Hey, George, Dude. Don't be too hard on Mrs. Rueda.
At the time of Dickie's...accidental... death, the entire family- none of whom had life jackets- was standing in a suffocating cloud of smoke. Mrs. Meissner later remembered that Mrs. Rueda was crying, and asking people to please help her with her children. Benito, the older boy, was also crying, and kept screaming 'I can't breathe.'
Benito was put overboard without a life jacket, and was only saved because he almost immediately drifted into the path of Miss Knight. The life ring was the only option available at the moment, and offered at least a partial chance at success.
Mrs. Rueda drifted with Jospeh and Claire Drummond, who remembered that she cried for her children all morning.
>As an aside, the vultures & gawkers at Asbury Park showed a disgusting amount of crassness. Damn landlubbers. I wonder if any of them realised, or cared, that what they were gawking at was a floating creamatorium with the still smoldering remains of men, women & children.
DUDE!
You're talking to a guy who redecorated his entire living room around a 16 foot Morro Castle oar, one of two which 'walked home' with a Spring Lake resident who went to look at the disaster. EVERY fragment that washed ashore went home with someone. The carnival atmosphere has paid dividends for generations of collectors!
>the vultures & gawkers at Asbury Park showed a disgusting amount of crassness.
Well... hmmmm...my grandparents went. EVERYONE'S grandparents went. Quite a few of the ambulatory survivors who swam ashore, or came ashore by fishing boat, detoured through Asbury Park on their way back to New York or Philadelphia. I don't recall anyone later talking about visiting the ship in terms of good or bad taste...it was just something that everyone did.
On board the ship, that morning, were only a few human remains. On A deck were found the teeth and pelvis of Catherine Cochrane; the teeth, pelvis and a few random bone fragments of Max Berliner; a handful of bones that were once Mrs. Caridad Saenz, and the pelvis of a man who was otherwise entirely cremated which was found in the starboard A deck aft corridor, in front of Mrs. Saenz' cabin.
On the B Deck promenade, starboard, and forward under the bridge, were the burned but not cremated remains of watchman Carl Foersch. He was on the bridge, with Warms, for quite a while at the outset of the fire, but no one recalled later how he ended up dying where he did.
Aft on D Deck were the burned but not cremated remains of Braulio Saenz.
Frank Tosti; Milton Klein; Mrs. Sarah Murphy and an unidentified burned female torso* that washed ashore on day #1, are the other burn fatalities. They all died of burn injuries in the water.
The rest of the 128 victims died of criminal negligence.
*I suspect that the torso was probably a drowning victim who washed ashore at a singularly dramatic moment. How one could be burned so severely that one's head, lower arms and lower legs would be gone, yet still manage to get overboard, escapes me.
One rather shocking item from September 1934, is a faded role of color home movie film which, after some random summer vacation footage, cuts to livid closeups of the faces of the Morro Castle dead laid out in Spring Lake.
