Taps for the Titanic

On April 15, 1912, a small group was standing about a gaping cellar at No. 25 South St., Manhattan, about to lay the cornerstone of the Seamen's Church Institute when newsboys ran past shouting the terrible news that the White Star Liner Titanic, largest ship afloat, had sunk with 1,513 passengers after hitting an iceberg on her maiden voyage. Year later on the same day the completed building was dedicated and the 200-ft. tower atop its 13 floors was named the Titanic Lighthouse Tower. Last week, on the twenty-fifth April 15 since the disaster, while foghorns mooed mournfully in the harbor below, three white-surpliced ministers observed the annual custom of placing a wreath at the foot of the Institute's time-ball on the tower and reading a service to some 200 hatless seamen.

Day prior, 1,000 miles at sea, where the slow Atlantic groundswell sweeps across the edge of the Grand Banks, the Coast Guard cutter Mendota slid to a stop, engines dead, church pennant at masthead, to pay the annual homage of the Ice Patrol to the 1,513 dead who caused its creation. Rolling in the trough of the sea with a bleak grey sky above and the broken hull of the Titanic below, the Mendota lay at rest with her 90 officers & men lining her quarter-deck in full dress while Commander Henry W. Coyle Jr. read the burial service. A rifle squad fired three volleys, and the Mendota steamed away through the spume leaving a lone wreath bobbing on the waves.

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