Whitehall Man's Poster Advertises A Trip That Never Was: The Titanic's Return Voyage

September 15, 1985|by FRANK WHELAN, The Morning Call

Louis Yuhasz of Whitehall admits that he has no personal memory of the sinking of the Titanic. "I was born in 1911," he says, "and so was a little too young to remember it."

But for Yuhasz, the Titanic is in one sense a part of his life. Thanks to his late in-laws, he is today the owner of a rare piece of Titanic memorabilia, a poster advertising third-class passage for the return voyage of the Titanic to Europe - a voyage that never was.

As Yuhasz tells it, his wife's family, Joseph and Julia Fabian, came from Hungary to the United States sometime around the turn of the century. Although they settled in Northampton County, says Yuhasz, they never forgot Hungary and hoped to go back there someday. Naturally, they kept in touch with the local representatives of the steamship lines. Among them, Yuhasz speculates, was the agent for the White Star Line, owners of the Titanic.

Although it may seem strange today, it was not out of the ordinary at the turn of the century for an agent of the White Star Line to be in Northampton County. If the Astors and the Vanderbilts were the cream of trans-Atlantic traffic, people like the Fabians were its meat and potatoes. It was with the average folk that the real profits were made.

If the prices on Louis Yuhasz's poster seem incredible - $36 to London and $45 to Hamburg - we have to remember that wages were a lot lower then. In 1912, laborers at Bethlehem Steel were working 16-hour days for 12 1/2 cents an hour. Therefore, even a $35 ticket was a little out of working people's price range, but many saved for years just to have money to someday return home and tell the folks in the old country about life in America.

As Yuhasz's poster shows, third-class accommodations on the Titanic were hardly deluxe. Four small bunks barely larger than cots were located next to a flush toilet. Food was served in a large dining room and the selection was limited. Yet as crude as things were, they were a vast improvement over the coffin ships of the 1840s and 1850s that constituted most third-class passage. In the intervening years, various governments, particularly those of England, America and Germany, had passed laws to stop the exploitation of immigrants.

What makes the poster so poignant is that it is for a trip that never was. "The Queen of the Ocean," with most of its third-class passengers, was almost a week underwater by the April 20 date set for its return voyage.

The Fabians, Yuhasz says, folded up the poster and hung on to it. Many years later, it was put under glass along with an old World War I bond from the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire and a bank note from the World War II Hungarian government. It has now become a family heirloom.

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