Fateful Words
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- February
- 19
It’s an old truth. I’ve personally learned and re-learned the adage many times, sometimes in ways that make me cringe to this day.
But it came back to me in a dramatic way when I was in Arizona, covering the Super Bowl.
The Super Bowl had nothing to do with the fresh revelation, incidentally. The inspiration was a story about a passenger on the Titanic.
In between column deadlines, I took a side trip to the Arizona Science Center in Phoenix where there was a haunting exhibit of relics scooped off the ocean floor at the site where the Titanic’s rusting hulk rests. The supposedly unsinkable ocean liner hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic in 1912 and sank like a stone, taking with it 1,500 men, women and children.But you saw the movie, so you alread knew that
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One of the passengers bound for America was 17-year-old Edgar Samuel Andrew, whose hat and slippers are on display at the science center’s exhibit.
Poor Edgar had booked his trans-Atlantic journey on another ship, but a strike forced him to re-schedule his trip two weeks earlier than he had planned. The result was a ticket aboard the Titanic
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Miffed that he had to leave England at an inconvient time, Andrew wrote a letter to a friend, which also was on display. I jotted it down.
It goes as follows:
“You figure, Josey, I am boarding the greatest steamship in the world but I don’t feel proud of it at all…Right now, I wish the Titanic were lying at the bottom of the ocean.”
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 2:15 pm by Phil Reisman.
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Phil Reisman is a veteran journalist and native of Westchester County. He began his career in 1977 as the head copy boy of a startup New York City newspaper that quickly went belly up. Reisman was not to blame for the newspaper's failure, or so he claims.
Or, as John Jacob Astor said to the bartender on the Titanic, “I asked for more ice, but this is ridiculous.”