Brilliantly lit from stem to stern, she looked like a sagging birthday cake.
Events alone rarely provide much guide to the future.
I look for something that is highly unusual, involving ordinary people caught in extraordinary situations.
I loved those ships, and I think the only thing that was more exciting than being on an ocean liner was a sinking ocean liner.
I never earned a dollar that was not somehow through writing.
I suppose the thing that I remember most was my first survivor. Finally, after all that time being fascinated by the subject, after all that reading, all those years in the college library when I should have been doing something else but was reading the hearings, finally, I saw a survivor.
It is indeed an unusual and gratifying experience to have two books on that list.
It would be nice to say the rich people, the fancy people, all behaved like bastards and the poor slobs all came through like heroes. But as a matter of fact, sometimes the poor slobs behave like slobs and the great, noble, privileged characters come off very well, indeed.
It's a funny thing, but today the Titanic is probably much more - that is people are much more aware of it than they were in 1954, when I was doing my research.
Just finding it, and as far as that went, I spent a good part of my life enjoying the study of the ship, ever since I was a little kid.
Someone once told me the one thread that runs through them all is a premium on personal courage - not intellectual courage, but just plain physical courage.
The fastest ships in the world at that time were the Mauretania and Lusitania. The Titanic wasn't made to go that fast. They weren't trying to break the record.
There were exceptions, a couple of families that just plain didn't want to even think about it, although forty years had passed but mostly the people were very interested in talking about it.
You have to study the people and the ones that measure up are not always the ones you expect.
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