52 people perished after being struck by the MS Stockholm
Published in the August 6 – 19, 2014 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Robert Airoldi
The Andrea Doria at dawn, just hours before the Italian ocean liner sank in the North Atlantic.
Fifty-eight years ago, Pat Ansuini and his family immigrated from Italy to the United States aboard the ill-fated Andrea Doria, After leaving Gibraltar, the last stop of three, she had a total complement of 1,134 passengers aboard, along with a crew of 572.
On July 25, 1956 as they approached New York at the end of a nine-day trip on the ocean liner Andrea Doria, the MS Stockholm was just leaving New York heading east across the North Atlantic Ocean toward Gothenburg, Sweden.
The two ships approached each other each in heavy fog and were quite close by the time visual contact had been established. By then, the crews realized that they were on a collision course, but despite last-minute maneuvers, they could not avoid the collision that eventually led to the sinking of the Andrea Doria, killing 52 people aboard.
Pat Asuini
“I kept hearing the ship’s horns blowing in the fog,” said Ansuini, who was 10 at the time and in his cabin with his mother as he was suffering from a bit of sea sickness. “Then I heard and felt the crash.”
All the alarms went off and the door to the cabin was jammed from the impact on the opposite side of the ship. Somehow his mother managed to wrangle the door open, but could only get one life jacket from the closet as that door was also jammed.
“Mom grabbed me and we started going up the stairs to the main deck, fighting against a sea of people coming down to retrieve valuables from their cabins,” he said. “Mom did quite a job getting us up to the main deck.” To this day, Ansuini, 68, doesn’t like crowds and avoids them at all costs.
Once on the main deck, there was panic, he said. The young boy was wearing only his underwear and T-shirt. He and his mother started looking for his dad who was chaperoning Pat’s 17-year-old sister Melanie and her soon-to-be husband she met on the ship at a dance when the collision occurred. His older brother Phil was at a movie.
They eventually located his dad and brother, but not his sister or her date, John Vali. Dad gave the young Ansuini his life jacket, which was huge on the 10-year-old. The ship was listing some and everyone was ordered to the high side. It was about 11 p.m. and everyone was praying, Ansuini said.
“We knew the ship was going down,” he said. “It was quite a scene.”
Named after the 16th-century Genoese admiral Andrea Doria, the ship had a capacity of about 1,200 passengers and 500 crew. For a country attempting to rebuild its economy and reputation after World War II, Andrea Doria was an icon of Italian national pride. Of all Italy’s ships at the time, Andrea Doria was the largest, fastest and supposedly safest.
After some time on deck, the Ile de France, a French passenger liner, showed up. Just as it did, the fog lifted.
“It was pretty exciting,” Ansuini said of seeing the ship. The crew explained how they were going to get everyone off the ship.
When they got to the lower part of the boat, they shimmied down a rope into waiting life boats, John Vali and his soon-to-be bride Melanie in one boat, Pat, his 11-year-old brother Phil and his parents in another.
“The people in the Ill de France were great,” he said. “They gave people clothes and food. We watched the Andrea Doria sink from the deck of the Ill de France.”
Ansuini vividly recalls the approach into New York harbor the next morning. They saw the Statue of Liberty and passengers were applauding and crying, he said.
They eventually landed in New York with literally just the clothes on their backs. An uncle came to pick them up not even knowing if the family survived the sinking.
The uncle took them to his home in Pennsylvania where they stayed for about 10 days. His father worked in a mine to earn money and his uncle gave them some money for train tickets to California. The entire family traveled by rail to Oakland where another uncle picked them up and took them to San Jose where they built their lives.
Ansuini worked various jobs including a stint as a dishwasher and busboy at Original Joe’s in San Jose while a teen. He eventually got into construction and started AM Construction Management and Consulting and built a development along Malaguerra Avenue in northeast Morgan Hill where he lived from 1985 to 2000 before moving to Gilroy where he and his wife still live.
So what did he discover about himself after surviving the sinking of the Andrea Doria?
“You’ve just got to be prepared for things that happen in life,” he said. “Through all the good and the bad, I’ve never quit.”
