ep28 Not English

The most widely spoken language in the world is not English. The death of the son brings back a mother's lost voice. A hand leads a police department to stray. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, those statements are all true.

Can you imagine that? And this is Lindsay McCarry back with another assortment of odds and ends of out-of-the-way knowledge and news items gleaned from every imaginable source. Until we come back in just a minute and a half to fire our first salvo of Can You Imagine That?

Wait around for us, won't you please? And here's the first Can You Imagine That item for this session.

From a newspaper of February 27, 1931, I've dug up what I think is a strange story, and here it is. It was on February 26 of that year that 60-year-old Mrs. Catherine Zenito of New York, New Jersey, was sitting in her home.

For four years, Mrs. Zenito had been speechless and was now spending her days in the quiet solitude of her own thoughts. In the next room, Mrs. Zenito knew that her son, Joseph, age 22, was preparing to...

to do what she didn't know, but you could hear him moving around, then suddenly she heard... My boy, my boy! For the first time in four years, through the impulse of that sudden gunshot, Mrs. O'Nito spoke, then she collapsed and fell into a deep coma.

When she was revived, she miraculously regained the power of speech, that the tragic potency of the story lies in the fact that the revolver shot which brought back that mother's speech after laps of four years had been the suicide shot which had caused the death of Joseph, her son.