A sorrow from which time has taken much of the piercing pain will come again to a quiet Winston-Salem woman who will look back 25 years to the night when one of the greatest tragedies of the sea left her a widow.

On April 12, 1912 [sic] proudly slicing her way through the Atlantic Ocean on her maiden voyage, with the word of the ship-builders still echoing the belief that she was unsinkable, the Titanic ployed [sic] into an iceberg.

After half a night, in which the confidence in the safety of the ship among the passengers and crew grew gradually into a horrible realisation that she was sinking, the Titanic went down with more than 1500 persons still abroad, and 711 others bobbing about in lifeboats and clinging to wreckage. 

The 711 others were those found by rescue ships and saved from death in the grim and cold ocean.

One of those not saved was a 28 year old North Carolinian, John Burns.

He was superintendent of the ship's laundry, a proud job newly earned. He had been a laundryman between sea trips at Chadbourne, NC

When the tragic news came out of the night by wireless, Mrs Luella Burns, wife of the ship's laundry operator, looks down at two and a half-year-old John Shelton Burns and at her tiny daughter.

She was one of the hundreds of widows around the world mourned that night.

Four years after that night she came to Winston-Salem.
The tiny daughter has grown up.
She is Mrs P.L. Yates of 2020 Charles Street, Winston-Salem.
Mrs Luella Burns, the widow, lives at 124 Liberty Street.
John Shelton Burns is a resident of Greensboro.