The man with no name

On Thursday, August 12, 1954, the front page of the Daily News-Telegram contained a photograph quite unlike any I had seen, before or since. It was a two-column facial photo of a dead man, his head on a pillow inside a casket, his body covered by a blanket below the neck. My father agreed to publish the photograph at the request of police, whose attempt to identify the dead man had proved futile. Maybe a News-Telegram reader would recognize him.

Of course, being 10 years old at the time, I was hypnotized by the image. I had never seen a dead person before. He looked alive to me, just asleep, with a nice shock of hair and a handsome face. He appeared to be in his mid-20s. I couldn’t take my eyes off that photo. Dead . . . really?

Very late the previous Monday, Mack Davidson was driving a month-old 1954 Ford from his home near Dallas to Paris, 35 miles north of Sulphur Springs. As he explained to authorities several days later, when he came out of a coma, he picked up a hitchhiker near Dallas. The man said he was headed for Texarkana, Tex., but did not divulge his name, home town or occupation to Davidson.

Near Commerce, 20 miles west of Sulphur Springs, the stranger took over the job of driving and Davidson dozed off. “I woke up in the hospital,” he later said. The hitchhiker took a wrong fork in the road after leaving Commerce, and headed for Sulphur Springs instead of Paris. About five miles north of Sulphur Springs, the car hit a bridge abutment, killing the hitchhiker and critically injuring Davidson.

Police had nothing to go on. The dead man wore blue jeans and a yellow nylon shirt and carried with him a door key, a cigarette lighter, a pack of Kools and a dime.

Day & Day Funeral Home had hundreds of inquiries, but all led to dead ends. Two thousand people viewed the body, probably in large part from curiosity. The man’s fingerprints were checked against databases available at the time, to no avail. After ten days, the body of this man with no name was buried in the city cemetery. I imagined he would remain there, until the end of time. Years went by, but I never forgot that remarkable photograph.

Then in July of 1964, almost a decade later, came a surprising development, which I wrote about in the Daily News-Telegram and filed as a story to the Dallas Times Herald, which published it under a three-column headline. A gasoline station owner in Gilmer, half an hour east of Sulphur Springs, called the funeral home. Kenneth Phinney said his brother, John Everett Phinney, had disappeared at the time of the accident.

Could this be the man with no name? Phinney, his three sisters and about 40 others who knew John Phinney all examined the photograph. It was their conclusion that the dead man was indeed John Phinney.

The initial mystery had captured my little town’s attention. The chances of its being resolved a decade later were, to my mind, infinitesimal. I was grateful to write the story of John Phinney’s identity. Strange as it is to say, I was sharing good news about a tragic event.