A TITANIC LOVE STORY
By Mike Moore

Journal Times
/03/local_news/doc4988ed7365966790412812.txt
Feb 4 2009
WI

Couple with family connection to ship wins wedding contest

Nearly a century before Leonardo DiCaprio clung to Kate Winslet,
David Vartanian lived a real "Titanic" love story.

He was a third-class passenger on the ship, the broken halves of
which slipped under the Atlantic Ocean’s surface early on his 22nd
birthday. Back home in Turkish Armenia, his wife, Mary, thought he
was among the more than 1,500 who had died.

Vartanian survived and woke up in a New York hospital. It took him
several years to locate Mary as she ran from Turkish persecution
and several more years to afford a reunion. Around 1923, the couple
finally met midway across a Niagara Falls bridge.

When his great-granddaughter heard about a contest to hold a wedding
at the Milwaukee Public Museum’s "Titanic" exhibit, the irony
was impossible to pass up. Melissa Vartanian, 28, and her fiance,
30-year-old Racine native Vache Mikaelian, won the free May 15 wedding
after sharing her family connection.

"It’s sort of the greatest love story that we know," she said. "It’s
great to pay tribute to that on the day we’re starting on our own
great love story."

The couple received the most votes in an online poll. Case High
School graduates Nesli Karul and Preston Brown also were among the
three finalists selected by the station’s staff.

The winners got plenty of help from St. Hagop Armenian Apostolic Church
in Caledonia, where they met. The announcement was made Tuesday on
"The Morning Blend," a television show on WTMJ that held the contest.

"Had it just been a wedding they were throwing, we probably wouldn’t
have applied," Vartanian said.

The setting sold them. David Vartanian died before Melissa was born,
but she has always been drawn to his tale.

As he told family, he had just married Mary in 1911 when he left
home to avoid being drafted into the unscrupulous Turkish army. When
the Titanic sank, he survived in the freezing water by clinging to
a lifeboat. At first, passengers worried he would climb aboard the
already crowded boat and sink it.

"They started to hit his hands with the oars," Vartanian said. "They
tried to drown him."

The brush she and her fiance will have with the Titanic promises to be
much less stressful, although just as visible. Viewers will be allowed
to select the rings, dresses, cakes and other essentials for their
wedding based on the couple’s top choices. That doesn’t faze them.

"We knew what we were getting into," Mikaelian said.

Unlike David when he boarded the ship in April 1912, they know the
drama is coming.