The Central New Jersey Home News from New Brunswick, New Jersey • 35

THURSDAY, JULY 1,2004 1 Home News tribune PAGE D3 M-YiGs 1904 disaster femeiibiredl Adella Liebenow Wother-spoon was a survivor. When the Watchung resident died in January at age 100, she was the last survivor of the General Slocum disaster of June 15, 1904. She was 6 months old the time of the burning and sinking of the ship in the East River at North Brother Island. The more than 1,000 people who perished in the fire represented one of the ties was never fully determined because there was no precise count of how many had boarded the ship," the placard reads. "Heart-breaking scenes unfolded as a temporary morgue established on the pier, the only space large enough to accommodate so many victims.

"There was even a father who posted 'missing advertisements to locate a son he hoped had survived." The Liebenow family moved to Watchung in 1910. Wotherspoon graduated from Watchung Grammar School in 1917 and Plainfield High School in 1921 before going to what was then Trenton Normal School to study teaching. Jl-c Adella Wotherspoon in her Watchung home in this picture taken Wotherspoon died in January at age 100. HOME NEWS TRIBUNEFlle on May 29, 1998. worst disasters in peacetime maritime history and the most rl rJ 1 rna in )S2'.

I York City nisiory unm 911. The Slocum toll has been listed between 1,021 and 1031. EUAS HOLTZKIAN When I interviewed Wother-spoon in 1998, she was 94 and getting ready to take part in the annual memorial service in which she had participated for years at Tomkins Square in Manhattan. She was the youngest to survive the disaster and lived to become the oldest. She and her parents survived, but she lost two sisters, Anna, 3, and Helen, 6, two cousins and two aunts.

The Tomkins Square monument in the center of an old German-American neighborhood is one of two memorializing those lost aboard the General Slocum. The other monument is at the Lutheran All Saints Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens, where 61 unidentified victims are buried. That monument was unveiled in 1905 by Liebenow, then VA. In 1904, Liebenow's family was among the many Germans from the Tompkins. Square area, a community known since the 1840s as Kleindeutschland or Little Germany.

The Liebe-nows attended St Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church on Sixth Street between First and Second avenues, where a synagogue is now located. It was the church's 17th annual Sunday School voyage and picnic that drew excited families, including the. Liebenows, to the East River's Third Street pier to begin a day of what was to be fun and frolic. She married in 1930. Her husband, James, was in retail work for Bamberger's and Macy's.

Wotherspoon taught at Cran-ford High School for a year and then taught business education at Plainfield High School before retiring in 1960. She was active in garden clubs and was the "Blue Star" chairwoman for the Garden Club of New Jersey, which just after World War II inaugurated the concept of "Blue Star" highways as living memorials to America's servicemen and women. What happened to the Slocum? It was raised and made into a barge loading bricks and coal. It suffered in that role, as well, springing a leak and sinking off the coast of New Jersey. Capt.

Van Schaick was one of the 407 Slocum survivors. He was tried and found guilty of criminal negligence and sentenced to 10 years. He was pardoned after 3 years in Sing Sing and died in 1927 at the age of 90. Elias Holtzman is a free lance writer whose column appears Thursdays in the Community section. He can be reached by e-mail at Marciaedaol.com, There were 1,360 children, teachers and chaperones aboard, including an oom-pah band.

The sun was shining. They left at 9 a.m. aboard General Slocum, a Mississippi River-style side-wheeler named for Maj. Gen. Henry Warner Slocum, a Civil War hero and New York congressman.

By 9:30 a.m. they were bound for Huntington Bay, Long Island, but before the hour was out the fire raged, started in a storeroom cluttered with cans of oil and barrels of excelsior. The boat proved to be a tin-derbox with crumbing life preservers, nonworking fire hoses, lifeboats that were lashed so thoroughly that the adults could not release them, and an inexperienced crew with no fire-drill training. The skipper, Capt. William Van Schaick, continued up-river to North Brother Island off 149th Street, ignoring wharves between 125th and 135th streets.

Meanwhile, a stiff breeze was fanning the flames engulfing the Slocum and less than 15 minutes after the smoke was first seen, the Slocum was a smoldering wreck on North Brother Island. Funerals were held for more than a week; one of the processions involved 156 hearses. much," Wotherspoon said. "I got more about it by reading the clippings in my father's scrap books. He kept two and clipped everything that ever appeared about the Slocum.

I also read" other books. I read one book of interviews in which my father's oldest sister was interviewed. Her hair had caught on fire during the Slocum incident." Wotherspoon willed those scrapbooks to the New York Historical Society. The society, at 77th Street and Central West, has mounted an exhibition, "The General Slocum and Little Germany," which includes material that Wotherspoon left. The exhibition continues until Aug.

22. Among the displays is a photograph of ra-year-old Adella in a white cotton dress as she unveiled the monument in Queens, plus the cotton dress itself, dolls from the Liebenow children and a pair of shoes from Anna, one of her lost sisters. There are photographs of the Slocum before the fire and a photo showing the ship on its side. One of the displays is a placard suggesting "eerie parallels" between the Slocum and the World Trade Center disasters: "In 1904, the number of casual Wotherspoon's recollection was guided by what her parents told her. "My mother was very badly burned on her upper side, so I assume she hung onto the railing until she couldn't hold on any longer and dropped into the water with me in her right arm.

The men stayed on board looking for the four other children until their clothes burned off. Then they jumped overboard," Wotherspoon said in a 1998 Wotherspoon recalled a story her mother told her. "We were in a hospital room on North Brother Island, when a woman came through looking for her baby and tried to claim me. 'Was your baby a girl or a my mother asked the woman 'A the woman responded, 'Well, this is a girl, and she's my mother said." In later years, Wotherspoon would sometimes tease her mother, whom she loved dearly, "Are you sure you didn't get me mixed up with the other baby?" Since she lost her sisters, Wotherspoon was brought up as an only child. Her father died when she was 7, and she was raised by her mother.

"My mother didn't talk about the Slocum incident very.