It started as a shipwreck, followed by a newsmagazine story in the still-golden age of newsmagazines like Time, U.S. News & World Report and Newsweek. And then a song.
“According to a legend of the Chippewa tribe, the lake they once called Gitche Gumee ‘never gives up her dead.’”
Forty-four years ago today on Nov. 10, 1975, 18 kilometres off Coppermine Point, and 60 kilometres north of Sault Ste Marie, Ont., the 222-metre iron ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald, with a crew of 29 aboard, sank. All were lost to the depths of Lake Superior. The laker, the pride of the American side, was still bigger than most, and had been the largest freighter to sail the Great Lakes when it was launched in 1958.
“The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy.”
Some of the most famous lyrics in Canadian music history, anchored to what would soon become the most famous shipwreck on the Great Lakes, first appeared as the lede of the bylined story “Great Lakes: The Cruelest Month” by James R. (Jim) Gaines, national affairs writer, and Jon Lowell for a Nov. 24, 1975 Detroit-based story in Newsweek magazine. Gaines, who began is career at the Saturday Review, the storied American weekly magazine that had started out as The Saturday Review of Literature in 1924, is now a Paris-based writer, would go onto become the first editor in chief of People magazine, as well as the editor of Time magazine, and also to serve as regional editor for the Americas, and then global editor-at-large for Reuters.
Lowell, who died in 2016, started out as a journalist in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, and had already covered politics, and civil rights events and disturbances, for the Detroit News, then Newsweek; including events like the 1967 Detroit Riot, the May 1970 Kent State shootings in Ohio, and the September 1971 Attica Prison riot, as well as covering organized crime, labour, and the auto industry, by the time the Edmund Fitzgerald sunk in November 1975. In July 1979, he would go onto co-author the book Great American Dreams: A Portrait of the Way We Are with the Washington Post’s Robert Kaiser.
Inspired in large part by reading Gaines and Lowell’s Newsweek story, Gordon Lightfoot recorded “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” the following month in December 1975 at Eastern Sound, a recording studio made out of two Victorian houses at 48 Yorkville Ave. in downtown Toronto. Ed “Peewee Charles” Ringwald and the late Terry Clements, a Detroit native who had played guitar for Lightfoot since the early 1970s, came up with the haunting guitar and steel riffs. The studio was, yes, indeed, later torn down and replaced by a parking lot. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was released as a 7-inch 45 rpm A-side single in August 1976, taken from Lightfoot’s album “Summertime Dream” released that July. The B-side on the single was “The House You Live In.”
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was also the first commercial early digital multi-track recording tracked on the prototype 3M 32-track digital recorder, a novel technology for the time.
The Headstones – originally hailing from Kingston, Ont. – released a very fine and very different tempo cover of Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” last March 15. You can listen to it here at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8LBkYjniTU
The final voyage of the Edmund Fitzgerald began Nov. 9, 1975 at the Burlington Northern Railroad Dock No.1 in Superior, Wisconsin, Sean Ley, a development officer at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point Light Station in Whitefish Point on the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan, wrote in a blog post for the museum titled “The Fateful Journey” (https://www.shipwreckmuseum.com/edmund-fitzgerald/the-fateful-journey/?fbclid=IwAR33M-6_G0X15ab73z4KkAIM3owr3GaVpRsHdaE5n_OIbSP3PzX7_FTMIGo).
Don McIsaac observed last July that “Gordon Lightfoot, who wrote ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ is from my hometown, Orillia.” McIsaac, executive vice-president and chief financial officer of Cirrus Aircraft, based at headquarters in Duluth, Minnesota, added, “From where I sit now, I can see the port the ship last left.”
The Edmund Fitzgerald was bound for Zug Island, a heavily industrialized island in River Rouge, Michigan at the mouth of the River Rouge, where it spills into the Detroit River, near Detroit, and where it was set to unload a cargo of taconite iron ore pellets before heading onto Cleveland, her home port, to wait out the winter.
Capt. Ernest M. McSorley had loaded her with 26,116 long tons of taconite pellets, made of processed iron ore, heated and rolled into marble-size balls – 26,116 long tons more than the great iron boat weighed empty. Departing Superior about 2:30 p.m., she was soon joined by the Arthur M. Anderson, which had sailed from Two Harbors, Minnesota under Capt. Bernie Cooper. The two ships were in radio contact. The Fitzgerald being the faster took the lead, with the distance between the vessels ranging from 10 to 15 miles.
McSorley and Cooper agreed to take the northerly course across Lake Superior to avoid a storm that was developing to the southwest, so they would be protected by highlands on the Canadian shore, taking them between Isle Royale and the Keweenaw Peninsula.
They passed several miles offshore from Split Rock Lighthouse, on Minnesota’s North Shore. They would later make a turn to the southeast toward Whitefish Point.
“Weather conditions continued to deteriorate,” Ley wrote. Gale warnings had been issued at 7 p.m. on Nov. 9, upgraded to storm warnings early in the morning of Nov. 10. “While conditions were bad, with winds gusting to 50 knots and seas 12 to 16 feet, both captains had often piloted their vessels in similar conditions. In the early afternoon of Nov. 10, the Fitzgerald had passed Michipicoten Island and was approaching Caribou Island, steaming toward Whitefish Bay at Superior’s east end.. The Anderson was just approaching Michipicoten, about three miles off the West End Light.
Cooper later said he watched the Edmund Fitzgerald pass far too close to Six Fathom Shoal to the north of Caribou Island. He could clearly see the ship and the beacon on Caribou on his radar set and could measure the distance between them. “He and his officers watched the Fitzgerald pass right over the dangerous area of shallow water,” Ley wrote. “By this time, snow and rising spray had obscured the Fitzgerald from sight, visible 17 miles ahead on radar.”
The last radio communication between the Fitzgerald and the Anderson was at 7:10 pm. The Fitzgerald was disappearing and reappearing on the Anderson’s radar – the height of the waves was causing interference.
Cooper asked McSorley how they were doing. McSorley replied, “We are holding our own.” A few minutes later, the Fitzgerald disappeared from the radar screen for the last time, sinking without giving a distress signal.
George Stegner recalled last year how he was on duty that night: “I was on duty this night. Stationed at K.I. Sawyer AFB in the UP of Michigan, crew member on a rescue helo. Never could have found any survivors in that storm but we sure tried hour after hour. Was a bad night. Still remember it after all this time.”
Every year since the sinking, the Episcopal Mariners’ Church – the Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral – on East Jefferson Avenue in downtown Detroit, along the riverfront, has held a memorial service for the Edmund Fitzgerald crew. This year’s service was held at 11 a.m. this morning, with the bell tolling 29 times for each man on the Fitzgerald.
Dave Sproule, a natural heritage education and marketing specialist with Ontario’s Department of Environment, Conservation and Parks’ Land and Water Division in Sudbury, has written Lake Superior is a “weathermaker … so big it creates its own weather…..”
By late autumn, writes Sproule (http://www.ontarioparks.com/parksblog/edmund-fitzgerald-40-years-later/), the “Gales of November” have usually set in on Superior, creating hazardous conditions for even large modern ships.
The cause of the sinking is still a matter of much historic debate, both Ley and Sproule note.
On April 15, 1977 the U.S. Coast Guard released its official report on “Subject: S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, official number 277437, sinking in Lake Superior on 10 November 1975 with loss of life.” While the Coast Guard said the cause of the sinking could not be conclusively determined, it maintained that “the most probable cause of the sinking of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald was the loss of buoyancy and stability resulting from massive flooding of the cargo hold. The flooding of the cargo hold took place through ineffective hatch closures as boarding seas rolled along the spar deck.”
However, the Westlake, Ohio-based Lake Carriers’ Association, representing U.S.-flag vessel operators on the Great Lakes, responded in a letter to the National Transportation Safety Board in September 1977 disagreeing with the Coast Guard’s suggestion that the lack of attention to properly closing the hatch covers by the crew was responsible for the disaster. They said, however, they were inclined to accept that the Fitzgerald passed over the Six Fathom Shoal Area as reported by Cooper.
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