Five Generations, One Birthday? What are the Odds?

Welcome to Simple Joe. I’m glad you’re here.

I’m spending October 1 in Daytona Beach, where vacation plans have shifted a little while Karin deals with a bronchial infection, but I still managed to get out for an electric-bike ride along the beach, meet Tony, a retired New York pizza-shop owner now living his dream selling Nathan’s hot dogs and Hershey’s ice cream, and make plans for a Halifax River cruise. Along the way, I’m talking about fishing cats that actually seem built for the water, birthdays including Jimmy Carter, Tom Bosley, Richard Harris, Randy Quaid, Mark McGwire, Zach Galifianakis and Brie Larson, some big October 1 moments involving Yosemite, NASA, Walt Disney World, EPCOT and the first commercial CD player, plus National Black Dog Day, homemade cookies, raccoons and my own five-year experiment with being a vegetarian. Then, for The Story Behind the Headline, I dig into the remarkable Bell-Harlow family, where five consecutive generations spanning 118 years were all born on September 14. I look at the roughly one-in-17.7-billion simplified math, whether the family could have tried to plan for the shared birthday, the fact that fifth-generation Arthur Bell was actually due on September 14 and arrived exactly on that date, and another strange pattern: the five generations alternate boy, girl, boy, girl, boy. It’s a fun story about coincidences, family traditions, birthdays and the little connections that can stretch across generations, and I want to know if your family has a strange repeating date, number or coincidence of its own.

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