My eldest daughter feels a certain connection to the Titanic. It's not for an extreme fascination with boats and the sea or anything like that, but on the day she was born, one of the headlines read that the wreck of the Titanic had been discovered at the bottom of the Atlantic. Forward to 1991, and Robert Ballard, the oceanographer who discovered the wreck, was invited to HMC to receive the Wright Prize. L was 5 at the time and wrote him a letter asking how the smokestacks came off of the boat when it sank. We went to the dinner and lecture with Ballard and I handed him her letter. He was quite pleased and made the remark along the lines that he loved his fan mail from children.
Two weeks later L received this reply in the mail from Ballard which she has kept all these years. She recently asked me to scan and email her a copy of the letter which I was able to find. She had been thinking about her personal brush with the Titanic since it's 100-year anniversary has been in the news. She also alerted me to Ballard's recent appearance on the Colbert Report.
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