There is an article in today’s Chicago Tribune about Millvina Dean.  “Who is she?” you may ask.  Millvina Dean is the last survivor of the Titanic.  Now 96 years old, Millvina was a two month old baby on that fateful April day in 1912.  She was the youngest passenger on board.  Her mother and father were taking Millvina and her two year old brother to America, joining the great early twentieth century migration of Europeans seeking a new life across the sea.  From New York, the Dean’s planned to proceed by train to Wichita, Kansas, where Millvina’s father, Bertram, had relatives.  Once settled, Mr. Dean planned to open a tobacco shop, and to make real his vision of the Great American Dream.  Of course, that dream came to a cold and tragic end on the night of April 12.  An hour after the ship swiped the ice berg, Millvina’s father wrapped his baby girl in a cloth sack and handed her to his wife, who was already in lifeboat number 13.  In the confusion, they could not find their small son.  While frantically calling his name, the lifeboat was lowered into the sea, mother and daughter separated from husband and son.  Following their rescue the next day, the distraught mother found her son on board the Carpathia.  In the chaos of the previous night, someone saw the small boy wandering the Titanic deck alone.  The boy was picked up and placed on a different lifeboat than his mother and sister, but he was saved.  However, the children would never see their father again.  Bertram Dean, who dreamed of running a tobacco shop in America, was one of the 1527 men, women, and children who perished that night.  His body was never recovered.

Millvina Dean is the last living connection to one of the great stories of the twentieth century.  We are quickly losing our connections to the important events of the first half of that century.  When film maker Ken Burns was interviewed about his outstanding World War II documentary The War, he said the main impetus for the project was the fact that 1000 American veterans of that war were dying every day.  Within a few years, it would be impossible to make an oral history of the war based on interviews with actual participants.

My own family is a case in point.  My mother had two brothers, one of whom served in the war, flying on B29 bombing missions in the Pacific.  He passed away 15 years ago.   Although my father was not a veteran, he had a job on the home front, working in a Memphis shipyard building landing craft that would be used on the beaches of Normandy, and on faraway islands carrying names like Iwo Jima and Saipan.  He had four brothers, three of them veterans of the war.  All but one of these men is gone now.  The only remaining son from that generation is 88 years old and in poor health.  My family connection to World War II is almost at an end.

Among the hundreds of family pictures in my possession, one that I find particularly interesting shows my grandmother’s brother in a doughboy uniform.  He was a young farmer from West Virginia on his way to the horrors of the trenches.  I only met that man once or twice, when he was already very old.  I was just a boy.  I don’t know anything about his WWI experience.  Like all but a handful of World War I veterans, my great uncle is long deceased.

The last remaining Central Powers veteran of World War I was Franz Kuenstler, who fought for Austria-Hungary.  He died last year at the age of 107.  There are two surviving British combat veterans from that war, as well as two Australians, one Italian, and one American.  The American is named Frank Buckles, who is 107 years old.  In two or three years, there will be no living veteran of World War I. 

When I was a child, I had very real and tangible connections to the great events of the twentieth century.  I listened wide-eyed to my grandfather’s tales of West Virginia mountain moonshiners.  I was enthralled by his personal recollections of the Appalachian coal wars, those violent and deadly clashes that happened a hundred years ago between unionizing miners and the companies they worked for.  I listened to my parents talk about the hardships of growing up during the Depression, and heard their recollection of the “day that will live in infamy,” December 7, 1941.  I was captivated by these stories, made real by the personal involvement of those I loved. 

The story tellers are gone, now.  The events themselves are recalled only in history books, and grainy old film.  As we move deeper into the twenty-first century, we are quickly losing our personal connection to the great events of the previous one.  It is an inevitable transition, but a sad one, nonetheless.