A lifelong obsession

Dear Diary,

The snow is falling quite heavily and I am up before the light to post this just in case we lose power during the storm.  Yesterday, my ever reliable generator decided to act up so I had to turn it off.  So if the power fails...well, you get the picture.  They will come later to see to it but for now all fingers are crossed.

It will be a reading day for me and I thought I would showcase a bit of my Titanic collection.  I have been somewhat obsessed by the ship since 1962.  My 7th grade social studies teacher, Mr. Berthiume, told us all about the ship.  It was the 50th anniversary of the sinking and his grandmother had had a friend who was on board.  The friend survived but her husband did not. 

Ever since then I have been collecting books and artifacts about the doomed ship.  In 2012, on the 100th anniversary of the sinking, I gave a talk at our historical society.  As part of the talk I gave scripts to three people based on testimony given during the investigation held in New York right after the tragedy.  Molly Brown, a famous survivor from first class, Violet Jessop, a member of the crew, and Anna Turja a third class passenger.  I wanted to put faces to the story, and what a story it is.  For refreshments, I served desserts the passengers in each class had at the last dinner.  Menus still exist so it was fairly easy to re-create the dishes.

When the movie, Titanic, came out in 1997 I went to see it three times!  I have to credit Mr Berthiume with starting this fascination for me.  When he was able to personalize an historical event as he did, I was hooked.  History is not just events and dates but people.  Understand the people and history makes much more sense.