The Last Survivors Remembered

Millvina Dean in 1994 peering through a replica porthole

This blog posting should have been written in 2009, but I was just getting started writing postings and had no idea that this would have been a great entry. The NYT is reprinting certain obituaries of women in celebration of Women's History Month. The obituary that would have been the idea for a posting was published on June 1, 2009.

Years ago I read the following in an edition of USA Today. 

There were but 11 Triple Crown winners in the last century, only three in the last 54 years.  And with Seattle Slew’s passing the other day, all of them are dead.  This we know because living Triple Crown champions are kept track of like ex-presidents and Titanic survivors.

--Mike Lopresti, USA Today, May 21, 2002

Because of that meticulous record keeping it can now be safely announced that the last survivor of the Titanic has passed away at 97. 

How is that possible you might ask. Well, Millvina Dean was 9 weeks old on the fateful evening of April 14, 1912. She was lowered in a mail sack into a life boat and as now passed away at 97 in a nursing home in Southampton, England, where the Titanic sailed from on its maiden voyage. Talk about completing a circle. Her mother and brother, who was 2 years-old, also survived.

We love record keeping. In the same celebratory view of Women's History Month, the NYT is also reprinting the 2001 obituary for the last survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, Rose Freedman. The fire took 146 lives in 1911.

When the Trade Center and surrounding buildings fell on September 11, 2001, I eventually started to think, will there come a day when it will be known when the last survivor of this disaster has passed away?

I was 52 at the time and am myself a survivor of 9/11, coming out of 1 World Trade Center from the 29th floor where I worked. Since it was estimated that there might have been 25,000 who escaped from multiple buildings at the site, my eventual passing will hardly make me the last survivor.

The last survivor will likely come from whoever was in the day care center that was run at what I think was 6 World Trade Center. All people from that building survived, so there were certainly some youngsters that would now be in their early 20s. 

But unless there is a great set of records, is it known who were in all the buildings at the site when the planes crashed into the two towers? Probably not.

We know how many survivors from Pearl Harbor might still be alive. And the Japanese probably know who are the survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their lives are being tracked, and someone will be the last survivor. 

But the Trade Center? The best guess is that in 2090 or so, there will be survivors who will be old enough to be considered to be the last survivors. But who will they be?

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