Bill Willard – The Titanic

bam this is Bill Willard and you are watching The Break It Down Show yeah is the Titanic so he's a Titanic expert everybody is the Titanic sinking is that the most famous ship syncing or is it something else would you say probably the most famous um it's the one that gets the most notoriety um especially you know if you look at the the Hollywood media the movie came out in 1997 that's you know 20 27 years ago and it's still headlines yeah yeah I no for sure and when you think about that me like what other notable shipwrecks are there The Edmond Fitzgerald has a song so we all know about that and we have uh gosh um the Cyclops very notable but not famous enough you know the Arizona is a sinking that's that's quite famous um several more of the Lucitania started World War I for the all for America at least that got us to join the Allies but you're right the fits what a great song Gordon Lightfoot learned what the Fitzgerald was and very tragic tale but it you know wasn't too long ago it was it was you know within the past 40 50 years and um as long as a boat floats it can sink yeah and a lot of times when a boat sinks it can float but not the Titanic it um it was different Titanic was special it had these watertight compartments all throughout the length of the ship and was designed by Thomas Andrew so that if you got rammed and it punctured a hole it still float because it was not heavy enough to bring the ship down and Andrews even did some calculations if it hit directly on one of those bulkheads and filled two compartment it wouldn't sink it but the iceberg didn't do that the iceberg went down the front of the ship and there was water coming in the first five compartments and that they were not able to handle the pumps were not able to deal with it um and the ship began to lower and once it got down to the Anchor openings the housers um the total opening you'll find this amazing was the size of a refrigerator door I was going to ask yeah that's not very big and you would think a a series of pumps could I mean maybe not manually but with a motor for sure pump all that water out but maybe they weren't equipped in that kind of way they the pumps were not able to keep up with it they they brought in extra pumps from NE near you know the other compartments even and it just wasn't strong enough uh when the housers went under it tripled the amount of water that came in and then the bow dipped under and started pouring into one of the front hatches and at that moment it was just a matter of minutes it was very quick yeah yeah it was one of these tragedies that um they've asked me before on documentaries what caused Titanic to sink and the answer is water filled the ship but what they were trying to get at was was there a decision made by one person and that no this was a a symphony of errors that all happened to occur at the same time that were purely coincidental um nothing not like turning a switch on and leaving it on this was you know if it could go wrong all of these things did at the same time and um yeah it was hard it was very very tragic and a lot of this stuff is just you can't cook up all of the scenarios that you need to have you know like it seems obvious now like hey you should have enough lifeboats for everybody on there but but 50 years before you didn't think about an earthquake knocking down a building and so to not make it out of bricks or hey you have to have a fire escape out of this building or you know a banister made out of metal you know like all these things came from tragedies and they're like hey you know what we got one thing man is resilient about and I don't mean to be callous about about it but if we learn from the tragedies so that it doesn't repeat itself and happen again yeah at least there's hope for us uh it would be nice if we started thinking about these things ahead of time so we didn't have to worry about those type things but but you're right we we correct problems as they happen 20 lifeboats and that was more than it was supposed to have it's supposed to have 16 according to the Board of Trade but then a ship half the size was only supposed to have 16 and you would think if they would have kept going with their requirements that you have enough space for everybody on board did they let's say they had a full complement of boats a spot for everybody and then some would they've even gotten everybody off the ship in time I think it would be very questionable um the amount of time they spent when they ordered the boat away they still didn't get all 20 launched so I don't see how they could have launched 40 uh they may could have floated some off the front and people could have swam to them but I still think the amount of time that the ship went down in it was two hours and 40 minutes um was just too quick it was very quick Lucitania went down in 20 minutes just as a comparable of course it was hit by a torpedo in a main Bay and there was an enormous explosion in Lucy because it hit Munitions that were being illegally shipped we won't yeah yeah we we'll have to take blame for that our country and I think Indie went down faster than that and there was no chance like you know a third of the people survived but a third of them didn't even get off the boat to even have a chance to survive they went down with it that thing went down like a rocket it's it is amazing so when you think about being on a ship modern or otherwise if it's going down fast it doesn't matter how much safety equipment's there it's going to take you with it and it's exactly and you know with Titanic they didn't even have a mustard drill nobody knew what to do and that's why if you go on a cruise in this day and age before you even go to your cabin you go to your mustard station these days this is where you'll report in case of an emergency and you will check in that gives them an account of everybody that they hope they can have an accurate account at least if something were to happen this is a bit of a a kind of out there question but you might actually know the answer so I'm just going to go Ahad and go for it he not trying to sharpshoot but if the Titanic had just survived and just went on and had a regular Shippy life and you know because that easily could have happened what was the next thing that was going to change the industry because there surely another accident that happens but because the Titanic had sank you know it was better prepared to deal with that kind of a tragedy the um next thing in line would have been World War I lucania would have been the been torpedoed would have been the next major Maritime disaster um Titanic would have been like Olympic and Britannic and transported or turned into some kind of a transport vessel to carry people across the British Channel um bratanic was going to recover wounded I believe from the Battle of gal which was a horrific um battle from the Ally our side of it from from the UK side of it um and it hit some mine and it went down also very quickly and they even had the windows open to get fresh air in so it was just you know very quickly uh just so happened there was a lady on board all three of the white star ships uh Violet Jessup was her name she was on Olympic when it was rammed by the hawk now the Hulk was found two days ago she was on Titanic with it sank and then she was on bratanic as a nurse to go and rescue uh the the wounded when bratanic sank and I tell you what if those things that happened to me after the second one after time I would have been landlocked I would have said you know for the birds I'm gonna work in a hospital I'm not gonna be on the ship anymore um but it would have been a troop transport probably uh would it have been torpedoed quite possibly Olympic was declared old and ready for scrap in 1938 and of course they were getting ready to prepare for World War II so that probably would have been Titanic's fade as well right and so would there so I don't know with the sinking of the bratanic have been the thing that changed the Industry Safety standards or was there another accident that would have happened that would have been like oh man we need to have a lot more lifeboats and all the other things I think Lucitania probably would have had more one because branic was empty except for nurses and doctors you know gotcha had no passengers and things like that um I'm sure I'm sure that there probably would have been something else torpedoed if Titanic had not gone down that may would have um caus that ripple effect and did you say they just found the hawk found the hawk within the past few days no kiding I didn't I didn't know that actually so let me back up so when they found the Titanic this for me and I think a lot of people it was such a big deal it's one of the things where I remember where I was when they found this out you know and I was I was a kid I was a kid and I was working at Kentucky Fried Chicken and someone came in and shouted they found the Titanic and I was doing dishes and all of a sudden the water had this real relevance to me and I'm like whoa you know and a couple years before they had had that movie about the Titanic the latest in the chain of them and I was blown away and then something in the news because now that we found it it was like let's get it up let's get it back and they're like it could be made out of gold and it wouldn't be valuable enough to be you know I'm like as a kid I'm like I'd go to that thing every damn day for a week I would just spend all kinds of money because I was fascinated you we were all fascinated by that thing it still draws the fascination there are a lot of schools that teach lessons in third and fourth grade third or fourth grade and Titanic is a part of one of those lessons and I I wish I had a dollar for every school group I've talked to um it's it's so fascinating to watch the eyes do what yours just did like yeah and and you're talking about it and you're sharing it and you start throwing pictures up there and these kids are just in a different world they they the teachers always contact me afterwards and say they talked about you for the next three days I didn't get a chance to teach them anything and they wanted to ask all these questions and so um it is beautiful learning taking place to see the excitement and energy that you even experienced while you were washing dishes yeah no it was it was a neat thing and we didn't think it was possible I mean that was the that was the belief that I had of that time was like no they can't even find it it's too deep and then you know and there was all this space exploration stuff that was going on at the time so maybe thinking back it probably was inevitable but we still don't know where Flight 19 went we still don't know where the Cyclops is I mean there's a lot of stuff that we're like we just don't know where it is because it's a big ocean and it's hard to get down to it it's hard to study forget about like staying down for a long time I mean even in modern times we just last year we had a deep sea vessel you know not Doo too well and I had a personal friend on that one pH worked with us and uh I was out there in '96 as an observer in '98 to raise the big piece which is that conglomeration behind me and I've known pH very well since 98 yeah and that was I talked to him in April before he'd gone out there in June we met down in Orlando for speaker excuse me speaker series and talk for a little while and uh I thought I'd see him again and every real iiz that that was you know the last time was very painful for a lot of people you know and and uh folks are real quick to judge people that don't understand Innovation and there was a lot of critique of of The Craft itself and the controller and all this other stuff I I used to don't do so much anymore but I used to play around in this race car League where we invent our own race cars and everything and we did a lot of our own stuff and it was very Innovative or you might see what someone does you might copy it and you're always thinking of how do I improve this car it's very similar thing to something like a deep sea vessel and you're like why can't we do this thing well there's or even even free diving you know like there's not really a lot of rules there's rules in organizations but they're you're like hey how about if I do this one thing and they're like you know call it the open category and go for it and go do it and so these things we we we don't understand the complexity and the and the expertise that goes into the stuff and some people just want to live at that the bleeding edge the Leading Edge of of a technology of a thing it's not it's not safe to be the first person to climb a 20,000 foot tall mountain you do it because that's what humans do that's the challenge yeah the yeah the Coast Guard's going to be coming out with their report about the Titan and it's going to be the last couple of weeks of September down in Charleston South Carolina and I've been invited to go down and listen to the report in in person yeah don't know if I'll be able to um but I'll be watching it watching the stream yeah um it's difficult when lives are involved yeah for sure did those other people realize what the actual risk was um it's going to be ugly before it gets prettier yeah yeah should we be going down to these places should we be doing this I can speak for Titanic um the French have a have a vessel called natil it is a um Titanium sphere it has been down many times they are extremely safety conscious they have a checklist of items that they go through if any one of them's red there's no dive um I would trust natil a Woods Hole had their Alvin same thing they had a very strong safety presence and uh for items like that um yeah I would go down in something like that um if this device had been unmanned and imploded uh it's like we'd keep right on going and they'd keep try on continuing and they'd make it a little better and they would make a few changes to it just like you did with your race cars you adapt and you make it better and um he this Titan had been down before it had been down safely um it's just that it was accumulative effect I'm speculating as to totally you know from looking without looking at the data but I would I would think it may have been a cumulative effect that it had on the device on the external spherical Parts the but it it was a tragic ending and um you know this it's it's in a position in the middle of the North Atlantic Titanic is to where there's no governing body over it it's international waters so if they want to do something like that they can but I would go down if it was safe enough if if I was convinced of the safety I would I would go down with the French without without worrying yeah yeah yeah it's it's um you the is not forgiving I was going to say earlier it's always trying to kill us you know like yes we adapt to it quite well but you give it a chance it's like I'm going to collect you you know and I look I love water I swim and I don't mind open water at all but I also have a healthy respect for the fact that I am insignificant in that big pool you know and you can be erased that that is a very accurate way of saying it what you just did uh we we are just a little something in this enormously massive yeah substance out there and it doesn't worry about us it doesn't help us or protect us it gives us simple rules and if we follow those rules we should be okay but if you read there's a book called the graveyard of the Atlantic um it's by Dr Lee Spence that talks about three to 400 ships that are off the coasts of the Carolinas and Virginia of those ships went down and there's no record of it also the grand banks have this is parallel to Canada going to New York um it's very short depth it's you know 300 300 meters so it's not a very deep area Grand Banks goes along and then it drops off drastically to where Titanic goes down down to about two miles but there are just numerous records of ships that went sailing and never reported they never went anywhere so they are down on the ocean somewhere it's like you said it's U the sea claims claims its own often really does yeah it really does yeah if we went back to the mid 80s and someone's like you know what I got the cash let's raise that thing is it even possible I mean we to much damage when we were there in 96 and in 98 I've got photographs that and video from inside the ship the supporting members are like parentheses okay because of the collap you put too much stress on those and it's going to collapse for sure um the damage is just too significant um would it be a a able to scoop something and pick it all up in one entity well if we had that kind of Technology maybe but that we don't have anything close to that and it would take much more um than what anybody's ever put into recovering something right we've recovered submarines and we've recovered um I think a fery or two but this is something that's five or six hundred feet long the bow is and it weighs 20 to 30,000 tons empty so you can imagine how heavy it will be with water in it yeah yeah it's crazy and then has anyone gone inside no you can't like I don't I mean you mean a like by themselves but like any kind of like vessel those are all those are all not man though right correct correct the closest humans have been uh they will sit at the top of the grand staircase in a NAU or a mirror the Russians had one two of them called the mirrors and the rovs Venture down from those similar to the movie and those little unmanned items go up and down the hallways uh I've got about 40 hours of footage from 98 and they went into specific cabins and when George tullk was in charge he had a three Expedition plan in ' O2 excuse me 2000 2002 and 2004 where they were going to go down the hallways and look in each of the CL uh listen to me each classroom each of the state rooms and do a Rec Recon order to see are there items that will contribute to the history that can be brought up right and then by the third Expedition um in ' 04 um seek to recover those items because nobody brought their luggage out to the to the rescue to the life right and Charlotte cardesa for instance she had 27 steamer Trunks and she she brought her own bed linens and she had all of her clothes and her mink and everything and the suitcases uh the leases and everything that are made out of leather they use a Lea a material called tannin in the leather the expression Tan Your Hide comes from there right uh we all knew what that meant in the South because we did not want to get our hide tanned but the tannin absorbs into paper and cloth and it preserves those items so if you bring up a suitcase or a Gladstone bag Gladstone bag is what you'd expect a doctor to carry back in the old days but you open a suitcase and the Tannon has helped protect the items that are inside it and uh they've actually recovered newspapers from inside a suitcase that look like they've been in a driveway for about three weeks you know sure got some damage to it but you still can read the original print yeah so Arthur pusan when he was getting ready to go up on the boat deck he had a 10 box that inside of it were in 19 12 terms $300,000 worth of stocks and bonds and commodities and instead of taking that and putting it in his coat he reached over and picked out oranges to stick them in his coat and he was asked why did you get oranges instead of you know your valuables and he said the oranges seemed more valuable at that time yeah so you know you can replace your stocks you just say I've lost those certificates and they'll reissue those but in his room if that p is still secure and if there's a leather C pouch or something in there with it those stocks and bonds may still be readable and still be recoverable yeah yeah we have a person coming to our conference named Julie Williams and um her Uncle Al Alden Caldwell his parents Albert and Sil Sylvia Caldwell he left $100 in gold in his dresser and $100 in 1912 gold just the gold value would be about $4,000 or so now but the fact that it was gold that was on Titanic would probably make it four to six times that yeah it's like that U the whiskey that you know alapon guys shot the holes in the boat so the boat would sink and it goes down to the bottom of the uh you know Lake Michigan it's not great whiskey but the fact that those guys did that it was Al Capone's Bootleggers coming from Canada boy that's that's worth thousands of dollars you know it's like all right it's the name of the place that makes it valuable it really is yeah yeah and when I'm talking about value um I just want to make it I always am very strong to stress this I do not believe in selling the artifacts at auctions because if you take a wonderful piece if you recover this piece off the bottom of the ocean and you sell it at an auction somebody's going to buy it and put it in their room and at on their mantle or in a display case in their house and nobody will ever see it again right I think the value comes in putting it in a museum because this piece has a story to it yeah and that's where the value is is sharing that story for the rest of time so that your grandchildren my grandchildren can go to a museum and go whoa that is so cool look at the story along with it and irreplaceable is there something that's airtight that's locked in there that someday will pop up because it'll just get or something that's Rusty enough that it gives away most everything down there um there are some refrigerator refrigerators that may have been sealed but it's believed that the heavy pressure has collapsed most of them yeah one of the theories I had when I was young I just celebrated 50 years of research on this um second week of July so I'm old I'm old as dirt I admit that but when I was in Middle School I thought wouldn't it be neat if those freezers are intact without water in them because they could bring a freezer up open it up and you got a piece of meat that's been frozen for 120 years by the time they bring it up yeah and so I do know that the champagne that they've brought up some of the bottles have already the cork is gone they don't have any idea where it is you know you shake a bottle good enough and that cork will pop out sure and some because of the pressure the cork has been pushed in um and the champagne's gone but some of them still have the cork intact and I do not drink alcohol never have had anything like that and um I I was asked if the champagne bottle had a a way to sample it would you sample the champagne that was on Titanic and I said you know you know but at those times it was like 45 years I've had 45 years of never having any alcohol but say my first sip of any alcohol was champagne from Titanic yeah I'd had a sip of it yeah yeah easy to go back to the you know that's the only one um but they said that the color is still golden still yellowish it still has a slight bit of effervescence the bubbles but it's heavily salty because the salt has permeated through the cork salt water sure I thought you know that's um it's amazing it is amazing how you know like the ocean in general we just don't know anything about it it's so expensive to explore and the archaeology that we just don't have any access to right how much of the Titanic remains just either unexplorable now without the technology that is required to do it or it's just too dangerous I mean how much have we actually gotten to I'd say 95% still okay pristine down there um there's so much there's so much I had a family member that was on the ship she was uh she did survive uh she was a distant cousin um my family in in the Carolinas did not know that she was related to us it was that distant and I I use this wonderful uh genealogical site called ancestry that everybody has a lot of people have played around with and I took my line back to England to the 1500s and several branches and then I said well I'm going to start her line and because she was unmarried I went followed her father's line only and she was from the same small village that my family came from in Kent England hores M and then I found the common ancestor so right we're like seventh or eighth cousins something Generations back uh but I would love to to go in her cabin and recover her items and they would belong to the recovery company I I would not oh those should go to the family I wouldn't say anything like that yeah but um that would tell her story it would put her picture beside those artifacts and tell about her life and I think what a great way to honor her um to do something like that and and George tullk was good about that he felt that the ship is important but it's the people that made it um incredibly important and U when they would recover a bag he was like what have we found who can tell us something about this in uh 1993 they recovered a bag that had a clarinet in it and it had music and it had cataloges and it was from a man named Howard Irwin Howard survived because the legend is he was Shanghai the night before put on a St a steamer down to Australia and by the time he realized he was on that steamer Titanic had already set sail and he was already on the ocean going down to Australia uh that's the legend uh but one of the things in those bags were Love Letters from his fiance named Pearl shuttle now buddy of mine that lived in Cleveland uh excuse me he lived in Erie Pennsylvania near Cleveland uh was a Yankees fan he was turning over to watch the Yankee ball game and he was not a Titanic person no didn't care about anything about it and all of a sudden he stopped because he heard the name shuttle his last name was shuttle and Dave stopped he sat back and he goes That's My Grandfather's sister Pearl and it's who it was it was Pearl shuttle and he found out about Pearl's letters and he never knew that about his his uh great a and so he calls up the company the next day and goes I'm Dave shuttle those letters are from my great aunt I just can I see them and so we learned about Pearl shuttle we learned about what she did we learned more about Howard Irwin and Henry Su Hall traveling together and it's just an incredible story and it was sitting on the bottom of the ocean for all those years that's a it's an incredible thing I so you know this but I'll tell the audience the other day I was in Seattle and I went to the local Titanic exhibit there and it is it is look the Titanic stuff is neat right like uh there's a I think there's like a door like a press door of some kind and you look at it and you want to touch it and that's kind of cool and there's like a block of ice to give you a sense of how cold everything is but it's it's the spectacles it's the letter it's all of these other things and then you see the person up there and you know it's like wow that's a real person and you're struck by how many you know it's how many businessmen are going I have finally made it I'm going to go back get my family ready I'm gonna come back get back to work and then my family's going to come on the next ship and then he's gone and you're like what does his family do they are they don't survive the wreck because they weren't on the wreck they just survive and they like hey the dude who's like you know had figured it out and he's in America he's dead and and just it's fascinating just the secondary and the tertiary stories people that were lives were you know it just becomes very human when you're in that space and and the exhibit in Las Vegas is also fascinating this won't ruin it for anybody and anybody who's in Vegas should absolutely go it's incredible like you get your at least what I'm me you got your ticket and you're like you're Bob Stevens and you're like I'm Bob Stevens and you kind of go along and then at the end you're like oh I'm a goner and you find out if you a had mine sitting here I moved it yeah yeah given a passenger and at the end there a list of who survived and who did not so right you get to you get to do that there's a perception with the Titanic and I always wonder how true this is and that the steerage folks the third class folks that they were treated um like a lower look they are literally in a lower class but that they were treated in a way that was more dangerous and unfair to them and I don't know if that's true or not I mean if you sit on an airplane everybody kind of just sits in the same place maybe someone's got a bigger seat maybe they get fresh cheese but there's not a whole lot of difference right is it is that perception that a lot of us have that like oh we look we look down on these people and that's why they were treated supp poorly and that's why they died is that fair thir class on Titanic was probably better as good as second class on another ship okay it was a lot of third class ships you had to bring your own food um you paid they called it steerage that was the term for it and they just hurted you in like cattle um but Titanic was different everybody had their own their own bed most of the rooms had running water now they did have one bathtub so if you wanted to take a a bath you would be sharing that bathtub with quite a large number of people so you bathed bird bath is what my mom would have called it you do in the sink and um but their meals were regular they were good meals the food was nice one of the areas that I studied that I've that is my passion is the adou 14 a d d r g o o l e ader 14 they are from County Mayo in Ireland and in 2019 I went over there and I met Tommy canovan Tommy's wonderful man his Uncle Pat died on on the Titanic his grandfather's brother uh excuse me his father's brother Uncle Pat and Pat was one of 14 people from that area that all traveled together uh an ader gou resident who had moved to Chicago was going back and bringing over a bunch of them and these people slept in a bed by themselves for the first time in their life they had running water in their room for the first time in their life um the restrooms you know they didn't have an ous that didn't have a hole in a an area um they had an actual flushing toilet and those kind of things amazed them they would sit down for meals and see foods that they had never had in their life like a banana they had had no idea what they're sitting there going yeah and then when somebody else would open it to eat they would try it also and when they realized oh it's good they would then they would share it so they were to steal the expression they were Kings in que of the world and this was the greatest they had ever lived um to get from their area up to the boat deck there were three boys and the rest were girls the boys would make little cradles with their hands and lift the girls up to the next level and one of the guys up there would help pull them up while the other two did that and they would do that all the way up the boat decks dilia um MC Derman is one of my favorites D's mother gave her as a gift now it was seven pounds to go on Titanic for this steerage 10 bucks in today's but when you're dirt poor in Ireland you save pennies at a time until you get that amount of money and they'd save for two or three years to pay off a little bit at a time until they were all ready to go yeah she had gone out and she had bought her daughter gloves this is deia's mother and she bought her a hat because all ladies in America where hats like you need to have your own hat so they get up on the boat deck and deal you realizes they put her in a Lifeboat and she's sitting there and she realizes her hat is down in her cabin she climbs out to go down to her cabin to go get the Hat now yeah these these Irish ladies are are remarkable she went backwards down you know drop down each level she goes into her cabin she finds the Hat pops it on her head and I don't know how she climbed back up but she made it back up to the boat deck in time to catch the last boat that was out she was the only Titanic passenger Survivor known to be in two different lifeboats W she made it back up and she was one of three to survive now this little village only had 92 people in it at the time and so for them to lose 12 two of them had gone to America and had come back together to get the rest so for them to lose 12 out of 92 that tells you that's a CH for the population everybody was cousins with everybody um if anybody ever goes to County Mayo binar lardone lardone is where the church was where they all were baptized and that's where the the Memorial Park is but a lot of the residents um are related to that group yeah and my favorite building is the one next to the church it's Fosters Pub and funeral parlor oh that's great so yeah Foster pulled double duty in that little village and yeah just great there's and I've just told you one story with his sister was deaf and he was the only one that knew how to use sign language to talk to his sister and she was terrified for him going and he says I'm going to go and then I'm going to send the money back for you just it'll take me about a year but I'm going to send the money back and she was terrified because she couldn't talk well with anybody but Jamie and Jamie and Pat were the two boys that lifted the women up and Jamie didn't survive so there's just hundreds and hundreds of stories and it's that story when Jamie doesn't survive and he was integral in someone else's life you know just like and especially with the dominance of males back then and you know these all do you know how did all these swedes get to England in the first place did they take boats to get down there I mean it's it's crazy how many sweds are on this boat people from um a lot of people from the Scandinavian Peninsula sweds and norns and like that yeah um but there was a channel that that would take them and it would get them down there so they could get on the ship CL veter Holm is a a historian there now and Claus was on the 98 Expedition with us and I last saw Claus in 2019 and um he has researched all of the families and told their stories and I said I want would love to read your book and there's only one problem with it it's in Swedish and I know that word I know that word I know that word that's a name I know that name and that's about all I can read out of it but it's a right fascinating book and he did a great effort to tell those people's stories yeah yeah it's um it's just a it's a ship full of these things you know it's just the the crazy coincidences the people that get on that get off all these different things it's just you never can get enough of it you just you don't get enough we yeah to make it really a tragedy um it could have been worse because Titanic was half full they had a lot of empty rooms if it would have been completely full add another 2,000 to the the casualties yeah so yeah it was there was a strike going on a coal strike so they transferred people to Titanic and and the coal so that they only needed the coal for one ship versus several and um it could have been full right yeah is that Providence I think that's a good way to say it it was it was just a fortunate flute that the maiden voyage was not full right you even some of the other stories Isidor Strauss own Macy's he and his brother own Macy's if you go in the 34th Street entrance in New York there's a plaque to Isidor and Ida stra interesting enough is they both were born on the same day two years apart uh February I think it's February 5th one was born in 1846 or 1848 the two years apart Isidor and his family were down in Atlanta and there was this little Skirmish getting ready to take place in the south against the North and his father realized that because Isidor was from a wealthy family he would probably be made a young officer instead of just an enlisted man yeah so he sort of sent Isidor to Europe for a while to shop to to as a purchasing to buy things so that would kept Isidor from being a southern officer in the Civil War right and when he came back they bought Macy's but they were had the same date not the same year but the same date of their birth and they both passed away on the same day um but even isidor's story James Cameron filmed it but he thought most of America knew it I think so he cut it out of his movie right where the maid steps in and then Mrs Strauss steps in and Isidor doesn't go in because it's the women and children first so his wife climbs back out and joins him I've lived my entire life with you Isador I'm not going to leave you now where you go I go and even though he plead with her please go go go she said our children will understand they will understand and they gave the maid some instructions and um smiled at her arm in- arm and they met uh their end together now if you watch the movie that was represented by the old couple laying in the bed I don't think they would have done that they would have been up on Deck yeah because they did recover one of their bodies but um I think they would have gone up on deck and and and met it that way that's just the type of people they were but even in even the rich people um how how do you deal with situations that you can't change the kobashi Maru to put it an odd way um father biles is one of my heroes Thomas biles was one of the many priests or p and or pastors that were on board and he began to give Absolution on the back deck Cameron portrayed him James Lancaster was the actor that played Thomas biles in Cameron's movie did a fantastic job and he begins to give Absolution if you're Catholic you know they'll be no more tears there'll be no more death right um and things like that and he's holding on while he's doing this uh somebody that survived came by and they began to say the Lord's Prayer and he said this is the steward that heard this is it was in different languages but everybody was saying the same thing and they all said it together and I thought oh man that's about as incredible as it could be is here you're facing the end and you're giving comfort and peace as only a priest or could to those who who you know who worship and who are believers and when I was in County Mayo for the adou memorial service they get to the end and they say we're going to say the The Lord's Prayer and I went oh I got this and they started saying it in Gaelic and I'm going sure and I'm hearing a a a completely different language and I was able to join in with the American the English words yeah you know the pauses are about the same place and uh the guy beside me leans over and says you're doing good lad you're doing good and it was they treated me so wonderfully over there but yeah you know for every Survivor there's a several stories what happened on the ship yeah what did not um we have a conference every year tenic con is what we've started calling it um and what our purpose is is to honor the ship and the passengers and researchers and things like that you were talking earlier when you were at KFC yeah the person who first identifies Titanic is William Lang it's a boiler is his famous quote and Bill Lang was one of our keynote speakers this year and um bill is still bubbly and excited when he talks about seeing that boiler and realizing what it was they saw and he said everybody was like glued to the panels after that point they they wanted to see so much more and it had to be Titanic they knew without a doubt it had to be Titanic but to hear him tell that story over again [Music] um I even was getting it you know I even brought back great memories for me and he went into artifact um Distribution on the ocean floor where pieces are and what where those pieces came from um in extra work he's done since 1985 but what we do is we had uh eight direct descendants that means Sons daughters granddaughters great granddaughters we had a a cousin and we had a niece-in-law a great niece-in-law uh whose husband's grandfather lost two brothers and uh so it's really an honor to hear those people tell their family stories how their families have dealt with it um in 2019 we had nine descendants that were there um but we have a a variety of speakers that tell all sorts of different stories and different sessions about all aspects of it yeah there it is right there thank you and you'll notice there are two tabs one is for 23 for Titanic con 23 it was the 25th anniversary of our team raising the big piece so we went to Las Vegas to honor big piece in the recovery and that was a special moment and then this year we were in Tennessee at a Titanic attraction they have in Pigeon Forge uh we'll change the name of the Facebook group from Titanic con make sure there's two C's in there Titanic Capital Co n and uh it's Titanic con space 24 right now uh but I'll change to Titanic con 25 probably at Christmas um when we book a location and we're ready to start doing planning and booking for this next year anybody is welcome you do not have to be a Titanic expert you do not have to be any knowledge at all um we've had kids as young as nine and 10 that are well behaved those kids sit there and do this fast they get everybody gets their pictures made with them and you know that just makes their day as well but anybody that wants to learn something anybody that's thinks they're a Titanic geek and they can't talk about it to anybody come be a part of our Titanic con family um that's how we you know we welcome you no matter what you know you're going to get a hug from somebody before you leave it's just that kind of thing it's these communities really are special the uh my hometown houses the last survivor from the USS Indianapolis in World War II he's still with Harold Bray yeah he's still the last one he's the only the last one he is the it's Indian it's Indiana no no so so he is in bonisha and he has been attending and they they tend to keep the year reunions when he can make them closer to the West Coast where where he is now but yeah that's that's that's where he's from and he took off basically from valo which is right next door to bonisha the shipyard there and you know they make that speed run out to drop off the parts for the atomic bomb and then they start going north to get back into the fight and then that's it it's like laying on the deck he's one of the guys that was on the deck CU was downstairs and uh it sank so fast his shoes went down you know like he's like I didn't even get my shoes like didn't have time to do anything and that Community because a lot of their kids are still alive even though some of them now have passed on because even they are getting old but it's amazing all the people involved there's a guy named um Colonel no he's Captain Toddy toti and he is a commander used to command the USS Indianapolis submarine and so he sort of owns all of that space because when you're a commander that's just part of your thing you don't get to give things up and when you're given a ship like that or a submarine like that it's there's a there's a special responsibility that goes with that and and I know you understand these things because owning a piece of that Community especially from a leadership standpoint it's not something you just get to walk away from you you see you're part of that thing yeah that's it yeah the um great thing about the IND Indianapolis is most of America didn't know much about the Indianapolis story until Jaws yeah and right you know when Robert Shaw did his little conversation about the Indianapolis the story behind that is very special but people went oh wow so they started investigating this Indianapolis and the reunion started getting people to come to it that wanted to learn more and yeah the survivors be started to have a following yeah we have a fellow in our group that has been an Indianapolis fan his name is Joshua Noble and he's met when he started going I think there were like 14 or 16 survivors and now they're down to the one yeah that's such an incredible story and it even goes into the 1990s because um the captain of the ship the captain of the Indianapolis was ruled guilty of not doing what he was supposed to do but he was pardoned by Bill Clinton I think in the 1990s yeah it that Captain I was telling you about Toddy he was a big part of that and pushing that forward and getting that dealt with this this will blow you away so I'm talking to Harold he's on the show and you know this is that generation so the boat sinks everything else they get rescued and people were dying as they rescued him people that were rescued just like the Titanic they died you know and so that's that's how fast how close they came to losing everybody I mean hours hours a day a tops and then they're all dead right so anyhow um Harold gets rescued and the Davy's like hey uh don't worry about the war thing anymore you know because he was new where do you want to go he's like as far from the water as possible so they sent him to Great Lakes and that that's not ironic that Great Lakes was a training place and it's safe you don't got to go out in the water so he went to Chicago and and work there never told his parents that he was on yeah never told him he's like why would I make a big deal about that so many worse things happen to so many other people and and uh when he said that because I'm a combat guy I got it I'm like yeah you're not going to make a big deal about yourself because you got lucky you survived you're just going to go on about your business right but my friends who aren't combat guys like did you hear that Pete and I'm like what are you talking about yeah because he didn't tell us yeah of course he didn't tell us folks not that big of a deal and they're like no is I'm like oh my God you're right it is a big deal yeah never never told his folks because they're like yeah uh a whole bunch of people died I saw a guy eaten by a shark you think I'm gonna be like I was there no it was horrible skip that part you know I wonder if they knew and never spoke yeah I don't know like if later on you did but you know so many of those guys just clammed up right and did never say anything about anything it's PTSD it really was yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely absolutely yeah and he said he survived and again all this stuff goes together right he survived because he found something floaty and he's like I'm getting away from all these because they were all fighting and trying to they were all trying to live were and then they started going crazy and he's like he had just like a ball with a net on it and he was just like let me get away from you guys and just stay away so he was with the group but not in the main group and so just waited you know and hoped but uh he's like that's one reasons why I got to survive is a lot of guys just you know went crazy because of the proximity of the people you know he was just able to deal with it for whatever reason but distance helped him out I I can't imagine that minute by minute fear because it would build oh it build and they were out on the water for almost a week yeah it was like five days yeah they were out there before the pby spotted them yeah and and yeah I like what Quint says and the the time he was most worried is when they were getting into the plane yeah because he sat there and wondered you know what would happen in the next few minutes yeah and uh I I I just I remember going to the the ocean when Jaws came out and nobody went in past their knees you know everybody went in kneight you know nobody went into their waist nobody was up to High nobody and then you you think about that story and um those men were incredibly courageous to be able to survive that without absolutely losing at all and I love that Robert Shaw tried that thing that scene drunk and he's like no he messed it up he messed it up yeah yeah it's it's an incredible thing and so again like these things go together because you have the people that float on something and they make it did anybody actually float anywhere on something or did everybody who survived from the water did they all get rescued into a regular boat and then taken somewhere to a ship you talking about Titanic now or Indianapolis yeah Titanic yeah Titanic in Titanic they uh were all on the lifeboats they did pull a couple from the water and um one of the ladies that survived that was pulled out of the water was um Abbott Ro Abbott and um the thing that roa's story was that she was on the ship as it was sinking and she was with her two sons Rossmore and Eugene and Rossmore was about 16 and Eugene was younger and they wouldn't let Rossmore get into the Lifeboat and mom's not going to leave a 16year old son and go I love you uh so she stayed with him and Eugene and then as they were trying to get to a Lifeboat a wave of water hit them and the two boys went under and there she couldn't get them she couldn't find them yeah and so they pulled her by actually grabbing her hair and pulling her close and then pulling her into a Lifeboat and of course that is the day she said was the the she never had another happy day in her entire life after that because that's when she lost her two kids they pulled her out of the water that way how do those people even want to stay alive you know like the ones that were just it's horrific I mean I know death was a lot more comfortable and familiar back then but that's just and when did they start to even feel anything and forget about being cold okay yeah that makes you numb and everything but going from I'm in bed asleep happy and then to an hour and a half later your entire family's gone or you don't know where they're at and then you on a ship and you're just like you don't have time to even process it you you can't you just have to make there were two cast members um we had a a conference in 1999 and we brought a Man Out named Bernard Fox Now Our Generation remembers him off of Bewitched he was Dr Bombay's Heroes he was Colonel critton the crazy Brit and one of his last big roles was Winston the pilot in the mummy okay but he put arall Gracie in Cameron's movie and he was in a night to remember as Frederick Fleet but he told me about about a scene that's not in Cameron's movie and this is before they had all these deleted scenes they had made public and I he called it The Gauntlet he had to run the gauntlet and um the person who played the ship's Baker was Liam tuy Liam is a wonderful Storyteller great great young uh person pardon me I hope we can get him to our conference next year but Liam is just awesome and when I mentioned the gauntlet scene he was in it also and so is Yan Lio uh Yan Griffith but they rescu these people they just got on board Carpathia and these men have to walk and there's women all the way down both sides of them that's the gauntlet and the women are crying or angry because these men survived and their husbands did not why did these men survive and Bernard Fox said that was one of the hardest scenes he's ever had to fix film because he's usually happy and jolly and comedic right and he said I was scorned I was ashamed that I survived when other males did not so the look on his face in that one scene and Liam tuy did the same thing Cameron told him one sentence to motivate him and it it hit it was a perfect take but it's the deleted scene and it's the Carpathia deleted scene but it shows them walk through these rows of women have you seen my husband where is my husband why did my husband not survive and things of that nature and um oh man it just knocks the wind out of you every time you see it yeah that's one of many yeah I would love to see and Cameron did something in his movie if you take a stopwatch or a timer or use your cell phone whatever and you start your timer when it strikes the iceberg to the moment it plunges beneath the water it's exactly 2 hours and 43 minutes which is how long the actual ship took to sink wow so he had to cut some of these scenes out in the middle uh in order to keep that time consistent but I would love for him to put in all these cutscenes that he took out and to view them in that order to where he wanted them to be because they tell so much of the story story like the Strauss story that he told and it shows how Fabrizio says goodbye to Helga and it shows more scenes when they wouldn't let little the little girl Clara I think what's her name uh the dancing the little child that was with Jack in third class when they wouldn't let her out of the gates and everybody that's watching those scenes you're going yeah that had a much more emot impact but he needed to show more Jack and Rose on the loveboat I guess that's what we call Jack and Rose on The Love Boat when you uh when you go a CBO I don't know if this always happens and the love boat shows up the actual princess Cru is's white ship and it's in the bay when I was there the last time it blows out in the evening the first few like the first bar of the theme song written by Paul williames by the way it sure was and it's like J so great that's classic I read on I read on social media on Facebook that there is going to be a celebrity cruise that they're booking and oh nice gopher no gopher's past away Fred Grandy yeah but Isaac and several of the others from some of those sitcoms at that time are all going to be guests on the proof so great and you get to you know you get to meet all the famous celebrities while you're on the cruise and of course they're saying you know Isaac's got to get out there and you know and make a cocktail or two and just yeah he's gonna be so famous those people are loving it I'd love to go show with a lot of those famous stars at it yeah just to say thank you for making my growing up so wonderfully meaningful I've got just two quick questions for you before I wrap and I know you we've already been a little bit long but it's just so fascinating uh what are your thoughts on on the reported ship that was right there in the area when Titanic sunk not Carpathia closer the California was nearby um it is it's it was nearby it was the California when we were out there in 96 we did an experiment where someone had Rockets made just like they made them in 1912 and one of the ships took them at a certain distance away like 15 miles and launched them and you could see the Rockets clear as a bell and then they went even farther to 19 or 20 miles away from hours and launched it again and you could see them as clear as a bell so there's no doubt the Rockets they saw were Titanics but this is one of the confusion things that we talked about earlier uh White rockets for one shipping line may have meant we're stopping for the night we're okay whereas white for somebody else may have meant something totally different there was no regulations so okay they're showing Rockets everything's good the one thing he did not do Captain lord of the of the Californian was wake up the wireless operator and make sure they're okay um had he done that he could have navigated his ship back but for them to stoke the boilers would have taken a good half hour you know you got to heat the boilers it's got to build up pressure and steam even if you're working overtime you can only get the temperature up so fast for them to maneuver through ice to get to Titanic would have taken them an hour to an hour and a half about the best they could have done is toss Nets over into the water and people could have jumped in and some could have climbed on board um that might would have happened uh would everyone have been saved it is very doubtful um Stanley Lord was vilified he was you didn't do your due diligence so he Bruce Isme was another one that was vilified they wanted skate goats they wanted people to blame and so when they came out with a night to remember um in 1958 they also came out with a movie in 53 Titanic with Clifton web But A Night to Remember um made the officer of the California made Stanley Lord look really um bad and so he walked into the Union in England and there was a man working there and he says I'm lord of the Californian have you seen this and he throws the paper down that has the advertisement about the movie and he said I did not do this this was not what I did and so they tried to plead Lord's case and say that you know you've portrayed him all wrong so if if you're looking for a scapegoat he's going to be one if you're looking to say you know he did all that he was required to do what else could he have done right he's not going to be a scapegoat nobody's a scapegoat it's just a one in a million thing that happened that one night so the California yeah was a true story now there's supposedly another mystery ship somebody claimed they saw uh that was an a wailer but there is no proof to that they it probably was the Californian um before it drifted a far away or something I don't believe in the mystery ship the Myst okay so it it if you do get back there if they do get back look the next time uh the first responding ship or plane goes out and doesn't ever come back is not going to be the first time you know this this happens fairly regularly where it's already dangerous and you race into an area and then that's it you know it's it's uh you know yeah so you can't go raming into iceburgs you can't go blow up your boilers all these things and yeah it's it's it's a tragedy right and it's going to stay a tragedy and and so many times tragedies are tragic because it's like oh just that close and it would have been different absolutely yeah okay one last thing uh 95% not explored all these things you must have theories on on maybe what we're going to find out like look the ship is in two pieces we didn't used to know that so what is something that you're like you know what I bet and sometime we're going to find this out like what's your pet Theory or Discovery or I think the the the big Discovery Horizon is going to be passenger stories um I think that's going to be the big thing I don't think they're gonna find the ship log it was made of paper I think paper's gone um I don't think that they're going to be able to cover um a lot of the things because it is starting to collapse and they've waited about too long um but I think if it were me and I were in charge of the company I would my first expedition would be uh I'd love to go out there and I'd love to go down one uh passageway and start trying to recover and then go down another passageway and how can we safely recover important objects you know George TK one time said we don't need 10,000 plates there's a lot of plates there we don't need 10,000 of them uh but there's one suitcase right of that particular suitcase and there's one more bag and there's one more V and those are unique items and you know some people use the the graveyard term and leave it alone and things like that yeah I'm I leave just the opposite if we leave it down there it will be destroyed and I would rather those people be remembered and and honored you this was his suitcase or her suitcase and this is her story um I think most people who they've recovered items from those families agree with that they they look look at how they've treated such and such with recovering those ad off salfield they brought up a bag that had perfume vials and nobody knew much about ad off salfi until they found those perfume vials and now they've got those vials in a little container and you can go over and and do this there's a couple little small holes in it and you can smell what that scent was but now we know who he is we know what he did because we found a bag yeah yeah yeah and and it's sort of like Pompei you know except for Pompei is a little more permanent and and like you said it's it's going to be falling apart constantly now it already is right it's already decaying and and because it's been over a hundred years it's crazy that it's so familiar to all of us yet none of us were alive when it happened at all not even close you mentioned Pompei I want to go around the base of the mountain to herculanum herculanum was not the Glorious Pompei but they are finding just as much there and it's not getting the same notoriety yeah I'd love to if you're getting the area visit both I mean don't don't waste OPP but for Titanic there is there is a a rule is put in by judge Jay calic Clark he is the admiralty he was the admiralty court person who ruled over um the ownership and the salver status of Titanic it is in his adaly court that has jur jurisdiction in the early 1990s um I got a phone call from the the group that took over and they said what we're going to do is we're going to cut holes in the side of the ship and we're going to sweep in a big arm and pull everything out and sort through it on the surface and I along with about 12 or 13 of my friends sent next day letters in to judge Clark and the very next day he issued a no bow recovery rule and that was July 28th of 2000 I'm proud to have been a part of that of course so no one can recover from the bow without permission now judge Clark has since retired and even passed away and now Judge Rebecca Beach Smith is in that admiralty chair and she has done an outstanding job um protecting Titanic from the buzzards and the vultures yeah and she is she is uh practical if you if if a project is taken to her that's respectful that's not going to trash the ship that has a a defined purpose uh she will approve it she has the power to allow it and to approve it uh they went a year or two ago right during covid is when they went about recovering the Marcone system which is the system that sent the SOS and the cqd and um the first ruling she made was Define your plan a little better and then bring it back to me and wrote it more a more detailed how we're going to do this and she approved it Noah gets keeps getting involved national graphic they keep thinking that they're in charge and they keep suing and it you know all it does is runs up the the legal expenses they never win uh they were going to sue about the Marone and they just need to realize that they aren't in charge of this one it's not in territorial waters you know they w't said about people recovering at Titanic but they recovered the monitor among other ships you know they they want to be in control and um I wish they'd sort of you know back down because it gets expensive getting lawers to come in and do stuff like that yeah yeah well if we don't bring it up it's G to be destroyed that's a given it's a given yeah how much time do we have we may already have lost access to a lot of those rooms I've not seen the footage they got while they've been out there this this past month um you know they may have lost a lot of access to go down those hallways yeah once once the sides begin to open um if those rivets and the pieces that are holding the the exter ior and the exterior Falls away then you can you know you've got open floor and you can access that way unless it starts cascading downward right and once it starts going downward you have to have something to pull off tons of steel in order to see what was in that room underneath it so that's right it's gonna damage a lot of stuff so we may have yeah we may not have the window that we expect well listen this has been great it's been longer than an hour but I've enjoyed every second of it it's just I had seven more questions that I said I wasn't going to ask you so I'm not gonna I'm G to save them for the next time schedule me for another time and put those in the be glad to oh yeah here's here's my here's my other big question is anything bigger than the big piece ever going to come up off the ocean at this time no yeah I I say at this time because there's are no plans that I've heard of um pH naral who passed away in the Titan in um his goal he wanted to bring up a boiler still okay he wanted to bring up a boiler the boiler is 20 tons 21 or 22 T crazy yeah that that's a big puppy to break to bring up and if you ever see the picture of the boiler with a little human standing in front of it you'll see how big that piece actually is and what you would have to do to conserve that is technically build about a 30 foot deep pool to put it in and uh to Des salinated it's just got to go through the deionized water to take the chlorine um molecules out and it's got to go through it for a long time because it's been down there for a long time and it's very dense material it's got to be hard on it to get it extracted and then elevated I mean that's that two mile climb can't be easy on anything that's 120 years old well that would handle it like the big piece handled it pretty well what they do is they get these lift bags diesel fuel they hook the diesel bags and it just floats up to the top the tough Parts getting it from up there onto the back of a ship you've got to get a ship with a big enough crane that can lift 2 tons and because it's gonna have water in it you know you can drain the water out while you're holding on to it but some of those boilers still may have coal inside of it that burn that night so you pour that out at first yeah um but once you get it and put it up on the deck how do you keep it from Rolling unless you sit it like a hamburger the flat side and it's it's hard all these things are hard like you know picking things up putting things down that are gigantic getting them to stay and yeah and whatever it is right there's all kind of things well listen I I bill this is fantastic I really appreciate it anything you want to see in closing before I roll these final credits I just wanted to thank you for having me on your show as you can tell I'm very passionate about this uh if people want to you know send a message uh send a good message they're welcome to if they want to send some little snide crappy something or other don't send that but um you know it's been an honor thank you for having me yeah thank you hang on and I'll say goodbye to I'll be right back hey thanks for watching the show I really appreciate it right here you can subscribe please do that it makes the show grow hit that notification Bell so you know which incredible guest is coming up next down below is the PayPal link you can put a small subscription in that is an enormous help all that money goes right back into the show and then right up over here are the next episodes you should listen to curated by yours truly thank you so much