ONE DAY IN 1912, ROBERT A. HEINLEIN LIKED TO RECALL, A YOUNG COUPLE WAS WALKING THROUGH Swope Park in Kansas City, Missouri. They were crossing the railroad tracks when the wife caught her heel in a switch—the pair of tapering rails that guided the cars—as a train’s whistle sounded its approach. A passerby, identified in press accounts as a tramp, stopped to help, but the men were unable to free her before the engine struck them all. The woman and the stranger were killed at once.
