What amazing historical event witnesses lived long enough to tell their story on TV?In 1956, a 96-year-old man with a black eye appeared on a CBS game show. His secret? He was sitting in the balcony of Ford's Theatre when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.
The man was Samuel J. Seymour. On April 14, 1865, a five-year-old Seymour was taken by his godmother to see Our American Cousin in Washington, D.C. From their seats in the balcony, the young boy witnessed John Wilkes Booth shoot the President and leap down to the stage. Young Samuel, not understanding the political assassination unfolding in front of him, was actually most concerned for the man who fell from the balcony and broke his leg.
Fast forward 91 years to February 9, 1956. Seymour appeared as a guest on the popular television panel show I've Got a Secret. Sporting that black eye—he had fallen down the stairs at his hotel before the broadcast but insisted on going on camera anyway—he sat opposite a panel of celebrities tasked with guessing his secret. When Jayne Meadows correctly guessed that he witnessed the Lincoln assassination, the studio audience erupted. Seymour was awarded $80 and a can of Prince Albert tobacco for his appearance. He passed away just two months later, the last surviving witness to the event.
Samuel J. Seymour (1860–1956), the last surviving witness to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Seymour was not the only living time capsule to appear in modern media. In 1955, television newsreels captured the life of Dewey Beard, also known as Iron Hail. Beard was a Miniconjou Lakota warrior who had fought at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 and survived the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. He lived to be 96, bringing the living memory of the Plains Wars into the same era as the polio vaccine and the Chevrolet Corvette.
Similarly, Albert Woolson, the last undisputed surviving veteran of the Union Army, became a fixture in national news broadcasts until his death in 1956 at the age of 109. Woolson had enlisted as a drummer boy in 1864. In his final years, news cameras frequently visited him in Duluth, Minnesota, broadcasting footage of a living Civil War soldier directly into living rooms across the United States.
