Titanic Museum

Part of our trip to Branson included a tour of the Titanic Museum. I fully expected this museum to be more commercialized for entertainment than educational, but found it to be a treasure trove of factual information.

The museum simulates the Titanic both outside and inside. The "ship" includes a grand staircase, first and second class accommodations, and a deck, among other things. Interestingly, we were informed that although the real Titanic's staircase was marble, the first-class staterooms featured a newly invented flooring that was even more expensive than marble, and which was affordable only to the rich...linoleum.


The museum tour begins at the boarding area, where staff, dressed in costumes, and speaking in charming English accents, gives each visitor a boarding pass that includes a Titanic passenger name. My assigned name was Lillian Mae Thorpe Minahan, a wealthy first-class passenger, married to a doctor. My husband and mother were also assigned wealthy passenger names. At the end of the tour, we would discover whether or not we had survived. At this point, too, visitors can (for an extra $5) get a recorder for listening to survivor stories and hearing information not contained on museum placards. I think the recorder should be included in the price of the entry ticket, but I do recommend getting it anyway, because it's a definite enhancement to the experience.


Among the museum's hands-on exhibits are a wall of ice, simulating an iceberg, a Marconi telegraph, where visitors can tap out an SOS in Morse Code, a shovel full of coal that visitors can lift to the furnace (which flames up when the shovel is placed near it), a deck that features a night sky of twinkling stars and a cold breeze, and three partial decks, set at varying angles...visitors can try to walk up these and hold on to the rails to get an idea of how passengers felt as the Titanic sank. There is also a pool of water at the temperature of the ocean on that fateful night. Visitors stick a finger in the water and hold it there to see how long they can tolerate the cold before having to withdraw. I was only able to keep my finger in the water for a few seconds. These and other hands-on exhibits help keep the museum interesting to all ages.


There is also a wonderful collection of black and white photos of life aboard the Titanic, taken by a young Jesuit priest, Francis Browne, who was on the ship a couple of days before the disaster, but did not sail with it.

A particularly poignant survivor story revolves around a seven-year-old boy, Douglas Spedden, and his stuffed polar bear, and the story his mother, Daisy wrote about it. To learn more about "Polar the Titanic Bear," go to www.polarthetitanicbear.com. In a tragic twist of fate, Douglas became the first automobile fatality in the state of Maine in 1915, three years after the Titanic sank.

Only one Titanic survivor is living today, though I don't remember her name. I think she was less than a year old when the ship sank, so of course she has no memory of the event. The last American survivor to have memories of the tragedy was Lillian Gertrud Asplund, who was five years old at the time. She died in 2006.

Titanic survivors are listed on a wall of passengers at the end of the museum tour. If you are planning a trip to the Titanic Museum, you might be assigned my passenger's name, so I won't tell you if she was a survivor or not.