A NIGHT TO REMEMBER – AT 10:01 A.M. ET:  Reader Claude Williams reminds us that this is the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. 

As Mr. Williams writes, "RMS Titanic....hit iceberg at 11:40 p.m., April 14, 1912, sank 2:20 a.m., April 15th, 1912."

Why are we still so fascinated by the Titanic?  I can't give you any profound answers.  The answers are pretty straightforward.  It was a great tragedy, it was so unexpected, it was the result of man's negligence, and it involved victims who were fabulously glamorous, as well as those, housed in the bottom of the ship, who were impoverished.

It also, let's face it, makes a whale of a movie.  And don't underestimate the power of film to keep an event in the public imagination.

The Titanic was, in effect, relaunched by author Walter Lord in his 1955 telling of the story of the sinking, "A Night to Remember," later made into a very successful movie.  It was one of the books, along with Jim Bishop's "The Day Lincoln Was Shot," that began a craze of non-fiction books about events that occurred within one day.  Lord went on to write "Day of Infamy," about Pearl Harbor, and Bishop later wrote "The Day Christ Died." 

"A Night to Remember" was published 43 years after the Titanic disaster.  Walter Lord was able to interview a number of survivors, bringing the event to life.  We note that many of those who shaped "the greatest generation" of Americans, who fought through the Depression and World War II, also remembered the Titanic disaster from their younger years.  When the Titanic went down, Franklin D. Roosevelt was 30.  Dwight D. Eisenhower was in his first year at West Point.  Harry S. Truman was 27.

Of course, we also had the more recent movie, "Titanic," which was an enormous hit.  And the finding of the wreck of the Titanic, and photographing it on the ocean floor, was probably the greatest single factor in keeping the story alive. 

There is a stone representation of the Titanic disaster on the grave of Isidor Straus, of Macy's department store, in Woodlawn Cemetery in New York.  Mr. Straus died in the sinking.  His wife, Ida, famously refused to take a place in a lifeboat, staying at her husband's side.  His body was recovered.  Hers never was. 

April 15,  2011