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92-Year-Old Titanic Buff Visits Gould School

Student's great uncle and maritime aficionado shares knowledge from 100-year-old tragedy.

When fourth-grade reading teacher Susan Kappock had students complete an assignment on the search for the Titanic, she noticed one child gave very detailed answers.

After inquiring about student Sajid Quraeshi's interest, Kappock learned his 92-year-old great uncle, Jack Mafcola, has had a lifelong fascination with the ocean and has become an unofficial expert on the sinking of the Titanic 100 years ago.

Mafcola, along with his wife Emily, visited Gould School Tuesday to share with fourth graders the lessons learned from one of history's greatest peacetime maritime disasters.

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"I always loved to go to the docks," Mafcola, who grew up an orphan in New York City, told the students. In a time before anti-terrorism security laws, Mafcola said he was able to freely visit ships entering the harbor.

"It blew my mind, how a big piece of iron could stay atop of the water," he said.  

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Mafcola eventually learned the physics of ship building and parlayed his interest in the ocean by serving first in the Navy during World War II and then with a job in U.S. Customs assigned to the East River in New York.

While working for the Customs office, Mafcola witnessed many refugees from Nazi concentration camps enter the United States. "I saw them turn toward the Statue of Liberty and recite the 'Pledge of Allegiance.' I knew my country had fought a good fight."

Interest in the Titanic

With his attraction to the ocean, Mafcola's interest in the Titanic came naturally.  Over the years, he has read numerous articles and spoken to survivors. 

In 1985 Mafcola said he had the "privilege" of meeting Dr. Robert Ballard, the oceanographer who discovered the wreck of the Titanic. In 1996, the Mafcolas went on an expedition with Ballard to witness divers with the help of robotics recover artifacts from the ocean liner. Students in Kappock's class have read Ballard's book, Finding the Titanic.

Mafcola told these students one of the highlights of the expedition was meeting  survivors who were also guests on the expedition. One 99-year-old survivor was a 16-year-old girl on vacation with her parents when the Titanic sank. She and her mother survived, but her father perished. While on board the expedition ship, divers recovered a pocketwatch belonging to her father.

Another moving moment for Mafcola was when another survivor, Michal Navatril, placed a wreath on his father's grave at the Titanic museum and memorial in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Navatril was four years old and traveling with his father and two-year-old brother when his father died.

Lessons Learned

In addition to describing the events surrounding the sinking of the Titanic and his experiences learning about the disaster, Mafcola spoke to students about some of the mistakes made during the tragedy:

  • Importance of Listening: After the Titanic hit the iceberg and began taking on water, Captain Edward Smith and the ship's builder, Thomas Andrews, determined the ship had one or two hours before sinking. Smith instructed two officers, Edward Murdoch and Charles Lightoller to begin boarding passengers on lifeboats. What Murdoch heard was Woman and Children only on the boats. What Lightoller heard was Woman and Children first.  As a result, some passengers would not even board the lifeboats and several lifeboats on Murdoch's side of the ship were not filled to capacity, resulting in unnecessary deaths.
  • Using Communication effectively: Many cables from other ships had warned of icebergs in the area. However, all cable communication shut down for the night at 11 p.m. The Titanic struck the iceberg at 11:40 pm. Furthermore, another ship, the Californian was five miles away. Without the cable communication, the captain of this ship mistakenly thought distress flares from the Titanic was just the ship having a party.
  • Planning for capacity: The Titanic had 2,223 passengers and crew on board, but only lifeboat capacity for 1,178. Safety regulations at the time had not been updated to account for large ocean liners. After the disaster, these laws were revised.

Mafcola's Experiment

Mafcola also believes another lesson is not all new inventions are helpful. The Titanic was equipped with the latest technology, including watertight compartments, which restricted the water to the front of the ship.

It is Mafcola's theory that if the water had been allowed to distribute throughout the ship, the Titanic may have stayed afloat longer without splitting. This would have allowed more time for rescue ships to retrieve passengers.

Mafcola discussed his theory with Ballard who did agree, but said the ship could have keeled over. To test the theory, Mafcola built model boats, some with water tight compartments and some without. Using his bathtub as the test site, he said many of the boats without watertight compartments did stay afloat longer, but one did keel over.

While Mafcola said he cannot know for sure if his theory is correct, he did know he had to conduct his experiment while his wife was out of the house, or she would have thought he had "really lost it" he joked.

After his talk, Mafcola shared his pictures and answered students' questions read by his brother-in-law and Quraeshi's grandfather, Adrian Kole. 

Quraeshi assisted his grandfather with selecting questions. When asked what he thought of his great uncle's presentation, Quraeshi replied, "I think it was fun and exciting, and everyone enjoyed it."

 

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