Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 193, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 August 1915 — WILL NEVER DROWN [ARTICLE]

WILL NEVER DROWN

Sailor Survives Three Big Sea Disasters. Francis Tuohy Still Goes Down to the Sea —Ships Again After Being In Wrecks of Titanic, Lusitania and Empress. New York. —Francis Tuohy of Hyde Park, Mass., dubbed the “man who was born never to be drowned,” because he survived the Titanic, the Empress of Ireland and the Lusitania horrors, is for the present voyage a fireman on the White Star liner Baltic, which arrived here the other day from Liverpool. For 12 years Tuohy was an enlisted man in the United States navy. He was with Admiral Dewey on the Olympia at Manila bay and before that a member of the crew of the U. S. S. Baltimore, under Rear Admiral Schley, when she carried back to his native Sweden the body of Ericsson< the inventor of the Monitor. The man with the charmed life is fifty-two years old. When the Titanic went down he was in the water twenty minutes, clinging to wreckage, before he was picked up. When the Empress of Ireland was sunk by the Storstad in the St. Lawrence he first helped Jower a boat and then jumped overboard. All the boats were swamped, and he was two and a half hours on wreckage in the fog.

“Something hit me over the head,” said Tuohy. “It was an overturned boat. I clung to it until I was picked up. I was just dozing off into my last sleep when I was saved. “When the Lusitania was torpedoed I was on duty in the stokehole. I heard the torpedo strike, and I beat it for the ladder leading to the flddley back. I had had some little experience. “Hand over hand I climbed a smoke stack stay. There was no back draft: there was no blowup. The water was a little bit hot as she sank. “Again in a total wreck, a ship having sunk beneath me, I picked up another piece of wreckage and floated three and one-half hours before I was found and taken into a boat. “Next I shipped on the Mauretania at double wages for a trip to the Dardanelles with 7,000 British soldiers. After I came back I shipped on the Baltic, and I guess I am safe now.”