Worldwide condolences pour out for last U.S. survivor of Titanic

WORCESTER, Mass. -- Lillian Gertrud Asplund lived a quiet life. She held down a job at a life insurance company, never married and had no children. Her only known survivors were two distant cousins.

But condolences poured in from as far away as New Zealand and Argentina when she died at 99. The flower room at the funeral chapel was packed. And complete strangers prayed at her graveside Wednesday as the last American survivor of the sinking of the Titanic was laid to rest.

"I've seen the movies. I've seen all the documentaries," said Giovane Luz, 32, of Leominster, who took time off from his job as an electrician to pay his respects. "Only lucky persons could escape from that accident. I wish I knew her in person."

Asplund died Saturday at her Shrewsbury home.

She was 5 when the Titanic went down in the North Atlantic after hitting an iceberg on April 15, 1912. Her father and three brothers died in the disaster, along with some 1,500 others.

Over the years, she shunned publicity, heeding her mother's admonition that it was not good to talk of the tragedy. On the rare occasion that she spoke to a reporter, she did not want her voice recorded or picture taken.

"It's kind of ironic that in life she was so private and in death she is so public," said Katherine Mangsen, co-owner of the Nordgren Memorial Chapel, where three dozen neighbors, former co-workers and a few fascinated by the Titanic story held a closed-door, 20-minute memorial service.

The chapel issued prayer cards in memory of Asplund. On the front was a picture of a cross floating over the ocean.

At a brief graveside service, the Rev. Jeffrey Newhall said Asplund would have been troubled by such a turnout. "She would have scolded you for bothering," he said.

Two remain

At least two other Titanic survivors are still alive, but they were too young in 1912 to remember what happened. Barbara Joyce West Dainton of Truro, England, was 10 months old, and Elizabeth Gladys "Millvina" Dean of Southampton, England, was 2 months old.

Asplund's mother, Selma, and another brother, Felix, who was 3, also survived the Titanic sinking. Asplund and her brother, who also remained single, bought a home in Shrewsbury and moved their sick mother there. Selma Asplund died on the 52nd anniversary of the sinking in 1964 at age 91. Felix Asplund died in 1983.

Lillian Asplund worked as a clerk for an insurance company in Worcester, retiring in 1971.

Karen Kamuda, a researcher with the Titanic Historical Society, said Asplund would have been perplexed by the attention her death received.

"She'd wonder what it's all about," said Kamuda, who founded the Springfield-based society with her husband in 1963. "She wanted to be private right to the very end."