William Spanhake - Crewman not listed

[Steven Christian]

Actually, I discovered that it is a German surname but not a common one. The German version is spelt with two 'n's ie S-P-A-N-N-H-A-K-E

Yes it is a german surname. But either way it sounds like grandpa was spinner of some good tales. He probably had more. Too his grandsons credit he obviosly picked up on it. As you pointed out, all the people to have claimed to been on the ship who werent you would need a Nimitz class aircraft carrier to haul them. Cheers.

 

[Arun Vajpey]

But either way it sounds like grandpa was spinner of some good tales.

Yes, I'm afraid it was very much an old sailor's yarn as far as William Spanhake was concerned, but in all fairness to his family, my research suggests that they simply accepted his word for it. I have spoken to his grandson Chris Spanhake over the phone and while he admitted that grandpa Bill told him about his "Titanic survival", Chris was not entirely convinced that it was true. I have also communicated with Richard Heppner, the archivist at of the Historical Society of Woodstock, NY (who kindly sent me the attached document) and John McCarthy, whose Facebook page also mentions it. I am still waiting to hear from the Daily Freeman, the editor of which interviewed William Spanhake in 1975. At the time the Daily Freeman article was published, Chris told me that 2 members of THS strongly disagreed with the story

It looks like Bill Spanhake (as he was known) had been claiming to have been a surviving Titanic engineer for many years. In September 1975, Tobie Geertsema, the Editor of what was then the Kingston Daily Freeman, interviewed the 94 year-old William Spanhake at the Ulster County Infirmary. Geertsema wrote an article about that interview which is the attachment below; it would have been poignant if it had not been so laughable. All this talk about "wild dark night with an ice-jammed ocean", how Spanhake 'guided' a lifeboat filled with weeping women and frightened children for 8 hours, "fires raging through coal bunker 8" etc sounds like after a while Spanhake started to believe his own fairy tales. I suspect that it started as a fireside tale to his grandchildren but somehow became public and when he realized that, Old Bill decided to play along.

The Historical Society of Woodstock, NY and John McCarthy at Facebook have now accepted that William Spanhake was never on the Titanic and decided to edit their articles accordingly; I have suggested that they visit ET as Guests and check for themselves if they so wished. I have not yet heard from the Daily Freeman; they might be a tad embarrassed by it because the late Tobie Geertsema had been one of their longest serving journalists who went on to become the editor.

 

[Steven Christian]

Yes, I'm afraid it was very much an old sailor's yarn as far as William Spanhake was concerned, but in all fairness to his family, my research suggests that they simply accepted his word for it. I have spoken to his grandson Chris Spanhake over the phone and while he admitted that grandpa Bill told him about his "Titanic survival", Chris was not entirely convinced that it was true. I have also communicated with Richard Heppner, the archivist at of the Historical Society of Woodstock, NY (who kindly sent me the attached document) and John McCarthy, whose Facebook page also mentions it. I am still waiting to hear from the Daily Freeman, the editor of which interviewed William Spanhake in 1975. At the time the Daily Freeman article was published, Chris told me that 2 members of THS strongly disagreed with the story

It looks like Bill Spanhake (as he was known) had been claiming to have been a surviving Titanic engineer for many years. In September 1975, Tobie Geertsema, the Editor of what was then the Kingston Daily Freeman, interviewed the 94 year-old William Spanhake at the Ulster County Infirmary. Geertsema wrote an article about that interview which is the attachment below; it would have been poignant if it had not been so laughable. All this talk about "wild dark night with an ice-jammed ocean", how Spanhake 'guided' a lifeboat filled with weeping women and frightened children for 8 hours, "fires raging through coal bunker 8" etc sounds like after a while Spanhake started to believe his own fairy tales. I suspect that it started as a fireside tale to his grandchildren but somehow became public and when he realized that, Old Bill decided to play along.

The Historical Society of Woodstock, NY and John McCarthy at Facebook have now accepted that William Spanhake was never on the Titanic and decided to edit their articles accordingly; I have suggested that they visit ET as Guests and check for themselves if they so wished. I have not yet heard from the Daily Freeman; they might be a tad embarrassed by it because the late Tobie Geertsema had been one of their longest serving journalists who went on to become the editor.

Well you certainly put a lot of time and research into this. Kind of reminds me of that navy seal guy that after he retired he exposes fake navy seal/udt guys. I don't blame the family members at all. Especially during that time frame. 99.99999% if they even cared wouldn't know where to check it out anyway. That quite the article. I wish I had done some of those things thats claimed in the article. I'm thinking a little Walter Mitty action here. Or like the quote from Mark Twain. Forget how it exactly goes..."I have a lot of good memories, whether they actually happened or not". Cheers.

 

[Encyclopedia Titanica]

Quick OCR of the article... possibly a few spelling mistakes but probably not as many as in the original!

KINGSTON DAILY FREEMAN, KINGSTON, N.Y, FRIDAY, MAY 9, 1975

Spanhake Recounts Titanic Tragedy ​

By Tobie Geertsema

The room in the Ulster County Infirmary is small and immaculately clean. Dominated by two neatly made hospital beds and several chairs, its big glass windows overlook an asphalt parking lot and a newly mowed lawn dipping downward from Golden Hill.

But when the man who now lives here begins to speak, the small Infirmary room is replaced in the mind of the visitor by a huge luxury liner on its maiden crossing from Southampton; England, New York . . . and the sunny spring day is transformed into a wild dark night of biting cold in an ice- jammed ocean. Nurses’ voices in the hallway outside segue into the sound of ice grating and groaning against the bottoms of lifeboats. The parking lot and lawn are seemingly repossessed by hands reaching out to other hands barely visible in the inky black and frigid water; and the big glass windows melt into the lights of the liner, disappearing row below the water — until the final row is suctioned down-ward into a scream of death.

William F. Spanhake Sr. still alert and sprightly at 94, has often relived that night the Titanic sank. His life today at the County Infirmary is a quiet one, much of it spent sitting with his 79-year-old wife, Minerva, in the solarium. But for eight dark hours in the black of night on April 15, 1912, Bill Spanhake helped guide a shivering boatload of weeping women and frightened children across an ice field, to a rescue ship, after the Titanic — supposedly unsinkable — struck an iceberg and took more than 1,500 people to their deaths in the Atlantic depths.

That was 63 years ago when Bill Spanhake was a young reserve engineer on the Titanic. Born in Pennsylvania Dutch country, he had long since left home "to see the world . . . to learn something." And even before he emerged as one of the 711 survivors of that fateful crossing, the education he had acquired in his world travels meant more to him than any college education.

He had read the works of all the great philosophers; mastered a score of musical instruments; backpacked through Egypt: lived with the Hottentots in Africa; learned the art of wood carving in Bavaria. And in the years after the Titanic, he acquired a dozen trades (among them: mason, butcher, resort hotel waiter, farmer; carpenter); trod the boards as an actor in summer stock; became an artist of recognized painting talent; earned a reputation as one of the finest violin makers and most sought-after carvers of wooden merry-go-round horses.

But in all that rich and fulfilling life; one event has dominated all else. Working the night engine room shift on the Titanic, Spanhake was eating his evening meal an hour or so before midnight when the iceberg tore into the Titanic, leaving her — in Spanhake’s words — “too badly injured with a 75 fool cut not to sink!”

Attempting to return to the engine room, he was forbidden to do so; told to help lower the lifeboats from the first deck down to the promenade deck; “Nobody came out of the engine room alive,” said Spanhake, who would have been there himself if he had not been on meal break. “The bunker on No. 8 was on fire, and fire was raging through the coal bunkers and boilers in the engine room, but no one was allowed to go down to put. them out. We had to wait for the captain to give the orders, and mine were to help lower and man: the lifeboats.”

It was an almost impossible task. Only women and children were being loaded into the lifeboats and, by the hundreds, they refused to go. Brainwashed by the publicity that the Titanic was unsinkable, they felt they'd be safer remaining aboard than risking the waves and ice field.

Spanhake, aided by two other crewmen and a passenger who was a colonel in the U.S. Army, managed to lower and fill several lifeboats — one with as few as 50 people, one with 70.

“People were: drowning around us by the dozens,” he said, “We tried to grab their arms, but it was impossible — they were ice cold and slipped from our grasp. A nurse and two little French boys were in my boat. When one of the boys fell overboard, she tried to help him — and she drowned, too. The other boy was the only child in my boat and, since I knew some: French, I looked after him.”

Bill Spanhake was not impressed with the Hollywood version of the Titanic's sinking he saw or television. "It was the biggest. fake I've ever seen,” he said. ‘Nobody pulled anyone out of the water. It just wasn't humanly possible; And most of the male passengers were not as brave and courageous as they were in, the movie. They were rich men who would have bought their way into the lifeboats if they could. Money they could [sic]. Money has never meant a thing to me... and it didn’t mean anything to the rich that night.”

Shivering in exhaustion, the crowded Titanic lifeboats manoeuvred their way through the ice-choked water in the killing cold for eight hours before the rescue ship Carpathia. picked them up. On the almost four-day trip back to New York, Spanhake — who had been eating in the crew's mess room when the Titanic struck an iceberg — received royal treatment in the Carpathia’s luxury dining’ room.

The agony of the Titanic and the nightmare of the rescue ended Spanhake's seafaring career. He never sailed again. "I" wanted to start a new life,” he said. “I had had enough of the shipping business. I was back home in America to stay and I never went to Europe again.""

He returned to Philadelphia, close to his Pennsylvania Dutch. origin; spent a number of years as a head waiter in major resort hotels in New: Jersey and on Long Island: still recalls with gourmet pleasure the duck served in one — and the pineapple cheesecake for which Brooklyn's Hotel St. George was famous when he worked there.

His zest for life eventually led him into a dozen other trades and into most of the arts. Married for 57 years to the former Minerva Lasher, born in the Lake Hill section of Woodstock and whose family property is now covered by Cooper's Lake, he raised his children in the art colony; became one of the town’s most popular residents.

On his Wittenberg farm, he raised cattle and goats. Throughout the town is the evidence of his mastery of masonry and carpentry, As a fiddler, he has been a perennial Woodstock: entertainer; as an actor, a memorable performer; as a consummate wood carver, he has had few — if any — peers. Some of his carvings were owned by the late Walt Disney, and his life-sized merry-go-round horses ("He gave most of them away,” says his wife — with more pride than chastisement) are highly coveted by those who own them.

That Bill Spanhake has lived life to the hilt is evident. He and his wife were totally self-reliant and fiercely independent in their own home until short weeks ago. They settled into the Infirmary only after he suffered a stroke and she became troubled with recurrent dizziness.

“We're tired now,” he laughs, “and we just want to rest.” And why not? There was no rest in the Atlantic on that grim night in 1912 (he: still feels the Titanic's Captain Smith and his engineers were “entirely to blame for the tragedy). And there was little rest in the many years that followed.

But even at 94 and even in the Infirmary, Bill Spanhake’s: incredible individuality is apparent. Nurses there say he was the life of the party on one recent occasion, singing and dancing with Papa Bear when his band performed for patients. His memory is as clear and detailed now as when he watched the Titanic sink, and he can still talk freely and emotionally.

 

[Arun Vajpey]

Well you certainly put a lot of time and research into this

Not really; I confess that I was lucky. When Amanda Spanhake revived this thread last week after a hiatus of over 20 years, I recalled that the surname was familiar. I soon discovered why; there is a fairly well known and respected children's writer and novelist named Connie Spanhake based in NY state. Now, Spanhake is not exactly a common name and there was this New York state connection. So, on a whim I emailed her through her web page, introducing myself and explaining the situation. Connie Spanhake responded right away and was VERY helpful; it turned out that her husband Roy was William Spanhake's grandson but too young to know anything about his grandfather. So she spoke to Roy's older brother Chris Spanhake who agreed to speak to me and asked Connie to send me his phone number (he cannot type due to a medical condition). I spoke to Chris a few days ago and he too was very co-operative; while he admitted that Grandpa Bill had told him several times about his "Titanic experiences" he was not certain if it was the truth or just a yarn. He was not sure how the story ended-up with the Kingston Daily Freeman but when Tobie Geertsema wrote-up that story in 1975, apparently a couple of THS members expressed their serious misgivings about it for obvious rasons. But the story remained and for the next 47 years William Spanhake continued to be a "Titanic survivor" for a small group of family and friends. Over time it even filtered out into the Social Media and appeared in the Facebook page of John McCarthy, a writer and researcher himself.

As I said, Mr McCarthy and Richard Heppner, the latter an archivist at the Historical Society of Woodstock, NY (where William Spanhake lived most of his adult life), have accepted now that the story was a fake and in time will amend their records accordingly. I am still waiting for a response from the Daily Freeman, as it is now called. Both Connie and Chris Spanhake have asked me to update them with my findings, which I certainly will in a few days time.