We're Holding Our Own: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

On this episode of Our American Stories, as big freighters go, she was bigger than most with a crew and captain well seasoned...but on November 10th, 1975 she and her 29 man crew were sent to the bottom of Lake Superior. Ric Mixter of Lake Fury tells the story.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories and on this
day in history, in nineteen seventy five, the Edmund Fitzgerald sank.
Most of us, by the way, know about this wreck
because of the Gordon Lightfoot hit single The Wreck of
the Van Forgerald, But this story is more than a
mere song. Today we're joined by Rick Mixter, who knows

(00:31):
this story firsthand. He's been down to the wreck. Here's
our own Monte Montgomery with his story.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
When we think of the word lake, we often think
of a calm, placid and small body of water. But
the Great Lakes are anything but that.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
People underestimate them, you know it literally, they think they're ponds,
they think that they're you know, they're much smaller than
the ocean. And the truth is that the Great Lakes
span over a thousand miles. You know, Lake Superior is immense,
and unfortunately it has these jagged shoals that, unlike the ocean,
it's confined. So these shoals bounce waves back and forth.

(01:14):
And these confused waves on the Great Lakes tend to
really mess with ships and make it very difficult to
navigate in a storm.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
And the results of these confused seas have often been deadly.

Speaker 3 (01:27):
There's a huge argument on how many shipwrecks are on
the Great Lakes because it's really hard to judge. Most
of the time, we would put it to you know,
insurance settlements. Let's look at Lloyd's of London or other
places that paid out, but we don't know if they
were recovered. If you set on the bottom, most people
would probably throw out a number between six thousand and
ten thousand shipwrecks that are still on the bottom.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
But out of all these shipwrecks, there's one that has
been etched into the collective consciousness of the people of
the Great Lakes, the Edmond Fitzgerald. And there's a reason
for that.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
Fitzgerald is famous for two words, Gordon Lightfoot. It's literally
a wreck that I think would have been forgotten if
not for a Canadian songwriter who took the story and
turned it into a seven and a half minute song
that went to number two on the charts. And once
that happened, it became enamored not only by the people

(02:25):
of the Great Lakes, it became their song. Played every
November every time you turn on the radio, somebody plays it.
At that time because of the gales of November and
to remember the crew. Nobody argues that it's not Gordon Lightfoot.
It is the largest shipwreck on the Great Lakes by
a couple hundred feet. The Fitzgerald was seven hundred and
twenty nine feet long and lost with all hands, which

(02:48):
was part of the mystery. I think that captivated even
Gordon Lightfoot, and that's why it kind of became a story.
How in nineteen seventy five could you have a seven
hundred foot freighter with twenty nine men and completely vanished.
Fitzgerald was one of the last of the ships built
in Michigan, which we used to have an amazing shipbuilding prowess.

(03:12):
We were number one on the Great Lakes for years.
Just a massive ship. I mean, it was the flagship
for Columbia Transportation. So when it was launched, not only
was she the biggest, but she was well appointed. She
had the best skipper according to Columbia, the best cook.
Because they would entertain many of the steel companies like
National Steels, President or you know, big wigs would come

(03:33):
on board, bring their family along, and you know, it
would have inside jail. Hudson Company, the famous Hudson Store
had all of the appointments inside, so your beds, all
of the furniture which had to be custom cut to
fit the canter of the floor of the Fitzgerald, which was,
you know, slightly rounded. They had to cut the legs
of the beds to fit correctly. So it was the flagship.

(03:56):
It was the ship that everybody wanted to be assigned to,
and it was certainly a ship that gave out many
rides to people. It was also fast. They called it
the Toledo Express because it made that rung so quickly.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
And for the next seventeen years, the Edmond Fitzgerald would
continue to make that trip from Superior, Wisconsin to Detroit
laden with iron ore, and there was no reason to
expect that on November ninth, nineteen seventy five, her trip
under the command of Captain Ernest McSorley, would go any differently.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
It was a Sunday, and it was in Superior, Wisconsin
on a beautiful day, and Jack McCarthy, the first may
would be in charge of telling the guys, you know,
the loading, make sure that the ship was loaded evenly,
in which they would go underneath a gravity fed doc
and it would actually spill these round taconite pellets into
the cargo hold, which they took twenty six thousand tons.

(04:49):
This is where Gordon Lightfoot was wrong on a couple
of accounts. In his song. He said fully loaded for Cleveland,
but it wasn't fully loaded. It was less than two
thirds loaded because she was actually going to River Rouge
near the area to the Zug Island, and in order
to get into that slip, she couldn't carry all of
her cargo because she would hit bottom in the Detroit River.

(05:10):
So not fully loaded, not going to Cleveland, actually going
into the Detroit area with a load of iron ore
that would eventually become automobiles. And they take off into
a beautiful day, and as they do, McSorley in the
pilot house actually sees that a big storm is coming up.
He's got a radio that he can get reports through,
and he's a weather ship, so he takes his observations

(05:32):
and adds them to the weather reports to help forecasters
try to develop where the storm's going to go. And
it's quickly ascertained that he's going to get a storm
that's going to come right through from Oklahoma all the
way up to Marquette, and so he starts to calculate
how long that would take, and uses the forecast that
he's getting given as well and has to determine what
he's going to do.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
But McSorley was a well seasoned captain and the coming
storm likely didn't phase him too much, despite some of
the reservations he may have had on the ship.

Speaker 3 (06:03):
McSorley had been a skipper that had been on the
Great Lakes for years and years and worked his way
up to the edman Fitzgerald. He was very stern from
the people that I talked to, very matter of fact guy.
As we talked to a third mate in my documentary
called the Fitzgerald Investigations, he remembered going through a Lake

(06:23):
Superior storm with just ten foot waves, where the Fitzgerald
would flex so crazily, unlike any ship he had been on.
And he looked at McSorley and he said, man, it
should it be bending like this? And McSorley said, sometimes
it scares me so literally. He knew that this ship
was different than other ships. He knew that it would

(06:45):
flex in these storms. But because as a part time
job he did hull inspection, he was very well versed
in the strength of these ships. And he unfortunately pushed
the Fitzgerald way beyond its means. As I did the
investigation documentary, I found the Coastguard looked into it. They
looked at ten years at the Sioux Locks, the worst

(07:05):
storms that ever happened up until nineteen seventy five, and
the one ship that kept pushing every storm and made
it through the locks during those gales was the Edmund Fitzgerald.
So he was a rough weather skipper. He pushed the
heck out of the ship and it eventually broke because
of it.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
So the Fitzgerald pushed forward and soon they would get
company to ride out the storm with in the form
of the Arthur M Anderson, another Laker captain by Bernie Cooper.

Speaker 3 (07:36):
And Cooper also is a You know, these guys are
experienced meteorologists. They have to be. Their lives depend on it,
and they start to figure out when the storm will
come and what they're going to do. As they pass
Isle Royal, they've got a place that they can hide
there from these northwest winds that are starting to build.
They continue going, but they take the northern route. The
northern route goes closer to Canada. Jokingly, some of the

(07:59):
sailors call that the scenic route, because otherwise you might
not ever see land as you go around. The Kiwanaw
would be the last spot as you make that long
haul past Marquette and make your way to the Sioux
Locks of Whitefish Bay. But as they're going up, they
go all the way past Otterhead in a second spot
that they could throw out their anchor. Because it's so

(08:20):
close to the Canadian shore. The waves can't build there,
so you're pretty safe. You could wait it out, but
they didn't. They decided they were going to make it
for Whitefish Bay. They thought that the storm would take
an extra hour to get to them, and they were wrong.
As they got past Caribou, it was the worst the
storm could be and they were in the absolute worst

(08:40):
place they should be, on Lake Superior, where those winds
now could build the entire length of the lake and
crash into the ship and crash into them in the
stern and on their starboard side. So if they had
any problems at all, they were going to get into
real trouble there. And that's what happened to Fitzgerald.

Speaker 1 (09:03):
And you're listening to Rick Mixter tell the story of
the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. As he put it,
how in nineteen seventy five could you have a seven
hundred and twenty nine foot freighter completely vanish? The answer
to that question, you'll hear it after these messages here
on our American Stories, and we continue with our American

(09:41):
stories and our story on the Edmund Fitzgerald, which was
sunk on this day in history in nineteen seventy five.
When we last left off, the Fitzgerald was sailing into
the worst storm on Lake Superior alongside another ship, the
Arthur m Anderson. Let's return to Rick Mixter with the
rest of the story.

Speaker 3 (10:01):
As the fits is going past Caribou, it realizes it
has some kind of problem. They look down the deck
and they could see that at least one of their
vents was missing. These looked like mushrooms that are on
the deck, and they're very large and they're used to
equalize the pressure below decks. But of course fitz has
two thirds of a cargo in there well, as he
noticed that one of those is missing. He also finds

(10:23):
out from his engineers that he's taking on water, so
they're running their pumps to try to keep that water out.
He also mentioned something really unique. He says, our fence
rail is down, and that has been interpreted in a
couple of different ways. The fence rail could be the
guide rails that are on the side of the ship
that perhaps some piece of debris came on, smashed its

(10:45):
vent off and also damaged that part of the rail.
So he's radioing back and forth to the Anderson that
he's got these problems, and then all of a sudden
mentions his radars are out, and he was worried because
the Mixorley had noticed that out of white Fish Bay
there were several saltwater ships and including a big freighter
called the William clay Ford and another one that we're

(11:07):
trying to get out of Whitefish Bay, and he worried
he'd get into a collision situation in the blinding snow
that was happening, so he asked the Anderson to keep
an eye out for them because his radars were out,
so he's going blindly into this storm. The Anderson is
now trying to close the distance because the Fitzgerald, being
a faster boat, was a or several miles ahead of them.

(11:31):
The last broadcast came from Morgan Clark. The first mate
on board the Anderson who asked the Fitzgerald, how are
you making out with your problems? And the Fitzgerald McSorley
answered back, we are holding our own, and unfortunately, in
a blinding snow squall, the Fitzgerald disappears. It disappears from
radar because the blinding snow also blinded the radar out.

(11:56):
When it finally clears, Anderson can't see the Fitzgerald, and
now their job is trying to notify the coast guard
that a seven nine foot freighter is missing.

Speaker 4 (12:06):
The last time that you talk about at what time
I want to work. I had think I was making
out with the problem, that he loved those MPs, and
he had a lift, and he said he was holding
his own. The last time I stopped with him that
he was holding his own, and that's the last time
I love contact.

Speaker 3 (12:22):
After that, good nobody wanted to believe that the Fitzgerald
was gone, especially the coast guards, and we're very lucky
that immediately the coast Guard started recording all of these conversations,
so we actually have the conversations as the cooper is
trying to tell the coast guard that they have missed

(12:43):
the Fitzgerald. So here the Anderson is now making the
safety of Whitefish Bay after now twenty nine guys have
been lost, a massive steel modern freighter has been lost
to the storm, and they call the coast guard who
tells them, we don't have a ship that can go
out there. So the coastguard has to convince the captain
of the Anderson that just witnessed this freighter sinking to

(13:06):
turn around, come out of the safety of Whitefish Bay
and go back into that killer storm. And he definitely
did not want to do that. Right from the radio broadcast,
we hear Cooper say, you know, there's going to be
two of us on the bottom. You know, he really
believed going back out there was going to be, you know,
a bad mistake. But he knew he was the only choice.

(13:27):
So they went back out there. You know, at that time,
it was sixty mile an hour wins. It was going
to take him two hours to go seventeen miles with
those intense winds that blowing right against them. And I
don't think they believed that anybody would survive it. You know,
with big thirty foot waves and water temperatures that were
just above freezing. There really wasn't much chance, and unfortunately

(13:50):
it was a futile attempt. But I think that that
was the spirit of the lakes. You do what you can.
First safe make sure your crew is going to survive it,
and then you know, if you can safely do it,
you go out there and make the rescue. And he
did to the truest tradition of sailors, you know, try
to find those guys. But unfortunately, you know, as we know,

(14:11):
nobody survived and no bodies were found.

Speaker 2 (14:14):
Then came the task of actually finding the final resting
place of the Fitzgerald on the bottom of Lake Superior.

Speaker 3 (14:23):
It didn't take them very long, so they used this
robot called the Curve three to not only find it,
but to secure it. The Curve three came out and
they flew that down to five hundred and fifty feet
and as they saw the bow they noticed it was upright.
But as they went around the stern section, which was
broken over one hundred feet away, they noticed that the

(14:44):
lettering was upside down. And the Coastguard investigators immediately thought
the rov or the robot was inverted, and the pilot said, no,
it's not. This is the back section. Two hundred feet
of the Edmund Fitzgerald that was upside down. So the
horrible act of it tearing apart somewhere in the water

(15:05):
column actually flipped the entire stern upside down, and the
bow section is resting proudly upright on the bottom where
you can actually see every deck in the pilot house
as well.

Speaker 2 (15:16):
And there the Fitzgerald sat a gravesite for her twenty
nine crew, none of which were ever recovered. Immediately there
were questions on why this modern lake freighter sank, and
these questions still brew today. Did she hit bottom, did
she get hit by a rogue wave, or did her
hatch covers cave in. Answers were hard to find, as

(15:39):
the wreck site was soon protected by the Canadian government
at the request of the families of the victims, so
very few people have actually seen the wreck. But in
nineteen ninety four Rick did.

Speaker 3 (15:52):
In ninety four, we took the submersible Delta, which had
been famous for diving the Lusitania, and we went down
in this two man yellow submarine, and I was the
third dive on the Delta expedition. When you dive a shipwreck,
you get down to it. If you're free diving it,
or you're doing it on scuba equipment where you don't
have a submarine around you. You can actually go up

(16:15):
to it and touch it, you know. The cold steel
and the immense size of these vessels is what really
becomes apparent to you. The Fitzgerald was surreal in the
fact that I was down five hundred feet the light
stopped at about two hundred and fifty, so it's pitch
black beyond you know, whatever you have on board your submarine,
which we had lots of lights, so it becomes very surreal.

(16:39):
As you look through the porthole, you can see glimpses
of the ship, but not the whole ship at the
same time. So as we went past the name, the
letters are, you know, over a foot and a half tall.
I'm trying to remember exactly how big they were, but
that's what first captured my mind was it said Edmund Fitzgerald,
and it was horribly horn up on the port side.

(17:01):
So the collision with the bottom had just ripped apart
the spar deck from the side of the ship, and
the name had been scratched up and beat up so
badly that it took my breath away. And as we
went around the bow and to see the bow was
actually bent almost ninety degrees. The force of the storm
was just incredible. And then the tiny details, as you'd

(17:24):
see a blanket hanging out of the pilot house, or
you go up to the top and you'd see the
radars that were you know, Panasonic on top, it's a
plastic like just a little sliver of plastic ripped off
and the wires were just there. So you start to
piece together the story from that. Each one of those
pieces not only awed me, but you know, you were

(17:46):
just so excited to see this great shipwreck. And then
when I came up, we actually had a power left
in the submarine, and so it was decided that the
owner of the tugboat who we were renting from, would
actually get to take his son down there for a look.
And we're eating lunch and we got a report from
the submarine through the sona phone the sound waves from

(18:08):
the it's like a radio that goes through water, and
we found out that they found a missing crewman. So
we went from this incredible high of me just visiting
the most famous shipwreck on the Great Lakes, the largest
shipwreck on the Great Lakes, at five hundred and fifty
feet down to a horrible low of Oh my god,
there are twenty nine people that were lost there. You

(18:29):
lose that connection, I think, because you're in the sub
and you're safe when you're diving. It's really apparent that
these shipwrecks are you know, this is a final grave,
because you have this water around you, and you've got
to be so careful when you're scuba diving to do that.
I never lost that connection, but I think I did
on the Fitzgerald because I felt so protected in the submarine.

(18:52):
But that immediately was erased when they found a first
missing crewman, a body lying off of the bow of
the shipwreck carrying a life jacket. There's nothing more sobering
than that, and instantly we were transported back to this
is a grave site.

Speaker 2 (19:22):
The day after the wreck, the Mariner's Church in Detroit
rang its bell twenty nine times for each of the
crewmen lost, and this ceremony continues in Michigan today of
the ship's actual bell, raised in nineteen ninety five and
kept at Whitefish Point, but for the families of those lost.
On November tenth, nineteen seventy five, the Edmund Fitzgerald is

(19:45):
more than just a song. It's a tragedy that will
always be remembered. For our American Stories. I'm Monty Montgomery.

Speaker 1 (20:01):
And great job is always to Monty Montgomery, A terrific
job producing that piece, and a real special thanks to
Rick Mixter. The story of the Edmund Fitzgerald here on
our American Stories.