Wife of OceanGate pilot is descendant of an immortalized Titanic couple
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Rush is survived by his wife of nearly 37 years, Wendy Rush — who, in what appears to be a tragic bookending of family history, is a descendant of a prominent couple who died together on the Titanic.
Wendy Rush’s ancestors were first reported Wednesday by the New York Times.
Isidor and Ida Straus were one of the wealthiest couples on the doomed ocean liner in 1912. They were 67 and 63, respectively, when they died and had been married — quite happily, by all accounts — for more than four decades.
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Isidor was born in the German Empire before immigrating with his family to the United States in 1854 when he was 9. The family fortune started humbly in New York, where his father sold dishes in the basement of a store owned by Rowland H. Macy. By the 1890s, Isidor and a brother co-owned the store, and in 1901, when they built Macy’s in Herald Square, it was the largest department store in the world.
Isidor also served in the House of Representatives for a little over a year, from 1894 to 1895. Hating politics and missing his wife, he declined to run for reelection and soon returned to New York, according to the Office of the House Historian.
Ida Blun was also a young German immigrant in New York when she met and married Isidor. They married in 1871 and had seven children, six of whom survived to adulthood. After traveling through Europe during the winter of 1911 and 1912, they cut their trip short and purchased first-class tickets on the Titanic’s maiden voyage, according to the House Historian.
As the ship began to sink, they stood in a line for seats on a lifeboat when the call went out that women and children would be seated first. Ida refused to leave Isidor, saying, “My place is with you. I have lived with you. I love you, and, if necessary, I shall die with you,” according to the House Historian’s office. Later, when a crew member told Isidor he could get on a lifeboat because of his age, he refused. A survivor told the New York Times, “They were standing arm in arm as the last boat left.”
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Isidor’s body was found two weeks after the ship sank, while Ida’s body was never recovered. A statue dedicated to them still stands in Straus Park on the Upper West Side of New York City, bearing the biblical inscription: “Lovely and pleasant were they in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.”
In the 1997 movie about the shipwreck, “Titanic,” director James Cameron depicted an elderly couple resembling Isidor and Ida holding on to each other until their last moments.
At the time of the Strauses’ deaths, their daughter Minnie was married to physician Richard Weil Sr., and Richard’s son, Richard Weil Jr., was Wendy Rush’s grandfather.
Wendy Weil married Stockton Rush in 1986, according to a Times wedding announcement. At the time of their marriage, she was a licensed pilot, and he was an aerospace engineer for McDonnell Douglas.
Wendy Rush now works for OceanGate, too, and has been a part of at least three expeditions to see the remains of the Titanic.
Stockton Rush also came from a wealthy family with ties to ocean liners. His grandfather, Ralph K. Davies, was a president of a shipping company now known as APL.
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Source: The Washington Post
