The Universe of Discourse : I owe my life to a 1913 road rage incident
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Sat, 27 Jun 2026
I owe my life to a 1913 road rage incident
This is my great-grandfather, born Dominusz Andor in<br>Szeged, Hungary in 1886. In the picture he is in Brooklyn,<br>New York, probably sometime in the early 1950's.
By 1911 Andor had moved from Hungary to Vienna and had changed the<br>spelling of his name to “Dominus” to save confusion. He worked as a<br>goldsmith, and owned his own jewelry shop, so he must have been doing<br>OK.
There's a family legend about why Andor left Vienna for the USA, and I<br>was never sure whether I believed it. But thanks to the Wonders of<br>the Internet, I was able to find out the details, which were all over<br>the Viennese papers in the spring of 1913, and were even reported as<br>far away as Budapest.
In 1913, Andor owned a motorcycle with a sidecar. On March 24 he was<br>driving around Vienna with his wife Rosa when the sidecar came<br>detached. Andor stopped to repair it, and a crowd gathered to watch.<br>Some local youths offered to “help”, rocking the motorcycle and<br>honking its horn.
After the sidecar was re-attached, The youths demanded a tip, which<br>Andor refused to pay. But he asked the boys to push the motorcycle<br>forward, which they did, but they also hit him and Rosa in the back of<br>their heads; Rosa responded by punching one of them in the face. The<br>boys jeered and shouted insults. As Andor started to drive away, some<br>people in the crowd threw rocks.
Andor, frightened or angry, took out his Browning pistol. He later<br>claimed to have fired two warning shots into the air. Whatever he<br>meant to do, one of his shots his a 22-year-old butcher's assistant in<br>the chest. Fortunately the bullet lodged in the young man's<br>breastbone. The second shot went through the hat brim of a<br>12-year-old boy without hurting him. Andor fled the scene.
The police caught up with him that evening at his home, having traced<br>the owner records of the motorcycle, whose license plate number had<br>been noted by people in the crowd. He was arrested and, as he was a<br>foreigner, was deemed a flight risk and jailed pending trial.
In May he was tried. His claim of self-defense was rejected, since by<br>the time he fired his gun he was already about twenty paces from the<br>crowd. He found guilty of assault, mitigated by the circumstances,<br>and sentenced to a week of prison time, which he had already served<br>several times over. However, the butcher's assistant, by then out of<br>the hospital, announced his intention to sue in civil court for lost<br>wages and for pain and suffering.
I haven't yet found the ship manifest that says exactly when Andor<br>arrived in the U.S., but it was no more than four months later. He<br>either fled to avoid the suit, fled to avoid paying the judgement, or,<br>perhaps, just decided he had had enough of Vienna. (I would have been<br>pretty annoyed too, after serving two months of a one-week sentence.<br>Also, his goldsmith shop had been robbed two years before, by thieves<br>who used the shop's own electric drill to break through the back of<br>the safe.)
Rosa and their son Sándor, then four years old, arrived in October<br>1913 and the family settled in Brooklyn. Andor was naturalized in<br>1920, and his mother came over in 1921.
Sándor's parents changed his name to the more American-sounding<br>“Samuel”. Samuel remained in Brooklyn until he retired in the early<br>1970s, by which time he was my paternal grandfather.
It's a good thing for me that the second bullet didn't hit the little<br>boy in the head, or I wouldn't be here to tell you about it.
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