Lorain Journal Front Page – July 26, 1956

Seventy years ago this week the famous Italian ocean liner SS Andrea Dorea sank after colliding with the Swedish ship MS Stockholm. The accident occurred during one of the ship's regular runs between Genora, Italy and New York about 70 miles off the coast of Massachusetts.

Here's the front page of the Lorain Journal of July 26, 1956 – the day after the collision – with the story.

As we'll see in a follow-up article, there was a Lorain connection with one of the passengers. 

Forty-six people lost their lives as a result of the tragedy. Actress Ruth Roman (who starred with James Stewart in The Far Country, one of his Anthony Mann-directed Westerns) was one of the surviving passengers.

Also on the front page: the winding down of the 26-day steel strike at National Tube, and the hunch that  Lorain was going to be the site of a new National Gypsum plant.

A day later, the front page of the July 27, 1967 Lorain Journal revealed that one of the surviving passengers was the brother of a Lorain man, Rosario Pillari. 

The brother was on his way to Lorain after a five year struggle with immigration authorities to gain admission to this country. There was a happy ending in store for him since a Lorain contractor had already promised to hire him.

I was somewhat ignorant about the SS Andrea Dorea. I had heard of it – just like the RMS Titanic, the RMS Lusitania, the USS Maine, etc. – but for some reason didn't realize that the tragedy had occurred in the late 1950s. I thought it was decades earlier.

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It was nice having last week off.

That's because sometimes it's a little stressful cranking out content for this blog. You would laugh if you knew how many times it was 8:00 in the evening when I realize that not only have I not prepared anything, I have no idea what to write about. And I would like to either go to bed or watch a movie on GRIT. So I'm going to have to either plan better or cut back. We'll see.

The funny thing is, I didn't even get the things done that I was planning to do. So it was a real vacation.

One thing that I did manage to do while I was off slumming was to get into is what my doctor thinks is a mild case of benign vertigo. (No, that doesn't mean that I'm obsessed with Kim Novak.) It's somewhat disruptive, both at work and at home. 

So if that's what it turns out to be, hopefully the cause of it goes away on its own, as it does sometimes. If not, there are a variety of ways to deal with it. 

Hey, I just realized that makes two pictures of James Stewart on this post! 

And that's the way I'm spinning it.