But as the truth emerged that the boat was submerged, people at Wittenberg College and others who knew her Springfield roots were fretting and praying for Nellie Becker and her children, Ruth, 14, Marion, 4, and Richard, 2.
The four were returning home from Guntur, India by way of England at the end of the family’s 14-year stay at a United Lutheran Church mission.
The Beckers’ names turned up on the list of Titanic survivors wired from the HMS Carpathia. But Becker’s father, Springfield photographer J.A. Baumgardner, wasn’t at peace until he received a personal telegram from his daughter when she arrived in New York.
The Springfield Daily News interviewed Becker a week after the disaster in the front room of her in-laws’ home in Berrien, Mich. Seated among the children, she gave a detailed account the paper said was occasionally “broken by deep sobs.”
“The collision awakened me,” Becker said.
“There was a little shock ... just sort of a grating sound. I really believed it was the stopping of the engines that aroused me.”
Once awakened, however, “fear filled me, not so much for myself but for my children. I seemed to have a premonition that something was wrong.”
Becker’s fearfulness may have had its roots back in India, according to Wittenberg University history professor Tom Taylor’s account in last April’s edition of “This Month in Wittenberg History.”
An 1896 Wittenberg graduate, Nellie married classmate and Hamma School of Divinity graduate Allen O. Becker in September of 1898 in Springfield’s First Lutheran Church.
“The United Lutheran Church soon posted them to Guntur, India, where three of their four children were born, and where the fourth, Luther, died of tetanus in 1907,” Taylor wrote. “Their elder daughter, Ruth, loved India, but Nellie disliked the heat and the reptiles, and she experienced more than one breakdown.”
“When young Richard fell ill in 1912, doctors advised her to take the children back to the United States,” Taylor wrote.
Having already lost one child in India, she didn’t hesitate.
Her husband, Allen, “suffering from lead poisoning contracted from setting movable type for the mission, stayed behind,” Taylor wrote.
Despite the reasons for their voyage, Nellie Becker did motherly things with her children during a stopover in London. They took in the London Zoo, St. Paul’s Cathedral and Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.
Although eldest child Ruth was excited as they boarded the spanking new Titanic in Southampton, her mother was anxious to be on a ship that had yet to cross the ocean.
Her unease may be why after feeling that bump in the night she asked a steward if all was well. It may also be why she stayed awake after being assured it was.
When she next ventured into the hallway, still in her nightclothes, another steward told her to wake up her children and get on deck, saying, “Don’t take time to dress.”
Taylor notes the Beckers were fortunate to have been in second class, “in which 86 percent of the women and all of the children survived.”
At the time, however, Becker feared all were about to become statistics of another sort.
“I hastily threw blankets around the ... little ones and wrapped a blanket around myself, taking time to put on my shoes and those of the children,” she told the Daily News.
Although “we hurried to the deck,” she said, “there seemed to be little noise and no unusual excitement. ... When the order came to put on the life preservers, I helped my children into them.”
Next, “the order came and found me ready to give my children a chance for life away from the sinking ship. The children were put into one of the boats and carefully tucked in with the blankets wrapped about them. They began to lower the lifeboats and I stepped back.”
Her account doesn’t say whether she thought she’d ever see them again.
“In the confusion, I did not notice just what boat they were in, and before I realized it, some of the men and sailors whisked me into one of the boats and it was lowered.”
Becker said only later did she realize she had been whisked into the same boat as her children — two of them, that is.
Taylor’s research indicates that Becker had sent Ruth to a stateroom to gather blankets. Although they were separated on deck, Becker did see Ruth being put on a lifeboat. Taylor reports that what happened with Ruth’s boat appears in a scene of James Cameron’s movie “Titanic,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
Because crews had difficulty releasing the boat Ruth was in, another lifeboat was almost lowered on top of it. After that was rectified, the Becker party of four took in the unfolding horror from two boats.
First came moments of discomfort.
“During the excitement, we had lost our blankets and had only our night clothing to protect us,” Becker told the Daily News. “Some of the other passengers shared articles of clothing with us. We suffered greatly from the cold.”
However uncomfortable she was, though, in the moments before the ship sank, Nellie noticed what Cameron’s film so clearly depicts: the beauty of the scene.
“It was going down very slowly, not fast at all, and the night was dark, no moon. That boat was just beautiful, all the lights were on ... I thought it was a beautiful night and a terrible sight.”
It was followed by more terrible sounds.
“The most horrible thing, which clings to me yet,” said Becker, were “the shrieks of the dying just after the boat plunged.”
“We could see drowning men all around. Some could not have been very far off. There was no more room in our boat, and helpless as if our hands were tied, we had to sit there and watch men perish.”
Later, the sounds that stirred terror were of ice bumping against the side of the life boats, at times threatening to capsize them.
Finally, the commotion faded.
“We simply sat in the boats and hoped against fate that dawn would come to us,” Becker said.
“Bodies were floating about in the water, with pieces of wreckage here and there. Other than these there was not a thing to indicate where the big ship had gone down.”
“How long the hours were,” Becker said. “They seemed endless as we sat there and shivered.”
They felt, too, the deep chill of grief.
“Women in our boat were crying, men at the oars were sobbing, those that had been hurt in the wild scramble were moaning pitifully and my children were sobbing from fright.
“I gathered them close to me to protect them as much as possible, and we just sat there through the long, dark cold hours of the night, silently praying.”
Even in her desperation, though, Becker found reason to give thanks.
“How often I thought what a blessing it was that (her husband) Mr. Becker was not with us,” she said. “He surely would have been lost.”
Once safe aboard the RMS Carpathia with other Titanic survivors, Becker took account of her material possessions.
“Every coat that I had, together with our entire household effects and curios and articles of rare value which I had been collecting during the 14 years I was in India, went with the Titanic, to the bottom of the ocean.”
But her family had not.
“Little Richard Becker, aged 2, suffered more from exposure than did Mrs. Becker or the other children,” the Daily News said. “He had been in delicate health and is now suffering from a slight cold and from fever. The others are comparatively well and have faces reddened by the wind.”
As though the story needed further drama, the Daily News said the Beckers, “are probably the only entire family saved from the Titanic disaster. This is considered remarkable, as they had no male companion to assist and see that the children were put into the boats.”
“Stories of other Ohio women are harrowing,” it concluded, “but none can compare with that of Mrs. Becker.”
• There is one other Springfield-related footnote to the Titanic story. Burton and Orpha Westcott, whose radical Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home had been built on East High Street five years before, were nearly passengers on the ship.
As was customary for people of their social status, they had been touring Europe. Accounts don’t say whether they were using one of the Westcott automobiles they manufactured in Springfield.
The family story is that the Westcotts’ son John, then 8, came down with a childhood illness. It proved to be nothing serious, but it was enough for the Westcotts to cancel their reservations to be on the Titanic’s only voyage.
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