"Titanic" addition: Exhibit's new panels depict Kentuckians

On 03/01/2010
In Museum News
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By Diane Heilenman - Courier Journal

Panels added to the “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition,” which will be on view through Feb. 15 at the Louisville Science Center, bring to the surface a new back story: that of three Kentuckians who made that fateful voyage in mid-April 1912.

There was Charles Hallace Romaine, a banker and/or confidence man and gambler raised in Georgetown, Ky., and Anderson, Ind., who was working for a trust company in London at the time he sailed. Romaine survived the sinking of the ship.

There was the inventive Louisville ophthalmologist, Dr. Ernest Moraweck, whose sideline was operating a rest home for wealthy older women at his farm in Brandenburg, Ky. He died at sea.

And, there was a former Courier-Journal reporter-turned-presidential military aide, Maj. Archibald Butt. He, too, died at sea.

Maj. Butt's first job after graduation in 1888 from the University of the South, where he founded the school newspaper, was as a reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal, recruited by its founder, Henry Watterson.

Butt wrote for the Courier-Journal for three years before moving on to Washington, D.C., and reporting for The Atlanta Constitution and the Nashville Banner. He served as the military aide to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.