HILDO: Try to find a copy of Hal Burton's Morro Castle: Tragedy At Sea. Though not without errors, it is by far the best of the lot. Last time I checked, Bibliofind.com had a fairly impressive collection.
CHILDREN ON BOARD: Harder to trace than the Stewardess question, for on the list the boys were referred to as "Master" while the girls were listed as "Miss" regardless of age making it hard to separate the minors from the unmarried women aboard. However, a partial list: Mervin G. Bregstein (drowned- father survived);John and Ruben Holden (father survived, mother drowned);Raymond Lione (drowned, along with his father. Mother and younger brother survived); Robert Lione; Dickie Rueda (drowned. Mother and younger brother saved); Benito Rueda; Braulio Saenz (fatally burned along with his mother. Two sisters drowned); Caina Saenz (drowned after being seriously burned); Marta Saenz; Arthur Sheridan (drowned. Mother saved).
SARAH KIRBY: Is listed twice on the Morero Castle roster. Once as a stewardess and once as a passenger from Brooklyn NY. There are several such errors on the list. So now I am not sure if she was an elderly stewardess; a passenger accidentally listed amongst the crew as a stewardess, or if there were two people abpoard with the decidedly uncommon name of Sara Kirby.
Michael: So, it was Shipwreck! Didn't Shipwreck also have lurid descriptions of passengers being felled by large shards of glass and emerging from burning corridors as fireballs? ( I had the imnpression that Shipwreck was written with one eye on the screenplay market) Which raises a question- how many passengers DID die aboard the ship? Most sources list four (Margaret and Braulio Saenz; Monroe Berliner, and Catherine Cochrane) although the final published list of the dead also includes Mrs Frances Murphy of Germantown PA as one of those fatally burned; a surprisingly low total considering how fast the fire spread and some of the other factors involved such as the late hour and the alleged drunkenness of many of the passengers.
Also, was the error of which you spoke (still in Shipwreck) the one in which they refer throughout the text to Charles and Selma Widder who were, in fact, Charles and Selma Filster?
PASSENGERS AND BIRDS: In addition to the non-death of Ella Jacoby, as I recall there was also a crew member who claimed to have released a bird early on in the fire (described at length in one of the books) AND an account of George Rogers rescuing yet another caged bird from the crew's quarters. It seems as if an AWFUL lot of time and risk was taken to rescue the avian segment of the ship's complement.
