Kenosha Man's Account Describes Survival After Sinking Of Lusitania
(CBS) -- 100 years ago this Thursday, the Lusitania was hit with a German torpedo and sank - killing almost 1,200. More than 760 survived, including some with ties to Chicago and the Midwest, as WBBM's Steve Miller reports.
Charles Jeffery wrote his account for the Chicago Daily Tribune, May 9, 1915.
"I was in the smoking room of the Lusitania when the explosion took place. It shook the whole ship..."
Jeffery owned an automobile company in Kenosha.
"I went down with (the ship)," he wrote. "Around me a great number of persons were struggling in the water... I looked around for something to keep me up..."
Jeffery grabbed a tank that floated by and then joined two men who were hanging onto a barrel.
"We had been hanging on for some time," he wrote, "when a man of 75 and a boy of 17 came along on a plank. The boy could not swim..."
Several hours later, a trawler picked them up.
"I am the only person saved from our table of five in the saloon," Jeffery writes.
Two years before the Lusitania went down, Jeffery's favorite daughter died of pneumonia. Before that, he'd lost a son.
Not long after the sinking, Jeffery sold the family's automobile company.
"The Lusitania was, I think, one more tragic event in his life. And he finally said, 'I've got to do something different,'" said Bill Hudson, the great nephew of Charles Jeffery.