tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407624264627208128.post4006010874417952009..comments2024-01-26T21:38:25.924-08:00Comments on Duane's PoeTree: Timothy Spearman writesDuanesPoeTreehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17053093400086634552noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407624264627208128.post-52489410668402144592016-03-29T07:38:36.752-07:002016-03-29T07:38:36.752-07:00John Jacob "Jack" Astor IV was a member ...John Jacob "Jack" Astor IV was a member of a prominent American family and one of the world's richest people, with a net worth of nearly $87 million at his death ($2.13 billion in 2015 terms). His sister Helen was married to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's half-brother. The author of "A Journey in Other Worlds," a novel about life on Saturn and Jupiter in 2000, he also patented a bicycle brake, a "vibratory disintegrator" used to produce gas from peat moss, and a pneumatic road-improver, and he helped develop a turbine engine. In 1897, he built the Astoria, "the world's most luxurious hotel," next to the Waldorf (owned by Astor's cousin and rival, William Astor); the complex became New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. He undertook a scandalous divorce in order to marry 18-year-old socialite Madeleine Talmage Force, 29 years his junior, and the couple took an extended honeymoon in Europe and Egypt to wait for the gossip to calm down. When Madeleine became pregnant, they decided their child should be born in the US and boarded the largest ship afloat at the time, the "unsinkable" RMS Titanic, on her maiden voyage to New York. On 14 April 1912, four days into the crossing and about 375 miles (600 km) south of Newfoundland, she hit an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. ship's time and sank during the early hours of April 15; 1,514 people on board did not survive, making this one of the deadliest commercial peacetime maritime disasters in modern history. Astor helped his wife, her maid, and her nurse into a lifeboat and asked if he might join his wife because she was in "a delicate condition," but the officer in charge of the evacuation told him men were not allowed to board until all the women and children had been loaded. Astor's prominence led to the creation of many unsubstantiated accounts about his actions. One of the survivors claimed that Astor was boarding the lifeboat when he saw two children on deck and stepped aside to give them his place; according to a newspaper report, he ordered a woman and her 17-year-old daughter to take the last two places. He was said to have placed a woman's hat on a boy to make sure he was able to get into a lifeboat, and that he opened the ship's kennel to release the dogs. He supposedly quipped,"I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous." He was last seen on the starboard bridge wing, smoking a cigarette a half hour before the ship sank, although one witness claimed Astor was in the water clinging to a raft but released his hold when his feet became frozen. Coincidentally, the Waldorf-Astoria became the host location for the American inquiries into the ship's sinking. Astor's corpse was among the 333 bodies recovered. Four months later Madeleine Astor gave birth to a son.DuanesPoeTreehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17053093400086634552noreply@blogger.com