Titanic Survivor Wayzata MN Mrs. John Pillsbury Snyder Talks with Gerald Skelly SR
Gabriel Skelly Gabriel Skelly
768 subscribers
70,732 views
0

 Published On Apr 17, 2012

Titanic Survivor Wayzata MN Mrs . John Pillsbury Snyder Talks with Gerald Skelly SR.

Update on historic information from a viewer below:

She is Nelle Snyder and her late husband was John Pillsbury Snyder, the grandson of John Sargent Pillsbury, founder of the Pillsbury (as in "Doughboy") Company. Her husband inherited one-quarter of his grandfather's fortune. Nelle and John had been married in January 1912 and, obviously, could well afford a 3-month honeymoon in Europe. They had experienced some unpleasant incident (I've never been able to determine what this was) with the captain of the Olympic, which had brought them to Europe. As a result, they were leery of traveling with him again. The first night at dinner on the Titanic, the Snyders looked at their menus, imprinted with the captain's name: Edward J. Smith. Gulp. Same guy. The Titanic still had another port to pause at before heading to the open sea, and the Snyders thought of disembarking to escape their nemesis, but they decided to give the captain another chance. Wrong decision.
Survivors later spoke of the cold public rooms on the Titanic in the hours before the collision (as the ship approached the icefield), so the Snyders and many others went to their respective cabins, which were equipped with electric heaters, to keep warm. There were 7 newly married couples in the Titanic's first class, and the Snyders of Minnesota formed a particular attachment with Mr. and Mrs. D.H. Bishop of Michigan. Nelle said they played table games and "did everything together" during the Titanic's four-day voyage to oblivion. It was honeymooning Mrs. Bishop who was told by a fortune teller in Cairo that she would be in a terrible shipwreck, an earthquake, and finally an auto accident that would result in her death. She was 19 years old at the time, so you can imagine how uproariously funny she thought these predictions were (in four years she'd die of injuries suffered in a car accident in Kalamazoon, Michigan-'--age 23). The Snyders and Bishops were rescued in Lifeboat 7, the first boat to leave the sinking Titanic. At that point, passengers were reluctant to leave the comfort of the ship for a rowboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean---in the middle of the night. So some of the Titanic's officers allowed male passengers to enter the boats in order to encourage their wives and other women to follow the evacuation orders. This was how Mr. Snyder, Mr. Bishop, and many other first-class male passengers were saved. (Later, many of these men were brutally hounded, labeled cowards for saving their lives when women and children died, hate mail for years---but they were completely faultless. There was at least one suicide later among the rescued newlywed men, a prominent New York doctor.) Lifeboat 7 leaked badly, as Mrs. Snyder said, and the men at the oars gave their hats to the women to bail with

show more

Share/Embed