By Young Soo Yang
The success of the 1955 publication of A Night to Remember by Walter Lord revived public interest and cultivated a new generation of Titanic devotées. Among them was Robert Bracken, a junior high school student when Lord’s book captured his young imagination. Now a retired teacher in Midland Park, Bracken is an officer of the Titanic International Society, also based in Midland Park.
His interest in Titanic centers on not the steamship itself which was billed as “unsinkable,” but the countless stories of its passengers.
“Titanic is a ship. A ship isn’t history. A ship with people on it and facing disaster is history. … So I’m very interested in the people and how they reacted to this tragedy, how it affected their later lives,” Bracken said.
The RMS Titanic was the most opulent ship ever built at the time. Passengers on the ship reflected this age of opulence, which included some of the wealthiest people in the world, including Macy’s founder Isidor Straus and Washington A. Roebling, a member of Trenton’s leading family.
“The people that had money had so much money they couldn’t have spent it if they wanted to,” Bracken said. “This was before income tax or any way of limiting the money these entrepreneurs were making.”
Bracken’s interest brought him into contact with some of the survivors and their relatives. By the time he joined the Titanic International Society in 1990, most of the survivors had passed away. The last survivor, Millvina Dean, died in England at the age of 97 in 2006.
And the stories they shared with Bracken run the gamut of human experiences — survival, kidnapping and unspeakable tragedy.
On board were some of America’s best professional tennis players. Said Bracken, one player from New Jersey was returning from Europe with his fiancé and her parents. They survived and eventually married. Another player who survived faced grave injury almost immediately when the disaster hit.
“Richard Norris Williams was in the water and the doctors wanted to cut off his legs because of the severe frost bite; they were afraid it would turn into gangrene,” Bracken said. “He refused and the whole time, with help from people, was walking the deck constantly exercising his legs and he ended up to be a world class tennis player in the top three in the United States for many, many years, and was also in the Olympics representing the U.S.”
Bracken had a chance to meet the last French survivor, Michel Navratil, who passed away in 2001 at age 92. Navratil was barely 4 years old when he and his brother traveled on Titanic with their father, who was estranged from their mother at the time. During the Easter holiday, the father essentially kidnapped the boys and boarded Titanic under an assumed name.
“So nobody knew these boys were on the Titanic and survived. He got them into a lifeboat and of course he wasn’t allowed to enter. And they were just young, under 4 years old, and they spoke only French. So they couldn’t tell who they were or anything. So they became the Titanic waifs,” Bracken explained. “And a First Class girl who spoke fluent French kind of took them to her home and was prepared to adopt them if nobody came forth. And finally, the mother in Nice, France saw the pictures in the paper over in Europe and contacted the White Star Line and was finally reunited a month later with her boys.”
But all this attention to the tragedy has not been welcomed by some survivors, especially if they lost loved ones. For one American family, Titanic would become an irreparable wound for the remainder of their lives.
Lillian Asplund, the last American survivor, passed away in 2006. She was a young child when she and her parents and four brothers were returning to the U.S. after a trip to her parents’ native Sweden. Her father had booked passage on the Titanic.
“She and her younger brother were thrown into a lifeboat as it was getting ready to go down. And her mother was frantic because her two youngest children were thrown into this lifeboat. So they threw the mother over into the lifeboat at the end,” Bracken said. “But as it started down, she remembers looking up at the deck and seeing her father and her twin brother and her two other brothers looking down at the rest of the family. And of course they never saw them again.”
So unbearable were the losses that Titanic would become a forbidden topic of discussion for Lillian and her family,
“The mother would never allow it to be discussed. It was never publicized. They never were interviewed. It was a taboo topic. Even after the mother died, she wouldn’t discuss it at all.”
This human drama played out on the high seas continues to cast its spell over legions of people around the world, both young and old.
“The RMS Titanic exhibits — they go all over the world. They’ve had them in China and Japan, India, all over Europe, in South America. They’ve been all over,” Bracken said. “And the interest is huge any place they’ve been.”
Bracken taught middle school for 38 years before retiring five years ago. During his teaching days, he would give a Titanic lecture on the anniversary date of the tragedy. He said the two-hour lecture never failed to enthrall students.
“You could have heard a pin drop. The kids never lost interest. They had a million questions and the projects we gave them to do, related to the Titanic talk, they did it enthusiastically,” Bracken said. “The English teacher always said, ‘My God! This is unbelievable, all the kids did the assignment and turned it in on time.’ That’s unheard of. So it’s high interest with kids and with adults.”
Preserving the story of Titanic and its people for future generations is not only a mission but a shared labor of love for Bracken and the Titanic International Society.
“We got files on all the people that were involved and we try to update them. We look for family members and friends to contact us and we put out a magazine four times a year called Voyage and it has up-to-date info on Titanic, other ships too, but primarily Titanic, and stories written by members and family members and Titanic historians.”
The Society is holding a conference April 27-29 in Secaucus to honor the 100-year anniversary. The three-day event will feature a reception, memorial service and a gala dinner with speakers.