Lydia is 14″ tall and marked 1469 C1OD. I adore her long, lean lines and her exquisite presence. Even though she smokes like a chimney and mutters to herself in an unintelligible combination of French and German between photo shoots.
She’s named after my maternal grandmother’s sister, because the connection between their emigration from Germany, and the Titanic, and the fashions she’ll be dressed in, were all too powerful to ignore.
I was very nearly never born.
On the evening of March 10, 1911, my great grandmother was lying in the infirmary of the S.S. President Lincoln, suffering from extreme sea sickness. My eleven year old grandmother, Olga, was left to mind her younger siblings – Lydia and Oscar. Unfortunately, the tremendous storm rocking the ship caused a young man from First Class to become so ill, he threw himself overboard. His grieving father paid the captain to do the wrong thing – recover the body – instead of steering the ship to calmer seas as quickly as possible.
The storm worsened. The ship began taking on water. And when the pumps meant to get rid of it stopped working, the S.S. President Lincoln foundered.
Just as was portrayed in the Titanic movie, lower class passengers were locked into their rooms. My grandmother recalls the bunk beds – three levels high – and the moment when the water had risen too far to continue sitting on the lower one. They crawled up to the middle one. But the water kept rising. So they moved to the topmost bed, and cowered there together in terror as the water lapped at their dangling feet.
When the band began playing they assumed the worst – that the ship was going down.
Fortunately, this wasn’t the case. The band was playing to celebrate that the pumps had finally been repaired. And on March 11, 1911, the S.S. President Lincoln limped into the harbor in New York.
Almost exactly thirteen months later, on April 14, 1912, The Titanic sunk to the bottom of the same sea, taking most of its steerage class passengers with it. Every time I see the movie, I think of my beautiful Great Aunt Lydia, headstrong and sassy as Rose Dawson herself, and the fashion icon of our family. She lived to be one hundred and one years old, and was still doing her own lawn with a push mower well into her nineties.
Wearing lipstick and perfectly coiffed hair, of course.
I think she would be pleased to be represented by such a stylish, German doll.
To follow along as Lydia’s wardrobe grows, you can find her private page HERE.