Is this another sign that times are hard, or a practice in the age-old philosophy that “you can’t take it with you”?
More than 95 years ago, a two-month old baby girl named Millvina Dean was wrapped in a sack and lowered into a lifeboat off the Titanic as it slowly sank into the Atlantic Ocean.
Today, that woman — the last living survivor of the 1912 disaster — is hoping to help pay her nursing home fees by selling artifacts of her rescue. Up for auction is a suitcase given as a gift after their rescue and letters from the Titanic Relief Fund offering her mother one pound, seven shillings and sixpence a week in compensation.
If it’s not sad enough that Dean lost her father in the tragedy — she was rescued along with her mother and two-year-old brother — she can’t even pass her mementos along to her family for keepsakes. She’s got to hock them off to pay bills. Jeez.
This article appears in Oct 14-21, 2008.
