Locked Out

After waving from the back of his train to a crowd that had gathered to meet him in 1912 at a railroad depot early one chilly morning in Asheville, North Carolina, Theodore Roosevelt tried to re-enter his private rail car.

Unfortunately, the train crew had set the door’s spring bolt lock the night before, and he was locked out.  Roosevelt then tried to alert the campaign staff about his plight by using the door’s buzzer. But they were asleep, and no one heard it.

The shivering candidate had to brave the cold for twenty minutes until he was rescued by a trainman at the next station.

Source: Gerald Helferich, Theodore Roosevelt and the Assassin: Madness, Vengeance, and the Campaign of 1912 (Guilford: Loy’s Press, 2013), 132