[The following is took place during the sinking of the SS Eastland. Context for the disaster, courtesy of Wikipedia: “The SS Eastland was a passenger ship based in Chicago and used for tours. On July 24, 1915, the ship rolled over onto her side while tied to a dock in the Chicago River. A total of 844 passengers and crew were killed in what was the largest loss of life from a single shipwreck on the Great Lakes.”]
Bobbie glanced over her shoulder and saw her mother about a dozen feet away. The sight would stay with the thirteen-year-old for the rest of her life. “I can see my mother holding onto my sister with one hand and onto the boat with the other as if it were yesterday,” Bobbie remembered many years later.
Fallen wreckage lay between Bobbie and her mother and her sobbing sister – most likely a piece of dining room – and the top of Uncle Olaf’s head bobbed in the shadows just beyond the women. The big Norwegian man took a big gulp of air, then dove under the water. A moment later Olaf helped a terrified woman get a hold on the slatted floorboards that had become the wall.
Marianne wanted to know if Bobbie was all right. Bobbie told her mother she was fine, maybe a little bruised, but all right. The threesome treaded water in silence for a moment. They listened to the commotion outside the ship. The frenzied shouts, the alarms, the boat motors revving. And those inscrutable mewling noises coming from somewhere inside the ship.
[…]
Bobbie looked up. A narrow wedge of sky glinted through a gap twenty feet above them, taunting her. Thumping noises vibrated the other side of the bulwark. Were they rescuers or were they coming from below? Were they the last movements of the less fortunate?
Olaf Ness pierced the surface of the water fifteen feet away. Bobbie heard him before she saw him. Then came the sound of a gasping woman. Bobbie watched as Olaf gently helped the hysterical woman onto a broken railing, probably a balustrade, protruding from the sideways floor. “By the end of the day,” marveled a Daily Herald reporter, “Olaf Ness had saved 27 people.”
Source:
Bonansinga, Jay R. “Chapter Eight – Down and Down.” The Sinking of the Eastland: America's Forgotten Tragedy. Citadel Press, 2005. 82-4. Print.
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