fled the Mitsubishi offices and trudged through the rubble of Nagasaki, hoping his wife and child were okay. When he got to his house, he saw that half of it had been destroyed in the blast, and feared that they may have been killed, but luck had found him for a third time in less than a week. At the time the bomb went off, his wife had been with their baby at the store buying burn ointment for him. They quickly ran and hid in a tunnel until it
was safe to come out. In a weird twist of fate, had Yamaguchi not survived the Hiroshima blast, his wife and child might not have been out of the house when the bomb fell on Nagasaki and collapsed half of their home. Yamaguchi went on to health the Allied forces as a translator before going back to his old job at Mitsubishi, but in March of two thousand and nine, the Japanese government officially recognized him as the only survivor of both the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs. One man had
been through two atomic detonations and lived to tell the tale. Sadly, he passed away in twenty ten at the age of ninety three from stomach cancer. Considering everything he went through, to Tomu Yamagachi may have been the luckiest man on earth by living as long as he did, and I would call that curious. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities, subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting
Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.