Augustus Weikman
By: Brendan Massengale

Augustus H. Weikman lived a very fruitful life.  He was born in Philadelphia in1860.  He was also one of the few survivors of the Titanic disaster.

Augustus was sleeping on the Titanic when he heard a strange noise.  He decided to go up on the deck to see what it was.  When he got up there he found a whole bunch of ice just sitting there, and then he saw the cause: they’d struck an iceberg!  He didn’t think much of it because this ship was unsinkable, right? 

So, he carried on with his duty as a 1^st class passenger barber.  Well, he did until Captain Smith came in and told him that the ship was going to sink into the dark depths of the ocean.  He decided he could cut some more hair because Capt. Smith said he had about 2 hrs, but somebody came in and told him to put on a life vest and report to the deck, so he did. 

He helped with the lifeboats, and then mass chaos broke out as women and children boarded the lifeboats. People tried to board lifeboats out of turn, people got drunk, and then of course you had your occasional suicide.  When all the lifeboats were gone he thought he was a goner, and then he thought of strapping some deck chairs together as sort of a raft.  Then he jumped overboard with his makeshift raft, and stayed alive long enough to be picked up by collapsible “A”. 

When they were saved by the Carpathia, he was mistaken for a dead man and thrown into a body bag.  He kept kicking and screaming until someone noticed that he was in fact alive.  Sadly, he died in 1924.

Works Cited

Barber, Mark. "Atlantic City Daily Press." 1 Apr 2008 <http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/documents/weikman_a_article.shtml>.

 Blackwell, Jon. "1912: Going down with the ship." Oct. 25, 1998. 1 Apr 2008 <http://www.capitalcentury.com/1912.html>.

 Mr August H. Weikman." Encyclopedia Titanica. 1 Apr 2008 <http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/biography/2188/>