On the night of April 14, 1912, Ruth Becker, aged 12, woke up to the sound of silence and then a knock at the door.
She heard a steward tell her mother, “We’ve had a little accident. They’re going to fix it, and then we’ll be on our way.”
Ruth described the sinking of the Titanic in a memoir written many years later than April 14, 1912, but relived the event as vividly as the night it happened:
"Rowing away looking at the Titanic, it was a beautiful sight outlined against the starry sky, every port hole and saloon blazing with light. It was impossible to think anything could be wrong with such an enormous ship were it not for the tilt downward towards the bow.”
Ruth remembered tearing up the blankets her mother had sent her back to their cabin to fetch and giving pieces of them to the stokers who were wearing only sleeveless shirts and shorts—they had been working in the coal bunkers and now shivered in the freezing North Atlantic air.
At daybreak on Monday, April 15, 1912, the Carpathia reached the lifeboats from the Titanic and picked up survivors, including the Becker family in Lifeboat 13.
In a 1960 interview in the Benton Harbor News-Palladium, Ruth said “although my boat was one of the last to leave the Titanic, it was one of the first to be picked up by the Carpathia.”
It took Ruth hours to find her mother and brother and sister on the Carpathia, but she finally did. “I never doubted that we would be rescued."
Ruth Becker Blanchard died on Friday, July 6, 1990, at the age of 90.
Her family scattered her ashes at Latitude 41 degrees 41 feet North, Longitude 50 degrees, 14 feet West—directly above the Titanic.
