Arthur Rostron, master of the liner Carpathia, stood on his bridge watching a green flare flickering in the darkness ahead.
At first he had hoped it meant the vessel he had driven 58 miles in response to her distress call was still afloat. Now he knew such hopes were in vain.
He carefully maneuvred his vessel around an iceberg to take alongside the lifeboat the flare had come from.
Then the night was suddenly marked by a woman's voice. A desperate, anguished voice cried "The Titanic has gone down with everyone on board!"
That woman was Mahala Douglas of Deephaven.
If anyone had told her the Titanic centered around a Hollywood love story, she would have been appalled.
For Mahala and the other women torn from the men they loved that night, the Titanic was anything but a love story.
Mahala and her husband Walter were native Iowans who had recently moved to the Lake Minnetonka area. Walter built a magnificent mansion in Deephaven, which he named "Walden" in honor of one of his sons.
After Walter's retirement, he took Mahala on a leisurely trip abroad to celebrate it.
They finally started for home on April 10, 1912, when they boarded the Titanic at Cherbourg, France.
Like most passengers, they felt only a slight bump when the Titanic collided with the fateful iceberg.
At first Walter did not consider the emergency to be very serious, but by the time they were on the boat deck by the Titanic's lifeboat No. 2, the grim situation was apparent Mahala begged Walter to come with her.
Walter refused, saying he must be a gentleman. It was at that lifeboat Mahala would last see Walter alive.
The sinking of the Titanic was so distressing for Mahala to watch, it led to her desperate cry to the Carpathia. She eventually calmed down after Officer Joseph Boxhall snapped at her to shut up.
Back home, Mahala sent an affidavit about her experiences to Sen. William Alden Smith, head of the U.S. Senate Titanic inquiry.
Soon thereafter, Walter's body was found floating in the ocean by the corpse-recovery ship Mackay-Bennet.
It became Mahala's sad duty to accompany his body back to their native Iowa for burial.
Ninety-seven years later, their story is nearly forgotten.
The Titanic was a saga thats emotional truth centered not on fairy tale romance but on cold, raw death and destruction. That truth was borne out by stories locked within it, such as that of Walter and Mahala Douglas.
This April 15, forget Hollywood's "Titanic" and instead, remember the likes of this couple and their story.
They and every other person whose story is entwined with that of the Titanic disaster deserve no less.
Richard Krebes, of Long Lake, is a freelance author with a taste for history and maritime subjects.
