Edith Louise Russell was an American fashion buyer, stylist and correspondent for Womens Wear Daily, best remembered for surviving the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic with a music box in the shape of a pig. The paper mache toy, covered in pigskin and playing a tune known as The Maxixe when its tail was twisted, was used by Edith Russell to calm frightened children in the lifeboat in which she escaped. Her story became widely known in the press at the time and was later included in the bestselling account of the disaster A Night to Remember by Walter Lord. Russell was also portrayed in the awardwinning British docudrama produced by William MacQuitty that was based on Lords book.
Edith Louise Rosenbaum was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, into a wealthy Jewish family in 1879. Her father was Harry Rosenbaum, who rose to prominence in the dry goods field as a director of Louis Stix amp Co. in Cincinnati. He was later influential as a cloak and suit manufacturer in his own right and an investor in garment industry real estate in New York, where he moved with his wife, the former Sophia Hollstein, and daughter Edith in 1902. Edith was educated in Cincinnati public schools and a succession of finishing schools, including the Mt. Auburn Young Ladies Institute in Cincinnati and Miss Annabels in Philadelphia. At agein 1895 she attended the Misses Shipleys at Bryn Mawr and later Bryn Mawr College.
Source: Wikipedia