At 12:00 noon on April 10, 1912, White Star Line’s passenger ship, RMS Titanic, left the dock at Southampton, England for its maiden voyage to New York City. Before the world’s largest passenger liner made it to the open waters of the North Atlantic Ocean, however, Titanic made two other stops to pick up passengers. The first stop was in Cherbourg, France, where Margaret ‘Molly’ Brown boarded the ship along with John Jacob Astor IV and his wife Madeleine. The following day, on April 11th, Titanic docked at Queenstown, Ireland where 123 passengers boarded the ship. There was no turning back now. A total of 1,316 passengers and 908 crew members were on board the largest man-made object in the world that was headed directly for New York City. But instead of docking at Pier 59 in NYC’s Hudson River on April 17th, Titanic ended up in the headlines of newspapers, in the pages of history books, and on the movie screens.
Fast-forward 114 years later to August 6, 2026. My photographer had spent most of the morning loading our Jeep Grand Cherokee L with all of the essentials needed for a three-week voyage to the Northeastern part of our country, as well as a portion of Canada. The Jeep’s cargo hold was filled with two large pieces of luggage, a toiletry bag, a cooler, a snack tote, two collapsable chairs, a computer briefcase, a large camera bag, Tom’s trusty bobble head repair kit, two large golf umbrellas (which we likely wouldn’t need), and a large collapsable wagon which my photographer planned to use at hotels instead of loading all of their stuff onto rag-tag luggage carts.
While this trip had a countless number of large and small Presidential sites penciled into Tom’s 43-page agenda, my photographer’s itinerary also featured a well-choreographed theme centered around the RMS Titanic. During our scheduled 22-day adventure, my camera guy planned to take his wife, Vicki, and me to a total of 163 gravesites where victims of the Titanic disaster were buried in six different states and two Canadian provinces. Keep in mind, only 337 bodies of the nearly 1,500 people killed after Titanic sunk were ever recovered from the ocean in 1912 – and we were scheduled to visit nearly half of those gravesites.
As an added bonus, the three of us were also going to get two closeup looks at the Titanic itself – or at least a small part of the massive ship.
Our first encounter with the ship will be in Nova Scotia on August 13th. In 1912, immediately after the disaster had unfolded, several pieces of Titanic were found floating in the Atlantic. Those artifacts were salvaged and are now preserved in the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax.
And on August 26th, Tom, Vicki, and I will be at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, Ohio where ‘Titanic – The Artifact Exhibition’ has been open to visitors since May 21, 2026. At that exhibit, we will see roughly 200 artifacts recovered from the ocean floor. Those priceless and somber artifacts include pieces of the ship and passenger belongings that were brought up from the wreck site between 1987 and 2004.
In 1912, Titanic was called ‘The Ship of Dreams’ and was considered by most as “Unsinkable” due to its 16 watertight compartments. My photographer had dubbed our 2026 Summer adventure as ‘The Trip of Dreams’ and boasted his agenda was watertight – Tom said not achieving total success during the trip was “Unthinkable”.
As the three of us boarded the Jeep, I had my concerns – concerns that I’ve never felt just prior to one of our many trips since 2013. The main reason was because Tom seemed overconfident, similar to Titanic’s captain Edward John Smith and the ship’s owner J. Bruce Ismay. An eerie feeling also filled my resin head as well – a feeling I immediately dubbed ‘The Curse of the Titanic’. But at precisely 3:37pm on August 6, 2026, which coincided with the 337 recovered Titanic victims, it was too late to change my plans. We left our home port and were headed for New York and beyond.
On most trips, Tom usually has me confined to steerage; safely stowed away in my padded camera case in the back seat. But for some reason, this voyage started differently – I was treated like a First-Class passenger. That’s right, I was riding up front – sometimes in the camera case, and other times I stood in the Jeep’s cup holder. I won’t lie, it felt like I was the King of the World!
With Vicki behind the wheel and my photographer manning the navigation seat, the three of us headed over the Blue Water Bridge and into Sarnia, Ontario. Once we made it through the first hurdle, which was Canadian Customs, we had 75 miles of open roadway ahead of us before we reached the first destination of our trip – St. Marys Cemetery in St. Marys, Ontario, which was about 20 miles Northeast of London.
During that first leg of the trip, the sky was mostly cloudy with the thermometer hovering in the low 80s and extremely high humidity. Everything was going as planned and my anxiety about a “curse” began to diminish. But that changed as soon as we got within ten miles of the cemetery – the clouds in the sky grew ominous and it began to rain. During my 13 years of traveling, with over 88,000 miles under my belt, rain or inclement weather has very seldom ever been an issue. At that moment, however, I knew in my resin mind I was going to get soaked – and more importantly, Tom’s camera equipment was likely going to get wet as well.
We arrived at St. Marys Cemetery at 5:32pm, and thanks to my photographer’s keen navigational skills, it didn’t take long to locate the gravesite of George E. Graham – a victim in the Titanic disaster in 1912. Tom waited a few minutes after we had arrived and contemplated using one of the umbrellas to protect his equipment from the raindrops. Then suddenly, as quickly as it had begun, the rain stopped – the two of us didn’t waste any time getting to work. Vicki stayed in the Jeep and checked messages on her phone while Tom carried me the short distance from the roadway to Graham’s large granite tombstone.
George Edmond Graham was a 38-year-old sales manager for the Canadian store Eaton’s, and he was based out of Winnipeg in the province of Manitoba where he and his wife Edith had relocated from the Toronto area. In March 1912, Eaton’s sent Graham, along with several other company buyers, to Europe where they visited suppliers and porcelain makers across England, Germany, Belgium, and Austria.
Finished with his portion of the buying trip before his colleagues were done, Graham decided to return to Canada ahead of schedule to reunite with his wife, who was staying with her parents in Harriston, Ontario during her husband’s absence. George purchased a First-Class passenger ticket aboard Titanic, occupying cabin B-42, and boarded the steamship in Southampton bound for New York City on April 10, 1912.
Four days later, on the fateful night of April 14th, Graham dined with four other salesmen in the First-Class Dining Room. At some point during their meal, the five men each autographed the menu, which survived the sinking in the pocket of John Irwin Flynn. At 6 pm on the night of the sinking, George Graham dropped into the wireless room of Titanic and sent his wife a Marconigram which read: “New York Wednesday Morning, Wire Me Sandy Hook. Well.”
Less than six hours later, at 11:40pm, Titanic struck a huge iceberg in the moonless North Atlantic night. Two hours, forty minutes later, the “Unsinkable Titanic” disappeared forever – leaving nearly 1,500 passengers and crew, including George Graham, freezing to death in the 28-degree water. At the time, Mrs. Graham was on a train bound for Toronto, and when she arrived Tuesday morning to hear the news of the sinking, she was relieved to get the telegram as she had no way of knowing it had been sent before the ship went down. In fact, on April 18th, The St. Mary’s Journal reported Graham’s name was thought to be among the list of those saved.
As Edith Graham prepared to leave for New York City to meet her husband, she was officially informed he had been lost in the sinking. Graham’s body was recovered by the CS Mackay-Bennett as victim #147 and brought back to Halifax where George’s remains were forwarded to Toronto on April 30, 1912. Originally interred in a cemetery in Harriston, George Graham was reinterred in St. Marys Cemetery shortly after Edith Graham passed away on January 31, 1960.
As my photographer plucked me off the tombstone and we began the short hike back to the Jeep, a sense of complete sadness filled my resin body. Out of nowhere, the aftermath scene from the 1997 movie Titanic came to life in my mind as I envisioned the hundreds of innocent souls floating in the water, frozen to death and still strapped in their life jackets. One of those people were likely businessman George Graham, one of the 123 First-Class passengers who perished in the disaster.
It was nearly six o’clock when we were back on the road headed towards New York. Even though our reserved hotel was on the Northern outskirts of Buffalo, my photographer insisted we cross the border at Niagara Falls’ Rainbow Bridge rather than using the less congested Lewiston-Queenston Bridge to the North or the Peace Bridge to the South.
Traffic was a non-issue through the usually busy areas around Hamilton and St. Catherines, Ontario, but that all changed when we made it onto the Rainbow Bridge at 8:15pm. Although there were at least a dozen Customs Stations on the New York side of the border, only two of them were open – and that caused a twenty-minute delay getting back into our own country.
Once it was our turn to be interrogated by the agent, my photographer’s wife handed the guy her and Tom’s identification – which were their enhanced drivers’ licenses from Michigan. Seconds later, panic filled the Jeep when the man said to Vicki, “Do you have your birth certificates or passports?”
Immediately, I knew it was the “Titanic Curse” rearing its ugly head, because Tom and Vic had neither and I figured our trip was over before it began. Vicki calmly replied, “We don’t have our birth certificates or passports because we thought our enhanced drivers’ licenses were all we needed to get us through Canadian-U.S. borders. They got us into Canada a few hours ago!”
The guy looked at the I.D.’s again and laughed, “Oh, my bad! These ARE enhanced licenses. Yes, this is all you need. You’re good!” Vicki rolled her eyes, looked at her husband, and whispered, “I guess you don’t have to be a genius to work as a New York Border Agent.”
Crisis diverted, we were back on the road for the last twenty miles of the first day’s journey. After we made a stop for dinner at a Sonics Drive-In where I watched my fat photographer fill his face with a hamburger and a grape cream slushy, we arrived at the LaQuinta Inn near the Buffalo airport at 9:25pm.
While Vicki registered in the lobby, Tom filled the wagon with all of their necessities for the night. Once in our room, my photographer placed me next to the television set where I was left alone with my thoughts as my companions were too tired to watch TV. My camera guy extinguished the room’s lights at 10:15pm.
On April 15, 1912, the last of Titanic’s lights went out at 2:18am, just two minutes before the passenger liner sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic. In my mind, as I stood sentinel in the silence of our room, I could hear the haunting screams of the countless number of people who were dumped into the frigid water – screams for help that never arrived; even though most of the 14 standard lifeboats and six auxiliary lifeboats were less than half full. After about thirty minutes or so, everything went silent.
The silence in our room was only broken by occasional snoring by my two companions – at least for the first four hours. At 2:20am, ironically the same time Titanic sunk, my photographer got out of bed and made his way in the darkness to the bathroom. When he had finished a minute or two later, I heard him open the door as he headed back to bed. Out of nowhere, I heard a thud on the wall which was followed by an “Ouch”, a “Damn It”, and a few choice cuss words. It turned out Tom had sliced his arm open on the hallway light switch and blood was streaming down his forearm. For the next ten minutes or so, my photographer worked to get the blood to stop flowing from the wound. When Vicki was awakened by the commotion, she suggested he cover the cut with a couple of Band-Aids she had packed in the bathroom bag. That idea seemed to work. With another crisis averted, Tom returned to bed and once again the room grew silent.
Was that incident caused by carelessness, clumsiness, or a plain ol’ lack of balance by a half-asleep fat man in the middle of the night? In my opinion, it was likely none of those. I knew without a doubt it was the Curse of the Titanic!
