The Most Famous Secret (1956)
On February 8, 1956 (
E173) Garry carefully led an elderly man on stage. His secret, that he had witnessed John Wilkes Booth assassinate Abraham Lincoln, has become, decades later, one of the most famous secrets in the long history of the show. Credit social media, and of course the Game Show Network reruns that put this show back into the public once again. No fewer than a dozen people have posted either the specific segment, or the entire program (which included Lucille Ball at the height of her fame) on their YouTube channels. The story has turned up in everything from personal blogs to historical journals. The gentleman at the center of the story even has his own Wikipedia page.
Samuel James Seymour was born on March 28, 1860 in Talbot County, located on the peninsula part of Maryland. At the age of five, he traveled with his father to Washington DC, where his father had business regarding the status of his employer’s slaves. That employer and his wife were on the trip, as was little Sammy’s nurse. The party traveled 150 miles by coach to the nation’s capital.
Seymour recalled being frightened in Washington by the large number of armed men in the streets. He remembered the employer’s wife telling him that they were going to “a real play”, which he thought meant a game, like tag. He remembered going to Ford’s Theatre and seeing President Lincoln waving to the crowd as he entered. And he remembered the shot ringing out, and in the pandemonium a man who appeared to fall out of the balcony and onto the stage. This, of course, was the assassin John Wilkes Booth, but little Sammy didn’t know that, and was concerned for that man’s safety.
Seymour told that story for the first time, at least for the first time in print, to Frances Spatz Leighton in 1954 when he was 94 years old. Leighton wrote for The American Weekly, a magazine insert that appeared in Sunday newspapers around the country. Leighton would go on to have great success as a ghostwriter of memoirs, mostly about ordinary people and their unusual lives in Washington DC. (Typical title: “I Was Jacqueline Kennedy’s Dressmaker”) Leighton took Seymour’s recollections and wove a short but gripping tale of a young boy who witnessed history.
Surprisingly, it took almost exactly two years for Seymour and his amazing story to make their way from that article to the I’ve Got a Secret stage. Seymour was frail that day, and wearing a bandage on his face from a fall he took at his hotel. The audience reacts as one might expect when his stunning secret is shown to them. As a game, however, it’s a pretty easy secret to guess. Told that it had to do with something that he witnessed, Bill does the math and immediately narrows the subject down to the Civil War era. In fact, it’s clear that Bill has the secret figured out, but he wastes time asking less pointed questions and lets Jayne have the win.
Seymour doesn’t say much during his appearance. Garry shares some highlights from the two-year-old article, mostly the part about how Seymour was concerned for the safety of the man who turned out to be Booth. Garry gives him the full $80 prize even though the panel was so quick, and since Seymour doesn’t smoke, Garry gives him pipe tobacco instead of the usual Winston cigarettes. Seymour would die two months later, just after his 96th birthday.
It's a fascinating story, and even though at the time, it didn’t generate enormous amounts of attention, today it’s seen as somewhat extraordinary. We still think of television as a modern medium, and the idea that someone could have appeared on television and also have been witness to something we process as long-ago history is a remarkable thing for our brains to comprehend. But now, I’m going to give your brain something else to comprehend. What if it’s not true? Or at least not entirely true?
Let’s start with an historian on the Ford’s Theatre blog. She points out, quite rightly, that historians are not usually in the business of accepting firsthand accounts as absolute truth, especially after significant time has passed. Usually, we want to have corroborating evidence, and there isn’t any. Records don’t exist of who might have attended Ford’s Theatre that fateful night. Other firsthand accounts do exist of course, but not from either of the two people who Seymour says took him to the play. Seymour himself didn’t tell the story, at least not in a public forum, until he was in his nineties. That story, ghostwritten by a talented author, contains many specific details having nothing to do with the shooting. How many of us can claim specific, vivid memories of our lives at five years old?
We’ve also learned that Mr. Seymour loved to tell a good story in his later years. There’s a 1952 newspaper article about a 90-something carpenter (our Mr. Seymour) who’s never missed voting in an election since he was old enough to do so. In the brief story, Seymour says that his streak was almost broken 45 years earlier when he suffered from malaria, but that against his doctor’s wishes he was carried to the polls on a stretcher to cast his ballot. Also, his 1956 obituary lists six incidents which could have led to an earlier demise, an odd thing to include in an obituary. Among them was falling off an oyster boat in the dead of winter, using arsenic instead of flour to make some muffins, a brick falling on his head while working in a well, and surviving when his ship was struck by lightning and split in half.
Could all those things have happened to him? Of course. There’s also no question that Seymour was old enough to have been present for Lincoln’s assassination. It’s also possible that his mind was playing tricks on him after so many intervening years. It’s also possible that Mr. Seymour was exaggerating or embellishing some of his stories for effect. We’ll never know the exact truth, but we do know this: If a storyteller’s goal is for his story to be remembered, Samuel J Seymour has succeeded beyond anything he could have imagined in his time. That alone is impressive enough.
