The 97th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic came and went with little note anywhere.
The April 19th Flashback page by Nancy Watkins in the Chicago Tribune Magazine had a very interesting and little-known story about one Chicago mother and daughter who were aboard the Titanic. Their story also involves an equally sad event in Chicago, the 1903 Iroquois Theatre Fire.
Ida Hippach, wife of Chicago plate glass industrialist Louis Hippach, and her daughter Jean, 19, were returning from a trip to Europe where she had been trying to regain her health which hadn't been the same since two of her sons, Archie, 12, and Robert, 14, had died in the tragic Iroquois Theatre Fire nine years earlier.
On April 12, 1912, they were aboard the ill-fated ship and had to be coaxed upon a lifeboat by John Jacob Astor. They survived, but two years later, son Howard was killed in a car crash.
Nancy Watkins then always has some interesting facts to go along with the story and old photo (of Ida, daughter Jean, and son Howard taken some time before the Titanic sank).
35-- Estimated number of Titanic passengers bound for the Chicago area.
$6,600-- fares for each of the Hippachs in 2008 dollars.
$50,000-- Winning bid in 1998 for Titanic scrapbook kept by Chicagoan Frank Blackmarr, a passenger on the Carpathia rescue ship. (Who says scrapbooks are a waste on time and effort?)
28-- Days after the Titanic's sinking that Collapsable Lifeboat A was found adrift about 200 miles away with three bodies on board.
There is a fascinating and huge web site devoted to all things Titanic at
www.encyclopedia-titanic.org
Where Does Nancy Watkins get All This Interesting Stuff? --Cooter
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