"Nearer My God to Thee"

[Eamonn]

I'm not what might be called "Into" The Titanic.

I haven't followed the exploration of the site where it went down and of course I feel for the great loss of life.

As a young man I got to know Bill Cook.

Bill was a real character. He worked full time for the Scout Association as a Camp Warden in Surrey England.

Bill was short, maybe about 5'-4".

He had a nose like Bill Clinton and when he spoke he nodded his head.

He really liked to talk. In fact at times I tried very hard to avoid him. If I had a key or something that needed to be returned I'd give it to a Scout. Because I knew if Bill caught me, I'd be stuck with him for the next half hour.

This might sound like I wasn't being very kind. But the truth is that I really liked Bill.

I often thought and looked for reasons why he wanted to talk so much?

In the end all I came up with was the fact that he was stuck in this camp site for long periods of time with no one to talk with.

Before working for the Scouts Bill had been in the Royal Navy,he'd been a Signal Officer on submarines.

He was really fascinated with the sinking of The Titanic.

One of Bill's hero's was the Bandmaster.

Fact or fiction Bill really held the belief that the band kept playing as the big ship went down and it played Nearer My God to Thee.

The Catholic church I attend has never had this hymn on the list on any day that I've been at church.

I lost contact will Bill a good number of years back.

He really knew his way around spars and rope, he gave me a wonderful understanding of pioneering.

I don't think of him very often, but this weekend with the media covering 100 year of the sinking. Bill came to my mind.

Strange how I do miss him, I learned a lot from him and given half a chance I'd be more than happy to drop that key off one last time and listen to him one last time.

Of course that's never going to happen as Bill really is nearer to his God.

I have no idea what goes on up in Heaven and even less of an idea if they will let me in. But if they do Bill and I are going to build the biggest bridge ever.

Eamonn.

[SeattlePioneer]

It was sad when the great ship went down!

[Tampa Turtle]

When I was a young boy I took Art classes one Summer at the local rec center in Hollywood Florida. This was back in the 1970's. The Art teacher there was locally known for being a Titanic survivor. She was very young when it happened and remembered very little. Her parents did not survive and she was brought up in an orphanage. She had a collection of articles and copies of the paperwork. She was always happy to discuss it except she was always sad about losing her family. It made quite an impression and I read Lord's "A Night to Remember" that year. Made me realize that reading about disasters, while quite an exciting subject (used to be a quite popular youth category for boys) involved real people and personal tragedy.

 

So I had a little tenuous thread from me to the event.

 

 

 

[Deaf Scouter]

It is amazing how events, words, an article and etc. can trigger memories of a person. There are some that we avoided because we thought them nuisance then but don't realize to years later the 'real' gift they had... *reminiscing smile

 

I'm sure many of us have one, two or three of those kinds of memories. To this day mine is that fellow deaf classmate who copied everything I did including moving her desk back and forth every time I moved mine to get away from her in my limit space. Looking back it was jealousy on her part yet now Facebook shows my jealousy of her when I see how well she's done when compared to myself... *smiles