to fifteen car-loads of Florida oranges and grapefruit at a time. He told me that he used
to torture himself with such thoughts as: What if there's a train wreck? What if my fruit is
strewn all over the countryside? What if a bridge collapses as my cars are going across
it? Of course, the fruit was insured; but he feared that if he didn't deliver his fruit on time,
he might risk the loss of his market. He worried so much that he feared he had stomach
ulcers and went to a doctor. The doctor told him there was nothing wrong with him
except jumpy nerves. "I saw the light then," he said, "and began to ask myself
questions. I said to myself: 'Look here, Jim Grant, how many fruit cars have you handled
over the years?' The answer was: 'About twenty-five thousand.' Then I asked myself:
'How many of those cars were ever wrecked?' The answer was: 'Oh-maybe five.' Then I
said to myself: 'Only five-out of twenty-five thousand? Do you know what that means? A
ratio of five thousand to one! In other words, by the law of averages, based on
experience, the chances are five thousand to one against one of your cars ever being
wrecked. So what are you worried about?'
"Then I said to myself: 'Well, a bridge may collapse!' Then I asked myself: 'How many
cars have you actually lost from a bridge collapsing?' The answer was-'None.' Then I
said to myself: 'Aren't you a fool to be worrying yourself into stomach ulcers over a
bridge which has never yet collapsed, and over a railroad wreck when the chances are
five thousand to one against it!'
"When I looked at it that way," Jim Grant told me, "I felt pretty silly. I decided then and
there to let the law of averages do the worrying for me-and I have not been troubled with
my 'stomach ulcer' since!"
When Al Smith was Governor of New York, I heard him answer the attacks of his
political enemies by saying over and over: "Let's examine the record ... let's examine the
record." Then he proceeded to give the facts. The next time you and I are worrying
about what may happen, let's take a tip from wise old Al Smith: let's examine the record
and see what basis there is, if any, for our gnawing anxieties. That is precisely what
Frederick J. Mahlstedt did when he feared he was lying in his grave. Here is his story as
he told it to one of our adult-education classes in New York:
"Early in June, 1944, I was lying in a slit trench near Omaha Beach. I was with the 999th
Signal Service Company, and we had just 'dug in' in Normandy. As I looked around at
that slit trench-just a rectangular hole in the ground-I said to myself: 'This looks just like
a grave.' When I lay down and tried to sleep in it, it felt like a grave. I couldn't help
saying to myself: 'Maybe this is my grave.' When the German bombers began coming
over at 11 p.m., and the bombs started falling, I was scared stiff. For the first two or
three nights I couldn't sleep at all. By the fourth or fifth night, I was almost a nervous
wreck. I knew that if I didn't do something, I would go stark crazy. So I reminded myself
that five nights had passed, and I was still alive; and so was every man in our outfit.
Only two had been injured, and they had been hurt, not by German bombs, but by falling
flak, from our own anti-aircraft guns. I decided to stop worrying by doing something
constructive. So I built a thick wooden roof over my slit trench, to protect myself from
flak. I thought of the vast area over which my unit was spread. I told myself that the only
way I could be killed in that deep, narrow slit trench was by a direct hit; and I figured out
that the chance of a direct hit on me was not one in ten thousand. After a couple of
nights of looking at it in this way, I calmed down and slept even through the bomb raids!"
The United States Navy used the statistics of the law of averages to buck up the morale
of their men. One ex-sailor told me that when he and his shipmates were assigned to
high-octane tankers, they were worried stiff. They all believed that if a tanker loaded with
high-octane gasoline was hit by a torpedo, it exploded and blew everybody to kingdom
come.