Memories

Today was the 100th Memorial of the sinking of the Titanic. It is a such a sobering day, especially since it also happens to be my grandpa's birthday. He passed away two Octobers ago.

Here is an article that came out in the New York Times before they even knew what all had happened. This is so powerful and heartbreaking. Hold out through it. It really is worth the read!!!

FIFTEEN HUNDRED LIVES LOST WHEN TITANIC PLUNGES HEADLONG INTO DEPTHS OF THE SEA.

Men of World-Wide Prominence Go Down With Ship After Women and Children Are Taken Off in Lifeboats—Only Six Hundred and Seventy-five People Saved Out of Total of Twenty-two Hundred on Board Ill-fated Vessel—Newest and Greatest Liner in World, Built at Cost of Ten Million Dollars and Embodying Latest Scientific Principles, Sinks as Quickly as Wooden Fishing Smack After Collision With Iceberg Off Coast of Newfoundland. 

Los Angeles Time:

April 16, 1912.

This dramatic headline article from the Los Angeles Times recounts the sinking of the British luxury liner Titanic. The exact figures mentioned here have been revised since the time of publication, and the term advices is used to mean information.

[BY DIRECT WIRE TO THE TIMES]

New York, April 15.—[Exclusive Dispatch.] The greatest marine disaster in the history of the world occurred last Sunday night when the Titanic, of the White Star Line, the biggest and finest of steamships, shattered herself against an iceberg and sank with 1500 of her passengers and crew in less than four hours.

Out of nearly 2200 persons that she carried only 675 were saved and most of these are women and children. They were picked up from small boats by Cunarder Carpathia which found, when she ended her desperate race against time, a sea strewn with the wreckage of the lost ship and the bodies of drowned men and women.

Not a name of those saved had reached the offices of the White Star line or the Cunard line at midnight, though every effort was being made to get in communication with the vessel that bore the survivors. It is probable that these names will be received in the morning. All night a crowd of anxious relatives and friends of the Titanic's passengers were massed in front of the line's offices at No. 9 Broadway. 

There were 325 first cabin passengers on the Titanic, of whom 128 were women and 15 children. In the second cabin there were 285 persons, including 79 women and 8 children, and in the steerage the complement of 710 was divided almost equally, it is believed, between women and men, with a small percentage of children.

The numbers are enough to indicate that if the women and children were saved, very few men could have survived the disaster, as there were almost enough women and children aboard to make up the 675 survivors. The crew numbered 860, bringing the total of those known to be aboard up to 2180, but it is understood that at the last minute before sailing several got aboard, making the total up to a full 2200.

Capt. E. J. Smith of the Titanic is believed to have gone to the bottom with his vessel.

Among the 1320 passengers of the giant liner were Col. John Jacob Astor and his wife, Isidor Straus, Maj. Archibald W. Butt, aide to President Taft, George B. Widener and Mrs. Widener of Philadelphia, Mr. and Mrs. Henry S. Harper, William T. Stead, the London journalist, and many more whose names are known on both sides of the Atlantic. The news that few besides the women and children were saved has caused the greatest apprehension as to the fate of these.

When the Titanic plunged headlong against a wall of ice at 10:40 p.m. on Sunday night, her fate established that no modern steamship is unsinkable, and that all of a large passenger list cannot be saved in a liner's small boats. The White Star line believed that the Titanic was practically invulnerable and insisted until there was no doubting the full extent of the catastrophe that she could not sink. The great ship was the last word in modern scientific construction, but she found the ocean floor almost as quickly as a wooden ship.

On her maiden trip, the Titanic, built and equipped at a cost of $10,000,000, a floating palace, found her graveyard when, swinging from the westerly steamship lane, south of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, to take the direct run to this port, she hurled her giant bulk against an iceberg that rose from an immense field that drifted from the Arctic. Running at high speed into that grim and silent enemy of seafarers, the shock crushed her bow. From a happy, comfortable vessel she was converted in a few minutes into a bedlam of misery and dreadful suffering. Through rent plates and timbers water rushed so swiftly that her captain, E. J. Smith, the admiral of the White Star fleet, knew there was no hope of saving her. That much the faltering wireless had told.

At midnight tonight the officials of the White Star Line were struggling to get into communication with the Cunarder Carpathia, which has on board, the 675 women and children saved from the Titanic, but not one word of news could they obtain. All they could get by wireless was that the Carpathia, which left New York on April 13 for the Mediterranean, was retracing her course to this port, bringing here the women and children widowed and orphaned by the disaster. The Marconi stations were striving also to get in touch with either the Carpathia or the Allan liner Virginian to find out whether all the rescued were really on board the Carpathia, or the Virginian carries others that were saved, but the while keeping hope to the last, freely admitted there had been “horrible loss of life.”

Accepting early estimates of the fatality list as accurate, the disaster is the greatest in marine history. Nearest approaching it in magnitude were the disasters of the steamer Atlantic in 1873, when 547 lives were lost, and the La Bourgogne in 1898, with a fatality list of 571.

Should it prove that other liners, notably the Allan liners Parisian and Virginian, known to have been in the vicinity of the Titanic early yesterday, had picked up other of her passengers, the extent of the calamity would be greatly reduced. This hope remains.

News of the sinking of the liner and of the terrible loss of life came early last evening with all the greater shock because hope had been buoyed up all day by reports that the steamship, although badly damaged, was not sinking, and that all her passengers had been taken off safely.

The messages were mostly unofficial, however, and none came directly from the liner, so that a fear remained of possible bad news to come.

SURVIVORS PICKED UP.

Shortly after 7 o'clock tonight there came flashing over the wires from Cape Race, within 400 miles of which the liner had struck the iceberg, word that at 2:20 o'clock this morning, three hours and fifty-five minutes after receiving her death blow, the Titanic had sunk. The news came from the steamer Carpathia, relayed by the White Star liner Olympic, and revealed that by the time the Carpathia, outward bound from New York, and racing for the Titanic on a wireless call, reached the scene, the doomed vessel had sunk.

Left on the surface, however, were lifeboats from the Titanic and in them it appears, according to meager reports received at a late hour, were some 675 survivors of the disaster. These, according to advices, the Carpathia picked up and is now on her way with them to New York.

For the rest, the scene as the Carpathia came up was one of desolation. All that remained of the $10,000,000 floating palace on which nearly 1400 passengers had been voyaging luxuriously to this side of the Atlantic, were bits of wreckage. The biggest ship in the world had gone down, snuffing out in her downward plunge, it appeared, hundreds of human lives.

A significant line in the Cape Race dispatch was the announcement that of those saved by the Carpathia, nearly all were women and children. Should it prove that no other vessel picked up any passengers of the sinking liner, this might mean that few of the men had been saved, as the proportion of women and children among the passengers was large. The same facts would likewise spell the doom of practically the entire crew of 800.

In the cabins were 230 women and children, but it is not known how many there were among the 740 third-class passengers.

In the first cabin there were 128 women and fifteen children, and in the second cabin seventy-nine women and eight children.

NOTABLE PERSONS.

Notable persons, travelers on the Titanic, whose fate was in doubt in the lack of definite advices as to the identity of the survivors, were: Mr. and Mrs. John Jacob Astor, Maj. Archibald W. Butt, aide to President Taft; Charles M. Hayes, president of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, his wife and daughter; W. T. Stead, Benjamin Guggenheim, F. D. Millett, the artist, and G. D. Widener of Philadelphia, Mr. and Mrs. Isidor Straus, J. B. Thayer, vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad; J. Bruce Ismay, Henry B. Harris, the theatrical manager, and Mrs. Harris, and Col. Washington A. Roebling, builder of the Brooklyn bridge.

A ray of hope appeared shortly before 11 o'clock tonight in a message to the night operator at the Marconi wireless station at Sable Island, near the scene of the disaster. Answering an inquiry regarding the delivery of wireless messages to the passengers of the Titanic, the operator reported that it was difficult to deliver them, “as the passengers are believed to be dispersed among several vessels.”

Even this faint indication that other vessels than the Carpathia had picked up survivors of the Titanic was eagerly seized upon by thousands of relatives and friends of those who had set sail on her for this country.

The White Star offices had endeavored vainly from 8 o'clock until 11 p.m. to get further word from the Olympic about the Titanic. Vice-President Franklin said at 11 o'clock they were hopeful of getting another message tonight.

TRYING FOR LIST OF LIVING.

The company also was trying to get into wireless communication with the Carpathia and filed a message asking that if possible the complete list of the names of the 675 survivors said to be on board the Carpathia be sent by wireless.

Such a list Vice-President Franklin believes to be of the utmost importance, as hope was waning among the White Star line officials tonight that any others than these 675 persons had survived.

Amid confusion at the offices the situation was studied as calmly as possible. Mr. Franklin figured that notwithstanding his fervent hope to the contrary the Allan line steamers Virginian and Parisian barely could have reached the scene of the disaster in time to have been of assistance. When the Virginian first reported catching the “C.Q.D.” signal she said she was not likely to be able to reach the scene of the wreck before 10 a.m. today. That would have been nearly eight hours after the Titanic sank. It was equally doubtful if the Parisian could have reached the scene in time.

Mr. Franklin said that from his knowledge of Capt. Smith's gallantry and heroism on other occasions, the veteran navigator must have stuck to his bridge and gone down with his ship.

There was discussion as to whether all the male passengers had sacrificed opportunity to save themselves by giving women and children the first chance at the boats.

“There is no rule of the sea,” said Mr. Franklin, “which requires such a sacrifice. It is a rule of courtesy on land as well as sea that gallant men have often observed in time of disaster.”

The White Star officers figured from their data that the Olympic was forty miles from the scene of the Titanic's sinking when she sent the news of it at 7 o'clock tonight. At that hour the Carpathia was estimated to be 1080 miles east of Sandy Hook.

Source: Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1912

This rambles just a bit, but I think it is really incredible at capturing the chaos of the event for those who were alive at the time. The final accounting was 1523 of the 2228 passengers and crew members aboard died. Only 705 survived. Those heroic men who sacrificed their lives for their women and men fill me with such inspiration and awe that I just want to burst out in thanksgiving to them! Let them me an example to today's men!!!!

The Titanic on the beginning of her one and only voyage.

The wreckage of the Titanic deep below the sea. Awesome, or what?!

And here are some pictures of my beloved Grandpa. So thankful to God that he lived and breathed! Miss him soooooo much!!! My grandma is visiting us right now.

Grandpa holding Thadden when he was two.

 One of Grandpa's greatest loves was hunting. And yes that is me being, well, me.

Abrienne feeding Grandpa her juice. 

 A sobering day for me and any who cherish the lives in this world. So glad God made both joy and sorrow in this life. The sorrow to compliment the joy and the joy to compliment the sorrow.