Through descendants, vivid tales of Eastland survivors keep memory alive
It was hard to tell if Borghild Aanstad was more excited by her new bonnet or going on Western Electric's annual employee picnic.
On the unseasonably cool and damp Saturday morning of July 24, 1915, the 13-year-old “Bobbie” queued with more than 2,000 others on the Chicago River dock, in line to board the S.S. Eastland.
Once loaded, the steamer was to carry the festive party of Western Electric employees and their families across lower Lake Michigan to Michigan City, Indiana, for a daylong picnic and then back again.
What happened instead would be remembered as one of Chicago's worst tragedies - and the greatest loss of life from a single shipwreck on the Great Lakes. Eight hundred forty-four passengers and crew died when the Eastland, still tied to the dock, rolled over into the river.
For the 101st anniversary of the tragedy, the Eastland Disaster Historical Society invited the Daily Herald to talk with three descendants of Eastland survivors - Barbara Wachholz of Arlington Heights, Colleen Ringel of Des Plaines and Valerie Bower of Westmont - whose ancestors vividly recounted to them the events of that day.
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Up at the crack of dawn and clad in their best dresses and suits, people started boarding the Eastland as early as 6:30 a.m., at the rate of 50 per minute.
Bobbie Aanstad was with her mother, Marianne, her 10-year-old sister, Solveig, and her uncle, Olaf Ness, 26, who was a supervisor at Western Electric.
They boarded the Eastland lugging a picnic basket full of carefully packed goodies. A band was playing on the top deck but the staircases were so crowded the Aanstads and Ness went to a lower deck and found seats together.
Marianne knew something wasn't right almost as soon as she sat down.
“I don't like the feel of this boat,” Marianne told her daughters, shortly after they got settled. She worried there were too many people. And for a big boat there was too much rocking.
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She wasn't the only one who felt that way. Erik Swangren, a Swedish immigrant who crewed on a commercial ship before going to work for Western Electric, also was uneasy. He directed his wife, Emma, to a ladder on one of the middle decks, telling her to hold on, no matter what happened.
What Swangren didn't know was that the Eastland had been susceptible to listing ever since it came off the construction line in 1903. The steamer's center of gravity was too high, and the addition of lifeboats, ordered onto passenger vessels after the Titanic disaster three years earlier, may have contributed to the instability.
Erik and Emma were separated from Emma's parents Bertha and William Selig, and her brothers Edward, 19, and Frank, 26, and Frank's fiancee, Louise Schmidt, 19.
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Most picnickers had no idea anything was amiss, including Gabriella “Ella” Schlentz, her fiance, John Thomas, and his sister, Rose, who got seats on the top deck. They were waiting on Ella's brother, Harry, to arrive; as usual, he overslept.
“The family joke was that Harry was born the day after Christmas and he was late for everything the rest of his life,” said Colleen Ringel, Harry's great-niece.
Until he died in 1963, Harry rarely spoke about Eastland disaster.
Ringel wasn't told the story until she was an adult.
By 7:10 a.m., the Eastland reached its 2,572 passenger capacity. Almost immediately, it started tipping. First, just 10 degrees. Then 12. Then 20. Then 30. Passengers who had rushed over to the port (river) side of the ship were asked to move back. Some did.
When the ship listed to 45 degrees, dishes crashed to the floor and furniture shifted on all the decks. A refrigerator fell forward, crushing two women. A bar collapsed. At 7:28 a.m. the ship rolled completely onto its side, coming to rest on the river bottom, 20 feet down.
Erik and Emma Swangren clung to their ladder. Nearby, a young woman tried to climb a ladder to the top deck, but a man dragged her off to save himself instead.
Erik, outraged, pushed the man aside and thrust the woman back onto the ladder.
People who were above decks jumped into the river. Others froze in terror. Some clung to furniture floating randomly in the dark caverns.
Harry Schlentz arrived just in time to watch the Eastland capsize. He had no idea that as the boat rolled, his sister was smashed underneath a smoke stack. He heard the shrieking as people tried to hold on to whatever they could - another human or a piece of furniture.
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When the ship rolled, chairs plummeted from underneath Olaf, Marianne, Bobbie and Solveig. Water filled the deck. People clawed at each other, trying to reach the surface. Bobbie and Solveig knew how to swim, thanks to their friend, Ernie Carlson, who had taught them on Lake Geneva over a summer vacation. They pushed to the surface. Took deep breaths and looked around. Saw their Uncle Olaf.
Olaf got the girls and their mother secure. Then he swam around the submerged deck, rescuing who he could.
Every few minutes, Olaf would look over his shoulder to check on them. Once he let go of someone's hand to swim to his sister, Marianne, who was being dragged under by an unknown source.
The four of them treaded the cool, greasy water for hours as bodies floated around them. One man, whose head had been sliced open, floated by.
Bobbie grew tired and sore. Years later, she would sit on her granddaughters' beds in Arlington Heights, telling them her only hope in those bleak hours came from the bit of sky she could see through the porthole above, and the movement of frantic rescuers outside.
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The first thing William Selig remembered was waking up in an air pocket, clinging to a stray piece of wood.
For all he knew, the rest of his family was dead. Bodies floated around him. A woman was clinging to him. She was the only other person in their quarters alive.
For one hour, they floated in darkness.
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Erik Swangren saw Emma going under. He grabbed the bun on the top of her head and pulled her up.
From where she clung, Emma saw her brother, Frank, and his fiancee, Louise, reach for each other and drown in the madness. She wouldn't see her mother or her other brother, Edward, until their bodies were recovered.
She and Erik would be among the first rescued, but Erik kept diving for people as long as he could, despite Emma's growing hysteria. He stopped only when authorities threatened him with arrest.
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William Selig and the unknown woman were rescued by workers who cut a hole in the side of the boat. Debris fell and sliced his head. He had to help the woman take her outer clothes off so she could fit through the hole.
Olaf saved nearly 30 people in the time he, Marianne, Bobbie and Solveig waited to be rescued. Rescuers pulled people out individually through the 20-inch port holes or through holes they cut in the boat.
Rescue efforts continued for days and weeks. Bodies were lined up on the dock and dazed families wandered through the rows, looking for relatives.
Among the 844 who died were Edward, Frank and Bertha Selig, Louise Schmidt, and Ella and Rose Schlentz.
“Great-Grandpa Schlentz always said if Ella had known how to swim, she would've survived,” Ringel said.
It changed forever the way her family viewed water.
“It was important to learn how to swim at an early age,” Ringel said. “It was important to learn how to float. We took babies in the water at a really early age because we didn't want them to be afraid of it.”
Among the 1,656 survivors were Bobbie, Solveig and Marianne Aanstad, Olaf Ness, Emma and Erik Swangren, William Selig and John Thomas.
Barbara Wachholz said her grandmother, Bobbie, refused to let her life be defined by the tragedy.
“(Bobbie) never let it ruin her life,” Wachholz said. “A lot of people never stepped foot in water again and would never get in a boat. But she went on cruises.”
Bobbie married in 1922 and had a son. She was widowed in 1965, and a few years later reunited with her childhood friend, Ernie, who she credited with her survival. They married in 1979.
Olaf received a Coroner's Star from the city for his rescue efforts. Solveig never spoke of what happened. She died in 1989.
Emma Swangren was three months pregnant with Valerie Bower's mom when she was rescued from the Eastland.
Bower heard their story when she was teenager.
“I remember having goose bumps, being so shocked and overwhelmed,” Bower said.
John Thomas went to his sister's and fiancee's funerals on back-to-back days at St. Dionysius' Roman Catholic Church in Cicero. Two days after the disaster, Emma, Erik and William were still waiting for their family members' bodies to be pulled up.
H.B. Thayer, president of Western Electric, wrote a public letter to Chicagoans about the tragedy.
“In disaster, there is always a lesson,” he said. “For whom is the lesson? Working people are entitled to their pleasures and to the enjoyment of them in safety. The lesson is not for them.
“The lives of the innocent have been taken and they will have been taken in vain unless the lesson is heeded and hereafter there is safety where for our fellow workers there was death.”