The chilling connection between the missing Titanic submersible pilot’s wife and the wealthy couple who drowned when the ship hit an iceberg in 1912 has been revealed.
Wendy Rush, the wife of the founder and CEO of OceanGate Stockton Rush, is the great-great-granddaughter of Isidor and Ida Straus – the rich New York couple who tragically died in the 1912 disaster.
Rush is one of the five people aboard the Titan sub, which went missing on Sunday less than two hours after it plunged into the water to visit the wreckage of the Titanic.
Isidor is a co-founder of Macy’s department store. He and his wife had been offered seats on a lifeboat – her as a woman and him as a co-owner of Macy’s department store and well-known former congressman.
However, Isidor refused and said he would not take a seat until all the women and children had gone. Ida then refused to leave her husband and decided to give her mink coat to her maid, Ellen Bird.
Wendy Rush, born Wendy Hollings Weil, tied the knot with entrepreneur and engineer Stockton Rush in 1986.
Stockton Rush then founded OceanGate in 2009.
Wendy, who works as OceanGate’s communications director, has visited the Titanic wreckage three times in the last two years.
Rush tried to purchase explorer Steve Fossett’s submersible after he passed away in 2007 but when he couldn’t, he started to create his own.
The OceanGate founder admitted that parts of his submersible were improvised – the light inside was bought from an online camping website and it is controlled by a video game controller – but said that it had been built with help from NASA, Boeing, and the University of Washington.
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