Please welcome Merida and Gideons Lucky 7 Liter! Merida blessed us with 7 stunning redheads adorned with white splashed chests and toes. Seven famous people who missed the Titanic! The notables who planned to sail on the fateful voyage included a world-famous novelist, a radio pioneer and America’s biggest tycoons. Theodore Dreiser: The novelist, then 40, considered returning from his first European holiday aboard the Titanic; an English publisher talked him out of the plan, persuading the writer that taking another ship would be less expensive.Dreiser was at sea aboard the liner Kroonland when he heard the news. He recalled his reaction the following year in his memoir, A Traveler at Forty: “To think of a ship as immense as the Titanic, new and bright, sinking in endless fathoms of water. And the two thousand passengers routed like rats from their berths only to float helplessly in miles of water, praying and crying!” Guglielmo Marconi:(The Italian inventor, wireless telegraphy pioneer and winner of the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics was offered free passage on Titanic but had taken the Lusitania three days earlier. As his daughter Degna later explained, he had paperwork to do and preferred the public stenographer aboard that vessel.Although Marconi was later grilled by a Senate committee over allegations that his company’s wireless operators had withheld news from the public in order to sell information to the New York Times, he emerged from the disaster as one of its heroes, his invention credited with saving more than 700 lives.Three years later, Marconi would narrowly escape another famous maritime disaster. He was on board the Lusitania in April 1915 on the voyage immediately before it was sunk by a German U-boat in May. Milton Snavely Hershey: The man behind the Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar, Hershey’s Kisses, Hershey’s Syrup, and the Pennsylvania city that bears his name had spent the winter in France and planned to sail home on the Titanic. The Hershey Community Archives has in its collection a $300 check Hershey wrote to the White Star Line in December 1911, believed to be a 10 percent deposit toward his stateroom, according to archivist Tammy L. Hamilton. Fortunately for Hershey, business back home apparently intervened, and he and his wife instead caught a ship that was sailing earlier, the German liner Amerika. The Amerika would earn its own footnote in the disaster, as one of several ships to send the Titanic warnings of ice in its path. J. Pierpont Morgan: The legendary 74-year-old financier, nicknamed the “Napoleon of Wall Street,” had helped create General Electric and U.S. Steel and was credited with almost singlehandedly saving the U.S. banking system during the Panic of 1907.Among his varied business interests was the International Mercantile Marine, the shipping combine that controlled Britain’s White Star Line, owner of the Titanic. Morgan attended the ship’s launching in 1911 and had a personal suite on board with his own private promenade deck and a bath equipped with specially designed cigar holders. He was reportedly booked on the maiden voyage but instead remained at the French resort of Aix to enjoy his morning massages and sulfur baths.“Monetary losses amount to nothing in life,” he told a visiting New York Times reporter days after the sinking. “It is the loss of life that counts. It is that frightful death.” Henry Clay Frick: The Pittsburgh steel baron was a business associate of fellow non-passenger J.P. Morgan. He canceled his passage on the Titanic when his wife sprained her ankle and had to be hospitalized in Italy. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt: The 34-year-old multimillionaire sportsman, an heir to the Vanderbilt shipping and railroad empire, was returning from a trip to Europe and canceled his passage on the Titanic so late that some early newspaper accounts listed him as being on board. Vanderbilt lived on to become one the most celebrated casualties of the Lusitania sinking three years later. John R. Mott: Though perhaps less well known today than the others on our list, Mott was an influential evangelist and longtime YMCA official, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946. He and a colleague were supposedly offered free passage on the Titanic by a White Star Line official interested in their work but declined and instead took the more humble liner Lapland. According to a biography by C. Howard Hopkins, when they reached New York and heard about the disaster, “It is said that the two men looked at each other and one voiced their common thought: ‘The Good Lord must have more work for us to do.’
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 23:33:00 +0000
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