Today in History - May 15: TV presenter's secret past not even he knew about
Larry Bader, a salesman from the US state of Ohio, vanished on a fishing trip on May 15, 1957.
Bader was out on the immense Lake Erie alone with storms approaching.
Heavily in debt and with his wife expecting their fourth child, his disappearance was treated as suspicious.
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Fritz Johnson was a well-known television and radio personality in Omaha, Nebraska. KETV 7
But three years on, he was declared dead and his wife received a generous life insurance payout.
Four days after Bader's disappearance in Ohio, a flamboyant oddball first walked into a bar in Omaha, Nebraska, hundreds of kilometres away.
Fritz Johnson quickly became a local celebrity after he sat on a flagpole for a month, a bizarre and popular craze of the early 20th century.
As a result, he became a local radio announcer and then a television presenter.
In 1964, a cancerous tumour was discovered behind his left eye. Johnson had surgery to remove it, but began wearing an eyepatch as a result.
Then a year later, Johnson was participating in an archery event in Chicago when he was approached.
"Pardon me," the young woman said. "Aren't you my uncle Larry Bader, who disappeared seven years ago?"
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Both Fritz Johnson and Larry Bader were keen archers. Supplied
Johnson brushed off his purported niece as suffering from mistaken identity.
Confident in his own identity, Johnson agreed to a fingerprint test.
The test proved what the family in Akron believed - Johnson was Bader.
"It was like a physical shock," he told Life magazine.
"Up until that moment, I had no doubt that I was not Larry Bader. But when I heard that, it was like a door had been slammed and somebody had hit me right in the face."
A team of psychologists analysed him for ten days before concluding he was not faking his new identity.
Instead he was suffering from a particularly unusual case of amnesia. He had completely forgotten his past life and genuinely believed he was Fritz Johnson.
Doctors believed the tumour next to his brain was a factor behind his unusual behaviour.
The revelation created several major headaches. His supposed widow had to repay the massive life insurance payout.
It also rendered two marriages null-and-void. Both Johnson and his widow had remarried since the disappearance.
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Fritz Johnson (Larry Bader) with his second wife, an aspiring local model. Supplied
But there remained sceptics as to whether Johnson knew he was actually Bader the whole time.
The mystery was never sold. His eye tumour returned the following year, and he died soon afterwards.
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