Lucky Guy
How do you define luck? Surviving an accident, winning the lottery? Some would say it’s being at the right place at the right time, or perhaps, the wrong place at the wrong time and getting out unscathed anyway. Frane (Frano) Selak was a music teacher from Croatia whose incredible life story gained him the nickname of the luckiest unlucky man to have ever lived… or maybe the other way around. His fate was so extraordinary, the fact he married six times seems like a footnote in comparison to everything else he faced in his lifetime. Selak was known as the man who looked death in the eye seven times in total.
Frane Selak had his first brush with death in 1957, when a bus he was on swerved off the road and into a river. Both Selak and the bus driver managed to get out of the bus and they swam to shore. Selak later stated that Ahmet the driver never got behind the wheel without half a bottle of rakija (the local liquor) in his system, Disaster struck again in 1962 on a train ride from Sarajevo to Dubrovnik. A boulder fell on the tracks, causing the train to jump off the rails and crash into the icy river Neretva. Selak managed to break the compartment window and get out of the coach, also saving the life of an acquaintance who was travelling with him. In 1963, Selak got on a charter flight from Zagreb to Rijeka to visit his mother who had fallen ill. The flight was fully booked, but he explained he was having a family emergency and managed to convince the crew to take him on. He was sitting in the rear of the plane, next to a flight attendant named Rozika. Not far from the destination airport, the plane suffered a technical malfunction and started losing altitude, finally crashing into a boulder. The plane door was blown off before the crash, and Selak got sucked out of the plane at a height of 800m – despite all odds, he landed in a haystack which saved his life. Rozika survived as well, while all other passengers died in the crash. Selak, quite understandably, never got on a plane again.
Frano survived 2 car fires while driving. In 1995, he was hit by a bus in Zagreb. Again, no serious injuries. A year later, a UN truck almost crashed into Selak’s car on a mountain road. Selak avoided the collision by swerving at the very last moment and crashed into a guardrail. The fence gave way and his car fell into the ravine, some 300 feet below. Selak, however, wasn’t wearing a seatbelt at the time – he reportedly never used one again after the tragic plane crash. He jumped out of the car window, clinging onto a tree on a slope right before the vehicle tipped over and crashed.
This was not the last time he pushed the limits of fate. You see, Selak chanced playing the lottery after everything he went through. A few days after he turned 73, Selak won a 6,5 million kuna jackpot, nearly $1 million. He bought a house and a holiday home, then generously shared the rest of his winnings with friends and family. He reportedly bought and gifted 25 cars and lent money to a lot of people – most of which, as it usually goes, he never saw again. It didn’t turn him bitter, and he occasionally joked he didn’t really have a business mind.
Lucky Laughs
What did the world’s unluckiest lucky man do when he found the pill of immortality?
He choked on it.
Deaf people are really lucky,
They don’t know what it’s like to have to listen to Kamala talk.
I was in a bar the other night going from barstool to barstool hoping to get lucky…
But there wasn’t gum under any of them.
A girl goes to a psychic. Don and Joe both like her and she is confused and wants to find out who is the lucky one that can be her life partner.
Psychic: “Don is going to the be the lucky one, but Joe will marry you.”
September 27th Birthdays
1987 – Hillary Duff, 1973 – Gwyneth Paltrow, 1983 – Anna Camp, 1978 – Dana Loesch
1982 – Anderson Varejão, 1965 – Steve Kerr, 1993 – Sam Lerner, 1992 – Thomas Mann