It was 101 years ago this week when a German torpedo sank the huge British-owned luxury cruise liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland, and aboard the doomed vessel was a Lewiston native who was among the few survivors.

James “Jay” H. Brooks told his spellbinding story to Rose O’Brien, Lewiston Evening Journal writer, just six days before he died in late April 1956. She met with him at his Paris Hill home where he recounted in detail his memories of the tragedy that plunged America into World War I.

Brooks told O’Brien he was leaning on the rail of the Marconi deck, an upper deck where the ship’s radio facilities were located. It was early afternoon of May 7, a pleasant day with the Irish coast in sight, Brooks recalled.

Then he saw it … a streak cutting through the water at an estimated 40 miles per hour, “jewelling the ocean, the wake of air bubbles flashing in the sunlight.”

His eyes glued to the silver streak, Brooks shouted, Torpedo!” The missile pierced the hull almost silently as it penetrated the engine room and exploded near the boilers. The first sign of disaster, Brooks said, was a gush of water, steam, dust, dirt and flying objects sent 150 feet high from a big ventilator.

He took two steps from the rail and was knocked flat, face down, with water pouring over him, steam choking him.

Brooks raced to stairs leading to a deck below, and there he was surprised to find everyone “serene.” There was no hysteria.

But, Brooks remembered, “There was never any direction, either.” He said that was the source of the tragedy to follow.

He saw a lifeboat break apart as it was being lowered and dump 50 or more women into the ocean. He helped load about 60 women into another lifeboat.

At that point with the Lusitania listing heavily, he decided it was time to dive overboard. Brooks said he had always hated diving, but he was a good swimmer. He had learned to swim in the Androscoggin River near Lewiston’s Riverside Cemetery. He was able to swim away from the ship just moments before it sank.

O’Brien’s story in the Lewiston Evening Journal Magazine Section of May 5, 1956, quoted Brooks’ description of the next frantic minutes.

“Once I looked up, the Lusitania had rolled right over, and the big funnels were right over my head. Some people say she went down, front end to. She didn’t. Her port deck, or left side of the ship, was the top deck when she went into the sea.

“I started clawing water,” Brooks said. “I looked up again and saw that wireless wire. I must have been in the water about eight minutes. I know that the wireless wire gave my hand a nasty cut. A couple of days later, red streaks started shooting up my arm and I spent about two weeks in an English hospital with it. But I didn’t have time to think about it then.”

With desperate people all around him, Brooks and three coal stokers from the Lusitania’s crew struggled to assemble a collapsible lifeboat. They pulled drowning people, “mostly women,” into the boat and for three hours he pulled on one of the boat’s 16-foot oars until they were picked up by a fishing boat.

Brooks had sailed on the Lusitania on a business trip to England and France for his company, the Weed Chain Tire Grip Company, and he had not known a few days before leaving New York that a warning about ocean liner travel had been posted in American newspapers.

It said, “NOTICE! TRAVELERS intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies; that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to the British Isles; that, in accordance with formal notice given by the Imperial German Government, vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or any of her allies, are liable to destruction in those waters and that travelers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk. IMPERIAL GERMAN EMBASSY, Washington, D.C.”

Brooks’ wife, the former Ruth Stearns of Paris Hill, had gone to New York to see him off. Back home, a couple of days later, a friend exclaimed to her, “Oh, Ruth, I hope Jay didn’t sail on the Lusitania!” Mrs. Brooks was not worried at the news, knowing that the ship was the queen of the Cunard line and “the largest and fastest ship on the Atlantic.” The Lusitania was said to be capable of outrunning a submarine.

The tragic death toll that day in May 1915 was 1,198 of the 1,959 people aboard. The “unsinkable” ship went down in 20 minutes.

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and a native of Auburn. He can be reached by sending email to davidsargent607@gmail.com.