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Three young engineers fresh out of Cornell University were running late to the Western Electric company picnic on July 24, 1915. One had overslept, making the trio miss their train and arrive at the Chicago River docks just as their coworkers were boarding the SS Eastland. Redirected to a secondary boat due to overcrowding, they stood on a bridge and watched in horror as the Eastland slowly tilted, then capsized in the shallow water, trapping hundreds inside. Their tardiness had saved their lives.

This remarkable eyewitness account of the Eastland disaster might have been lost forever if not for Jake Fry, who decades later told the story to his friend's son. The friend, Ira Cole, had never spoken of that day to his own family—a silence that mirrored many survivors' responses to trauma. What makes this account particularly valuable is how it captures not just the immediate catastrophe but its aftermath: the desperate rescue attempts continuing into the night, the train ride home with grief-stricken survivors, and the sleepless night that followed.

Both Ira Cole and Jake Fry went on to have distinguished careers in engineering—Cole becoming a pioneering electrical engineer with Lockhead Electronics and Fry developing the relay system for long-distance direct dialing at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Their contributions to technology and their communities illustrate the profound ripple effects of survival. Had they boarded the Eastland that day, not only would they have likely perished along with over 800 others, but their innovations and family legacies would never have existed.

This story, published in Thousand Islands Life magazine in 2011 yet overlooked by many Eastland researchers until now, reminds us how easily historical memory can fade without deliberate preservation.

Too often, disasters like the Eastland are sensationalized, packaged, and sold. But in that process, the real people disappear. Each disaster holds countless individual stories—voices silenced, memories carried forward quietly. Recovering those narratives isn’t just history; it’s resistance against forgetting. What parts of your family’s story are still unspoken, waiting for someone to ask the right questions?

Resources:

• Cole, Rachel. “The Eastland Disaster.” Thousand Islands Life Magazine, 13 Nov. 2011, Note: The comments on the original 2011 article add an interesting layer to this story. They’re worth a look if you’d like to see how the narrative was being shaped at the time.
• Boyer, Dwight. True Tales of the Great Lakes. Chapter 2, “Who Speaks for the Little Feller?”

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