A Pitiable Sight: A Postmaster Remembers the Eastland

Send us Fan Mail What happens when a dramatic story is repeated often enough that people stop asking where it came from? We begin with the curious case of Arthur Loeb, the self-proclaimed "King of the Bell Divers," who spent years promoting himself as an Eastland disaster hero (not true) and claiming honors that he never received. His story illustrates what can happen when assertions are repeated without documentation and gradually take on the appearance of fact. When preserving a famil...