706 people survived the sinking of the luxury liner, the Titanic, in April 1912. One of those survivors was a young woman named Maddie. She was a the second, young wife of an older man, a man who put Maddie into one of the sinking ship’s lifeboats and reassured her that he would be on one of the other lifeboats. Don’t worry, he said. I’ll be right behind you, he said. Well, it’s not hard to guess that Maddie’s husband didn’t make it off the ship.
That left the young woman a young widow. And five months pregnant with her first child, technically making the actual number of survivors 707. That baby, a boy born in August of that year in New York City, came into the world with the specter of the doomed Titanic hanging around him. His mom called him Jakey, after his father’s name of John. As he grew up, people looked on Jakey with pity; poor boy, they said, born without a dad. The Titanic baby they said. His mother Maddie, not wanting to be alone, met and married a man less than four years after her first husband had died. That marriage didn’t last, but the man did help to raise Jakey. And, the union did produce a brother for Jakey, another boy, and the two step-brothers remained close all their lives. However, the same year she divorced husband number two, Maddie met and married another man, a young Italian boxer.
Jakey liked the first man her mom married after his dad died, but he loathed the boxer. That guy was not much older than Jakey by the time Maddie married him, and Jakey didn’t understand what his mom saw in him. For his part, the boxer picked on Maddie’s oldest boy, saying that bullying him would toughen him up for what life had in store for him. Poor Jakey! But things got worse.
After managing to leave the home at age 21, Jakey met a woman in 1934 and fell in love with her. But the woman said that the young man was too immature for marriage, and, even though they were engaged, she broke off the relationship. Turns out that her parents had convinced her that he was strange, Jakey was. He was, after all, that guy who had been the Titanic baby. Jakey was heartbroken. So, he decided to get on a ship and go away for a while. When he came back, he quickly found another woman and fell in love with her. This woman was the best friend of his first fiancé, oddly enough. The couple married. They divorced 8 years later. Then, Jakey married another woman in 1944. He divorced her a decade later. That even was then followed by two more marriages. Poor Jakey was cursed in life and love, he felt.
Yet, the four marriages produced two children for him, a boy and a girl. Like his love life, Jakey never really settled on a career, either. And, when he died in 1992 at age 79, of course his obituary mentioned that he was born as that poor Titanic baby. And you may sort of know him already, in fact. You see, in 1953, Warren Kremer and Alfred Harvey, the creators of Harvey Comics, created a character loosely based on Jakey.
I mentioned earlier that Jakey’s father’s name was John, and that was also Jakey’s name; his full name was, of course, John Jacob Astor VI, and he was one of the heirs to the Astor Family fortune. But because of his life of seemingly bad luck, beginning before he was born, he was known all his life as the Poor Little Rich Boy, like the comic book character, Richie Rich.
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