Error processing SSI file
"I live with it year-round," says the Rev. Richard Ingalls, who tolled a bell for each of the 29 lost men a day after the wreck.Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
The legend lives on
30 years later, Great Lakes tragedy still fascinates
Known as the "Queen of the Great Lakes," the Edmund Fitzgerald disappeared from radar during a blinding snow squall.Special commemorations are being held this month across the Great Lakes in memory of the 30th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Among the local events:
Dossin Great Lakes Museum, Belle Isle, Detroit
"Night Watch for the Edmund Fitzgerald," a 3 1/2 hour observance coordinated by the Great Lakes Maritime Institute, takes place Thursday. Tickets are $25; call (313) 852-4051 or (313) 852-4051 or check www.glmi.org/event/fitz2005.htm. The event also will be Webcast on www.glmi.org. On tap:
• 4:30 p.m.: Participants will place 29 illuminated lanterns -- one for each of the lost crew members -- around the Fitzgerald's original anchor, which was lost in the Detroit River years before the tragedy. Recovered in 1992, it was installed on the museum grounds.
• 5 p.m.: Concert by Great Lakes balladeer Lee Murdock.
• 6:30 p.m.: Capt. Donald Erickson will recount how his crew on the William Clay Ford braved the storm to search for possible survivors of the lost ship.
• 7:10 p.m.: The approximate time the Fitzgerald went missing, the names of the 29 lost crew members will be read and a bell will toll 29 times. Bishop Richard Ingalls, the rector of Mariners' Church of Detroit, whose bell-ringing 30 years ago inspired Gordon Lightfoot's famous ballad, will participate, and a wreath will be placed in the Detroit River.
On Saturday (Nov. 12), from noon to 4:30 p.m., Dossin Museum will host an open house highlighting Detroit's relationship to the ship.
Stations around the museum will feature shipbuilders and models. Visitors also may tour the actual pilothouse from the William Clay Ford and chat with retired Capt. Erickson. Included in museum admission, the event is $3.50 for adults, $2.50 for students and seniors ages 65 and up.
Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, Whitefish Point, Upper Peninsula:
• 7 p.m. Thursday: Fitzgerald family members will ring Fitzgerald Memorial Bell, which was retrieved from the icy depths of Lake Superior in 1995. The Whitefish Point observance will be shown in a live Web cast at www.shipwreckmuseum.com.
Mariners' Church, Detroit
• 11 a.m. Nov. 13: Mourners are urged to arrive early for the 11 a.m. memorial observance at Mariners' Church in Detroit, where Bishop Ingalls' traditional bell-ringing service will include a bagpiper, sacred music. Call (313) 259-2206.
In Toledo
• The Bonstelle Theatre Company, of Detroit's Wayne State University, will perform "Ten November," on the deck of the S.S. Willis Boyer in International Park at 7 p.m. Thursday. Call (419) 936-3070 for tickets.
Related links
Rearview Mirror: The fateful voyage of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Photo gallery
Gordon Lightfoot's 'The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald'
A memorial bell will toll Nov. 13 at Mariners' Church in Detroit for the lost Edmund Fitzgerald crew. Family members are glad their loved ones are not forgotten, but they remain fearful that the shipwreck site will be further exploited.
Bishop Richard Ingalls will remember the lost crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald during a service at Mariners' Church of Detroit.
Comment on this story
All Capt. Donald Erickson saw on that cruel November night on Lake Superior 30 years ago were two ducks tossed about in the waves.
Battered by hurricane-force winds, the skipper and his crew frantically searched for the Edmund Fitzgerald, one of the mightiest ships of the day.
Known as the "Queen of the Great Lakes" -- and thought to be indestructible -- the 729-foot ore-carrier mysteriously disappeared from radar during a blinding snow squall with no cry for help.
"When I heard (the news), I started thinking, 'Well, somebody's got to go out there and look for them,'" says Erickson, 78, whose freighter, the William Clay Ford, was one of only two ships to leave safe harbor that night, Nov. 10, 1975, to mount a search near Whitefish Point.
News soon spread that the Detroit-bound Fitzgerald sank in 530 feet of frigid water with all 29 crewmen aboard.
Before dawn the next day, the Rev. Richard Ingalls of old Mariners' Church in Detroit tolled a bell for each of the 29 lost men. Reporters and TV crews literally ran to the sanctuary to interview him.
As the story pulsed across the world, it inspired Canadian songwriter Gordon Lightfoot to write "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," a haunting ballad that launched a legend.
Three decades later, the saga remains so intriguing that the shipwreck has become known as "the Titanic of the Great Lakes."
As the last major shipwreck on the Great Lakes, the Fitzgerald is a part of American folklore, studied by schoolchildren in Michigan and beyond.
The freighter was built for a then-record $8 million in 1958 and was named for the president of Northwestern Mutual Insurance Co. in Milwaukee. It was just one -- albeit the most famous -- of some 6,000 known Great Lakes shipwrecks that together have claimed 30,000 lives.
Today the Fitzgerald is the subject of a growing pile of key-chains, refrigerator magnets, snow globes, books, Web sites, videos, plays, proposed Hollywood movies and even a symphony -- not to mention countless theories, including a wacky one involving a UFO.
"The legend isn't waning a bit. In fact, it keeps growing," says Thomas Farnquist, executive director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society and its museum at Whitefish Point -- ground zero for the phenomenon.
On the eve of the 30th anniversary of the ship's sinking, he adds: "It's pandemonium up here."
Located 17 miles from where the Fitzgerald vanished, the Upper Peninsula museum is preparing for overflow crowds Thursday at its annual memorial ceremony.
Relatives of the lost crew members, some from as far away as California and Oregon, will ring the Fitzgerald's original brass bell, which was retrieved from Lake Superior's icy depths on a dive mission 10 years ago.
Special observances also are planned in Detroit on Thursday and Nov. 12 at Dossin Great Lakes Museum on Belle Isle and Nov. 13 at Mariners' Church. As he has for 29 years, Bishop Ingalls will ring a bell for the 29 Fitzgerald victims. A 30th bell is tolled each year in tribute to all sailors lost on the lakes.
Of the Fitzgerald tragedy, the minister says: "It's always over my shoulder. I live with it year-round. There's always something that reminds us of it -- we get phone calls around the clock."
Fitzgerald buffs pay tribute
Emotions are sure to run high Nov. 11 when a group of Fitzgerald buffs will board the Great Lakes mailboat J.W. Westcott in the Detroit River to make a ceremonial presentation. They'll deliver some iron-ore pellets -- said to be part of the original Fitzgerald cargo -- to Zug Island, where the ill-fated ship was bound that November night.
The ore, from Lake Superior's pellet-strewn floor, was found embedded on the muddy runners of a Coast Guard submersible after it took underwater photos of the shipwreck during an investigation in early 1976, says Capt. Erickson, the skipper who searched for survivors.
Erickson says he was given a handful of the pellets by three Coast Guard captains who caught a ride back to Detroit with him on the William Clay Ford after their investigation.
"Some of the cargo from the Fitzgerald will finally get to its destination," says Erickson, who was invited to join Friday's Zug Island mission coordinated by the U.S. Steel Corp., Dossin museum and a videographer filming a documentary.
Also as part of the Dossin's Fitzgerald programs next week, Erickson will discuss how he polled his crew before heading back out onto the wave-whipped lake that night.
They were joined in the search mission by the freighter Arthur M. Anderson, which earlier had tailed the doomed ship across Lake Superior during the storm. The Anderson was the last ship to talk to Fitzgerald crew members -- and the first to sound the alarm.
"We must have stayed six to eight hours right in that area," Erickson says of the search in an area of Superior traditionally known as the graveyard of the Great Lakes. "I was hoping the weather wouldn't get any worse -- it was heavy seas, big, big seas. ... It was really nasty."
Loved ones fear exploitation
Each year, as November rolls around, family members of the lost Fitzgerald crew brace for an inevitable wave of phone calls and questions.
Several say they're heartened that their loved ones are not forgotten, yet they remain fearful that the shipwreck site, lying mostly in Canadian waters, will be further exploited.
"The thing is, these were just ordinary guys working to pay for their kids' clothes, to support their families and themselves," says Cheryl Rozman of Gwinn, Mich., who was putting her kids to bed 30 years ago when the TV flashed news that the Fitzgerald was missing.
Rozman prayed hard that night for the crew, especially her father, Ransom "Ray" Cundy, 53, a watchman. She remembers being in shock for a long time as she planned his funeral.
"I wanted a funeral for my dad like everybody else has," she says, "but I had no body."
Like many of the family members, Rozman declined to discuss the controversy that raged around the 20th anniversary of the sinking when a Fitzgerald buff, Fred Shannon, led an exploratory dive to the wreck.
His 1994 self-financed mission produced photos and videotape showing the remains of a body in a life vest.
Reached last week in Mount Morris, Shannon also refused to talk about the pictures, which reportedly have not been widely circulated.
In their continuing efforts to ensure the wreck will be left undisturbed and treated as a gravesite, some Fitzgerald relatives have urged Canada to declare it off-limits to divers so the crew can rest in peace.
While that hasn't happened, a new amendment to Ontario's provincial Heritage Act further regulates diving on the wreck.
"Before, a sport diver could dive the wreck without a permit, but expeditions needed one," said Farnquist of the Whitefish Point museum. "Now nobody can dive the wreck without a permit. You can't even tow a sonar by it anymore."
'Time to put this ship to rest'
For various reasons -- most notably Lightfoot's ballad, which is dusted off and played repeatedly this time of year -- the Fitzgerald struck a universal chord.
Yet Lightfoot, who has attended memorial services in Michigan in the past, believes out of respect for the family members that it's "time to put this ship to rest," according to his business manager in Toronto, Barry Harvey of Early Morning Productions.
Still, many of those who grew up hearing the Lightfoot ballad say they thought the tale was fictional and had no idea it was based on an actual tragedy.
But for some, it's as if the great ship sank yesterday. Like many old salts, Jack Callahan of Woodhaven speaks in respectful, even reverential tones about the Fitzgerald and the power of the Great Lakes' winds and waters.
Now a relief captain, he was the wheelsman on a freighter seeking refuge in northern Lake Huron around the time the Fitzgerald went down.
"That was one of the worst nights I ever spent," Callahan says, his voice catching at the memory. "I'd never seen a sky look as green as what it did.
"The waves were so high (our) bow was coming straight up out of the water. It slammed down so hard we broke out a couple of the running lights."
After finding safe harbor with a dozen other ships in DeTour in the eastern U.P., Callahan, 59, remembers that he was playing cribbage when his ship's first-mate relayed the news about the Fitzgerald and its crew.
"It was just one awful feeling," he says. "You just knew what every one of those men felt like on that ship. You could just feel for what they were feeling."
In suburban Cleveland, Ruth Hudson will never forget the morning of Nov. 11, 1975, when she first heard a radio bulletin about the tragedy.
"I pulled the car over and sat for a while. I kept thinking, 'It can't be the Fitzgerald because it's too big,'" Hudson said. "I never expected anything could happen to a ship that size."
Bruce, her only child, worked as a deckhand on the ship. Ironically, she worried each time he zipped about town on his motorcycle when he was home on leave.
But with typical 22-year-old bravado, he urged her to stop fretting, she recalled. "He said that when he went out, the whole world would know. And I think they do."
You can reach Susan R. Pollack at (313) 222-2665 or srpollack@detnews.com.
"When I heard (the news), I started thinking, 'Well, somebody's got to go out there and look for them,'" says Donald Erickson, whose freighter was one of only two ships to leave safe harbor to search for survivors.
Copyright © 2005
The Detroit News.
Use of this site indicates your agreement to the Terms of Service (updated 12/19/2002).