Fun Facts That Are

Skydiver Debbie Williams was knocked unconscious in a midair collision over Arizona in 1987, and loadmaster Gregory Robertson dove after her, knowing he might fall too low to open his own parachute. He reached her in free fall, pulled her reserve ripcord and pushed her clear. Only then did he open his own, about 13 seconds from the ground, and both of them landed alive.

Floodwater covered most of Louisville, Kentucky, in January 1937, and there were not enough boats to rescue everyone downtown. In less than a day, a crew built a floating bridge about 1,800 feet long on empty whiskey barrels. An estimated 75,000 people walked across it to safety over the next four days.

Jeff Daniels grew up in Chelsea, Michigan. His grandfather once ran a car and bus garage there in the early 1900s. In 1989 the Dumb and Dumber star bought that garage and rebuilt it into a theatre that still seats 168. Then he handed the whole building to the nonprofit company he founded there. He still runs it, and he still writes and directs plays on that stage.

When an ice storm shut down roads across the South in January 2026, Jeep clubs offered nurses free rides to work. In Longview, Texas, six Jeeps and Broncos made more than 200 trips, taking hospital staff to their shifts and home again. Every driver was a volunteer, and the hospital surprised them with gift cards for gas. One East Texas club has done it since the 2021 winter storm.

After the 1900 Galveston hurricane wiped out the strawberry farms on the Texas mainland, Red Cross founder Clara Barton, 78, had her staff ask the growers what they needed. The answer was strawberry plants. Her workers ordered 1.5 million from nurseries in four states, and they were in the ground within two weeks. Pasadena, Texas, still holds a strawberry festival every May.

Tom Cruise jumped from a helicopter with a burning parachute 16 times for Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. Each canopy was soaked in fuel and set alight at least 7,500 feet up. He cut it loose after about three seconds and opened a backup. He was 62, and Guinness made it a world record.

In a single day in 1952, the people of Moses Lake, Washington, built a whole farm for a stranger. From one minute past midnight, more than 50 tradesmen raised a seven-room house by floodlight while about 100 men on 25 tractors leveled and planted 63.5 acres. By day's end it belonged to Donald Dunn, a WWII tank driver whose Kansas farm a flood had wiped out.

Bruce Willis's 8-year-old daughter Tallulah was selling Girl Scout cookies in Idaho in 2002 when she had an idea: send them to the troops. Willis bought 12,000 boxes. More than 8,000 pounds reached the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy in the Arabian Sea, and the captain handed the very first box to a sailor who had been a Girl Scout herself.

The Ghostbusters firehouse is real. Ladder 8 has answered calls from it in Tribeca since 1903. In 2011 the city put it on a list of 20 fire companies to close, the neighborhood rallied, and it stayed open. One firefighter says about 20 people a day ask him if it is a real firehouse while he stands there in uniform. It is, and the truck still goes out.

Paul Newman was 70 when the Ford Mustang he shared won its class at the 1995 24 Hours of Daytona. He ran his first pro race at 47, won four national championships and finished second overall at Le Mans in 1979. At Daytona he drove with NASCAR star Mark Martin and two other drivers, days after his 70th birthday. The man who voiced Doc Hudson in Cars really was a race winner.

Willie Nelson helped start Farm Aid in 1985 to raise money for family farmers. In 1991 the government put his own 44-acre Texas ranch up for auction over back taxes. More than 40 farmers, some from South Dakota, came to the courthouse and asked bidders to stay away. A lawyer for a farm group bought the ranch and held it until Willie got it back. At 93, he played Farm Aid again in September.

For six years, Detroit fans trespassed onto the empty field of the torn-down Tiger Stadium with their own lawnmowers. Tom Derry started it in 2010, when the diamond where Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth played had weeds up to eight feet tall. His crew grew to about 30. Police kept throwing them off at first, and they kept coming back. Detroit kids play ball on that same spot today.