Astounded to learn that Max Schmelling is still alive, I went to this website, where I discovered something even more astounding: Brooke Astor is still with us, aged 102.
Brooke is the widow of Vincent Astor, whose mother, pregnant with Vincent, was helped onto a lifeboat one cold night in the North Atlantic, by Vincent’s father, John Jacob Astor, who, refusing to enter a lifeboat himself until he was certain all the women and children had already been saved, went down with the ship.
That ship? The Titanic.