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'Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald' still remembered 50 years later
Spend enough time along the shores of Lake Superior and it won’t be long before there’s some reminder of what happened “when the gales of November came early.”
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the largest and most famous of the estimated 6,500 ships that have gone down in the Great Lakes. But the Fitzgerald is remembered while the others are forgotten, thanks in large part to Gordon Lightfoot’s haunting 1976 folk ballad that became a surprise hit.
The Fitzgerald, a 730-foot long freighter named after a Milwaukee insurance company executive, went down in Lake Superior on Nov. 10, 1975. All 29 men on board died.
The Fitz, as it’s still affectionately called, was the largest ship on the Great Lakes when it launched in 1958 and kept that title until 1971.
On its final voyage, the Fitzgerald departed Superior, Wisconsin, on Nov. 9, 1975, carrying 26,000 tons of iron ore along a familiar route to Detroit.
Most of the crew members were born and lived in states that border the Great Lakes — Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Minnesota.
The captain, 63-year-old Ernest M. McSorley, intended to retire after the 1975 season. He was known for his ability to navigate storms on the Great Lakes, but the one that hit on Nov. 10 was unlike any he had encountered.
McSorley chose a northerly route across Lake Superior to be protected by highlands along the Canadian shore. Gale warnings were issued the night of Nov. 9. Those worsened to storm warnings in the early morning of Nov. 10.
The crew of the nearby Arthur Anderson, which was trailing the Fitz, reported waves as high as 25 feet. The first mate radioed McSorley, who reported that the Fitz had been damaged by the storm.
“We are holding our own,” McSorley said. That was the last message received from anyone aboard.
There are many theories as to what caused the Fitzgerald to sink so rapidly without a distress call, but the exact reason remains unknown.
Even without an answer, the wreck spurred many “incredible” safety improvements, said Frederick Stonehouse, whose 1977 book “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was the first of dozens written about the tragedy.
Whereas a similar-sized ship would be lost on the lakes every six or seven years before the Fitzgerald, none has gone down since then, he said.
The Fitzgerald still sits at the bottom of Lake Superior, submerged in 535 feet of water, about 17 miles north-northwest of Whitefish Point, Michigan. No bodies have been recovered.
The wreck is protected as a grave site under Canadian law. Unauthorized dives or artifact retrieval are barred.
Bruce Lynn, executive director of the Great Lake Shipwreck Historical Society, said the museum is on track to see its busiest year ever on the 50th anniversary.
The wreck is also remembered in Detroit at the Mariners’ Church, where Rector Richard Ingalls rang its bell 29 times in honor of the crew after receiving word in the predawn hours of Nov. 11, 1975, that the Fitzgerald had sunk.
Without Gordon Lightfoot’s song, the Edmund Fitzgerald could have faded from memory along with the names of the roughly 6,500 other ships that went down in the Great Lakes before it.
Lightfoot was inspired to write his ode to the Fitzgerald and the 29 men who died on board after reading the first Associated Press story about the wreck and a Nov. 24, 1975, article in Newsweek magazine. The song was released in August 1976, less than a year later.
Lightfoot’s mournful storytelling propelled the tragedy into infamy. Affection for the song and interest in the wreck has sustained for half a century, though it wasn’t even the deadliest recorded on the Great Lakes. The deadliest wreck on open waters was the Lady Elgin in 1860, which historians estimate killed nearly 400 people.
“The song has made this by far the most famous Great Lakes shipwreck,” said John U. Bacon, author of “The Gales of November,” a recently published book coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the wreck. He said the Edmund Fitzgerald trails only the Titanic and possibly the Lusitania as the most famous shipwreck in the world.
Debbie Gomez-Felder was 17 when her father, Oliver “Buck” Champeau, died on the Fitzgerald. She couldn’t bear to listen to the song at first.
“I put it on the record player and I thought, ‘Oh no, this music is eerie,’” she said. “I turned it off.”
But she came to love it.
“The part that says ‘All that remains are the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters,’ I thought there wasn’t a word he missed,” Gomez-Felder said. “There wasn’t anything he didn’t recognize.”
Lightfoot met regularly with family members and famously changed one of the lyrics at their request, removing a reference to a disproven theory that unsecured hatch covers caused the wreck. The exact cause remains a mystery.
Lightfoot died in 2023. Lightfoot’s band still tours and plays the song at every concert.
(AP Photo Scott Bauer)
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