HELPS HIS WIFE TO A PLACE IN THE BOAT.
Mrs. Fred R. Kenyon, of Southington, Conn., was one of the Titanic’s survivors. Her husband went down with the vessel rather than take the place of a woman in a boat. Mrs. Kenyon said that when the call was given for the women to take places near the boat davits, in readiness to be placed in the boats as they were swung off, Mr. Kenyon was by her side. When it came her turn to enter the boat, Mr. Kenyon helped his wife to a place and kissed her good-bye. Mrs. Kenyon said she asked him to come with her, and he replied: “I would not with all those women and children waiting to get off.”
In an instant Mr. Kenyon had stepped back and other women took their places and the boat swung clear and dropped to the water. In the boat Mrs. Kenyon said there were one sailor and three men who had been ordered in because they said they could row.
Mrs. John B. Thayer, whose husband, the second vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, went down with the Titanic, after heroically standing aside to allow his wife’s maid to take his place in the lifeboat, and whose young son, John B. Thayer, Jr., was pulled aboard a lifeboat after being thrown from the giant liner just before she sank, seemed too dazed by what she had gone through to realize the awful enormity of the tragedy when she reached her home at Haverford, Pa.
After reaching the Thayer home Mrs. Thayer was put to bed and the greatest precautions were taken to see that neither she nor young “Jack” Thayer was disturbed. Detectives from the Pennsylvania Railroad, assisted by two members of the Lower Merion police force, guarded the house both front and rear. All callers were told that both Mrs. Thayer and her son were too much overcome by their heart-breaking experience to see any one.