From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
No one talks about anything except the “Titanic.” Grandfather came home late for lunch because he stands all morning in front of the Examiner building looking for news on the Blackboard. Nearly everyone on the ship was drowned. One lady refused to go into the life boat without her beautiful Great Dane and one lady refused to go without her husband and they all drowned with musicians who kept playing all the time the ship was sinking. They played “Nearer My God to Thee,” which isn’t a very pretty melody but the words have something to do with being close to God and if you are drowning you might as well think of heaven, I guess?
I was unable to find information about the San Francisco Examiner’s “blackboard” — in the days before CNN and Twitter, the board would have been a convenient way to learn about breaking news between newspaper editions. Although the wikipedia entry for “Nearer My God to Thee” says that it was probably not played on the Titanic, the Examiner’s headlines a few days after today’s entry mention the song:
