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The Book Review
The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, 50 Years Later
00:39:33
On Nov. 10, 1975, during a calamitous storm, the Edmund Fitzgerald sunk below the waves of Lake Superior. All 29 men aboard went down with the vessel. Just in time for the disaster's fiftieth anniversary, John U. Bacon has written a new account of the story, “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald." In this week’s episode of the Book Review podcast, Bacon spoke with Gilbert Cruz about his new book.
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- [00:00]
A
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- [00:38]
B
I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast. It's arguably the most famous shipwreck in American history. Fifty years ago this month, on November 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald went down on in Lake Superior with all hands aboard with no survivors and no eyewitnesses to the disaster. There's always been a sense of mystery around the sinking of the Fitzgerald. Add to that a surprise hit song, Gordon Lightfoot's ballad, the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and it's no surprise that the story of the Great Lakes freighter has lived on for all these decades. This week we are joined by John U. Bacon, author of the new book the Gales of the Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. John, thank you for being on the Book Review podcast.
- [01:31]
C
Hey, Gilbert, thank you.
- [01:33]
B
Now, you appear to be a Midwesterner through and through. I am a New Yorker, an East Coaster. I don't know the Midwest as well as I would like, but I get a sense that the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald is one that sort of lingers there. When do you first recall hearing about this ship?
- [01:52]
C
Right on all points, first of all. And second of all, yes, the morning after the accident on the Today show. I was a sixth grader going to school, watching the show, and we all talked about it once we got to sixth grade, my class. And that's always been a part of the zeitgeist around here, certainly. So eight states border the Great Lakes, and I think everyone has got their own story about it pretty much.
- [02:13]
B
And where did you grow up?
- [02:14]
C
In Ann Arbor, Michigan.
- [02:16]
B
You grew up in Michigan. You've written several books about Michigan football, you've worked at several Midwestern newspapers, and now you're turning to this tale that sort of has its own legend. What was the thing that led you to this story, which has been told in various different ways over the past many decades?
- [02:37]
C
I grew up on all the Great Lakes. I've been on all of them at some point or other. And I did live in Princeton for a little while and written for New York Times, Time Magazine, year old Shop and Smothers, but undeniably a corn fed boy. So let's own that. But it kind of haunts you when you're on these lakes. And people out east don't realize when you're on one of these lakes, you can't see across them, they're that big. And it's not because the mist or the fog, it's because of the curvature of the earth. You cannot see across Lake Michigan or Lake Huron. So it's always part of it. And of course, the song plays endlessly around here certainly. And I think it does somewhat nationally. And what drove me on this, the mystery of it, I know, is a big part of it. And this stack of books behind me that I've read for this book, almost all of them are in the, what I call the whodunit class. Trying to figure out exactly what happened, which is no small task, I grant you. But that's not what drove me. It's the 29 men. I didn't know anything about them. I didn't know who they were, their names, even what their jobs were like, what their lives are like. Why does shipping matter? What are the Great Lakes like when you see it from their point of view and not mine? And even what the families are like, where do they live, how did they survive without their father and their uncle and their causing, in some cases, their boyfriends. So I wanted to find all that out. And that is the untold story of my story. At least. I got to six crewmen who had never talked to the media before, who obviously were not on the ship that night because all 29 did go down with the ship, including two guys who were on the ship that that year, who knew the crew, knew the captain. All this and I got to half the families, 14 of the 29. So that truly is the untold story. And none of them ever talked to a reporter before.
- [04:10]
B
I am definitely gonna ask you about the families and how you gained access to them. That is, as you say, the untold story here. For those who perhaps only know the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald through the Lightfoot Song, I was wondering if you could give us as tightly as you can, a basic story of what happened on that night. This book is about the history of the ship. It's about a lot of things, but what happened on that night.
- [04:35]
C
First of all, the Emet Fitzgerald was in fact the Titanic of its era. When it was launched, it was the greatest ship on the Great Lakes. Out of three, that's no small title. It was the biggest, it was one of the fastest. It broke all the records in the Great Lakes for cargo. It was a heavyweight, it was a sprinter, it was a workhorse, it was all the above. And it was by far the most famous ship on the Great Lakes. People would wait in Duluth and at the Soo Locks at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, Detroit, Port Huron, Toledo, to see this ship go by and cheer it on. It was that big a deal, actually. So on that night you had the perfect storm. You had two storms coming in, one from western Canada, one from southwest United States. That's never good, of course. And they combine over Lake Superior, the biggest in the most northern of the lakes, right in front of Whitefish Bay, like a catcher, guardian, home plate. And that's what they're trying to get to. And they only knew about half that information. The forecasting, the communication was pretty lackadaisical, unfortunately. So they didn't know much about that that night where the Fitz itself was. And one of my experts said, based on computer models they've run since, it managed to find itself in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time. And that means 100 mile per hour winds, that is hurricane force, and waves that were on average 30, but about 10 that were 40. We can calculate three or four that were 50 foot waves and one or two probably 60 foot waves. Consider for a moment, this ship only has 11ft out of the water carrying 26,000 tons of iron ore. And that's on a good day and this is not a good day. So this thing is getting swamped by a six story building of water every four to eight seconds. That's not good.
- [06:11]
B
I remember maybe when I was in high school, the film A Perfect Storm came out. The poster, that film is a small fishing trawler that is coming up against what looks like the biggest wave that has ever existed. When you say there are a couple of waves out there that were 30, 40, 50ft, even higher maybe that just seems unfathomable to me.
- [06:33]
C
And happily to me also I've got some experts who've been in the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean for 30, 40 years. And they said, you know, I saw 20 foot waves once and trust me, that's enough. Things go wrong very quickly with 20 foot waves, naturally. So you're right about that. And this ship was 729ft long. That's one foot short of Detroit's Renaissance center, the biggest building between Toronto and Chicago, a 73 story building. So very different dimensions, but only 75ft wide, which is less than home plate to first base by 15ft. And the reason for these crazy dimensions and these ships are built nowhere else in the world. Two things. You want to carry as much cargo as you possibly can naturally from the northern lakes, where the iron ore is, the lumber, the copper, the limestone, you name it, and get it down to Gary, Indiana, Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland. It all has to slip through this very narrow bottleneck called the Soo Locks, which is at the tip of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, bordering Canada. So that's why they are 10 to 1 ratio of length to width, which, again, you'd never build this in the ocean, and they don't. So that makes it fragile in rough seas.
- [07:39]
B
I don't know that I had ever seen a photo, actually of the Edmund Fitzgerald. And when I first saw it not too long ago, I had that reaction. I said, this does not look like a real ship. Why is this. Why is this ship so long?
- [07:52]
C
Well, it's kind of a giraffe's neck. Evolution has made it very odd. And I've been on two of these ships, the Arthur Anderson and the Wilford Sykes, that were out with the Fitzgerald that night. So I got very lucky on that. You have to get on these things to even understand the scale of these things and the bizarre dimensions. And you're right. If you live on the east coast or the west coast, you have never seen a ship that looks like this.
- [08:12]
B
Yeah, I'm an ocean boy, so, yeah, these ships were quite surprising to me. Your book is as much a story of everything that made the Fitzgerald so important in its time as it is the Fitzgerald. It's a story of the ship. It's a story of the men on board and their families, but particularly early on, it's a story of the lakes. It's a story of the industry around the lakes. It's a story of why that industry was important to America in the middle of the 20th century. Why were all those things necessary to weave throughout the early part of this story before you get to the ship? The men, the families, the disaster?
- [08:53]
C
Once I learned more about the MFs, Gerald, and how special it was, I realized it is the apex of this very large pyramid that starts with iron ore in Minnesota. And John D. Rockefeller is the first guy to figure out how to get that out profitably. And of course he did. But that steel, the steel, the copper, the limestone, the grain, the lumber, all this stuff. The car in your driveway, the cement in your basement, and the food in your Table. It comes from the Great Lakes. And I did not fully appreciate that even being a corn fed Midwesterner until I started doing the research here. And from 1945 to 1975, the same industry that obviously was the arsenal of democracy in World War II ended up being the epicenter of the world economy. It was truly Silicon Valley before Silicon Valley, and in some ways more so. Silicon Valley has Seattle to compete with Austin, the Chinese. There was no competition during those three decades, basically. So here's a fun fact. You can win bar bets on Gilbert unless they hear your podcast. First name. The Great Lakes city that in 1960 was bigger than Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, Nashville, Tennessee and San Jose, California.
- [09:59]
B
I feel like I know this because I read your book, but I might get it wrong. Should I guess I might get it wrong?
- [10:04]
C
Go ahead.
- [10:04]
B
Is it Toledo?
- [10:05]
C
It is. Toledo, Ohio. Well done. I read the book and you passed the quiz. Toledo, Ohio was bigger than all five of those. Those five cities now have 11 major league teams. So Christine Brennan of Good Morning America fame in USA Today, a friend of mine, she's from Toledo, she said, we didn't drive to Detroit to fly to Florida. We flew from Toledo. It was that big.
- [10:27]
B
That's incredible. The Great Lakes. I gotta say, this is a very sad story that you document here, but it actually made me want to go to the Great Lakes in a perverse way. They just seem giant and fascinating and full of their own amazing history.
- [10:44]
C
That's probably true. And a few of the reviewers have said that this is a love letter to the Great Lakes. And it was not really my intent. But I'm not offended by that. They're underestimated. And whenever I have friends in from either coast or Japan or Spain and they look across, they can't believe it. They're called the Sweetwater oceans. Fresh water. But if had to pick, one surprise that I had in doing this research is that for the experienced commercial sailors, not the sailboat kind, but the kind on these freighters in the ocean and in the Great Lakes, they say the Great Lakes are more dangerous than the Atlantic Ocean and it's not even close. And I would never have guessed that in a million years. And frankly, Gilbert, I needed 10 experts to tell me that before I actually believed that. But they all. They're all consistent.
- [11:26]
B
Why do these sailors say that the Great Lakes are more dangerous than some of the oceans?
- [11:30]
C
It's three things in a nutshell. One, salt water. Salt water on the oceans blunts the top of the waves, makes them nice and smooth, and spreads them out. So the waves on the Atlantic are 10 to 16 seconds apart. The waves in the Great Lakes are 4 to 8 seconds apart. And that can matter in a storm, naturally. Also the storms. The storm you have on the Ocean can be 500, a thousand miles away. And the Great Lakes are called locally occurring storms, which means the damn thing is right over your head. And I've heard countless stories, I've seen it myself, that these things can whip up very, very quickly in ways that the ocean usually can't. And the third thing is just the traffic aspect in the ocean, of course, you leave New York and you point your ship towards Portugal and you can go on autopilot for a week, basically. Here, only two thirds of a trip is open water. It's canals, bridges, shs islands, other ships, naturally. And that keeps a captain on his or her toes. And these days it is his and hers.
- [12:24]
B
By the way, this book is about this freighter. You think of a freighter, a freighter full of iron ore, a freighter full of taconite, a word I had never heard before. And you just think of a filthy ship. But as you say, the Fitzgerald did have this outside reputation. Not only was it the grandest ship that the Great Lakes had ever seen, it was fancy at points, you know, it would have guests on who enjoyed amazing meals and somehow did not get covered in ore dust over the entirety of their trip. How did it get that reputation?
- [12:57]
C
By design. The man himself, Edmund Fitzgerald, was the CEO of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance, still a gigantic concern. $31 billion, I believe, last year, Senator in Milwaukee. And he had two edicts when he commissioned the ship. One, it'd be the greatest ship in the Great Lakes in every way. And two, that they not name it after him. And of course, they quickly violated that when he left the boardroom for five minutes. One of their tricks they played on him, basically, and said eight to nothing. The vote, Neil. It's going to be called the mfs, Gerald. But he wanted even to be the most luxurious chip on the Great Lakes. And that seems utterly oxymoronic, if not a waste of money, because you're hauling 26,000 tons of iron ore. As you say, it's not for you and me per se, but they had carpeted living areas, they had wood paneling, they had air conditioning and TV. When hotels in 1958 into the north didn't have that, they had a galley that was better than any hotels. And they would get chefs from hotels to work on these ships. And why do you do all that? It seems again, a Waste of money. You want the best captain, you want the best crew. Get them through their bellies is not a bad way to do it. Of course. And they had two gorgeous state rooms for the VIPs that you mentioned. These are the guys who run National Steel or Ford Motor Co. And guess what? They're your clients. So when you give them something that even money can't buy, only 30 trips a year could you get on this ships for that they go 50, but the VIPs can only go 30. Guess what? You are loaded up every ship. They never had to wait for a client for cargo and they never had to beg people to take their ship. They had the best captain and the best crew, always. So that strategy worked quite well. And it was all appointed by J.L. hudson, which at the time was the biggest department store in the world, based in Detroit. Later on Hudson, Dayton and all that. But they did a great job hearing.
- [14:38]
B
You talk about Fitzgerald. The man's desire to have his company ship be the greatest out there on the inland seas. Just thinking about all these different aspects of the story, the economic incentives for getting that iron from one point to another as quickly as possible were pretty high. And captains were competitive. And as much as we talk about the effects of the weather on this disaster, while one could never draw a direct connection between economics and the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. What was it like to be a captain on one of these ships and feel like you needed to move as quickly as possible, even if there was a little weather? In this case, it was a lot of weather.
- [15:28]
C
These guys are basically in the same competitive field as an NFL coach. And it turns out the way these things work, you get flagged to get into the soo locks, for example. So you get to a certain point and you call it in. Whoever's there first goes next. It's first come, first serve. If you lose by 30 seconds, you just lost that one by an hour. Because it takes an hour to go through the soo locks. And then when you're trying to unload in Detroit or Toledo or Cleveland, if you lose that one by a minute, you lose by 14 hours. Because that's how long it takes to unload one of these things. And okay, you may have your own opinions about that, but guess what? The corporate bosses in Cleveland have their own opinions about that. And as one of my experts said, those guys bet with their wallets and the guys on board bet with their lives. So this compulsion, greed is certainly one aspect drove everything. And then on top of that, built into it is the DNA of these captains who end up being just highly competitive guys who really can't turn it off.
- [16:20]
B
The captain of the Fitzgerald was known as one of the best freshwater captains around, maybe the best at the time. Ernest McSorley. He, in a terrible irony was supposed to or said he was going to retire after the 1975 season. Tell us about this man who by all accounts had more experience than almost anyone out there.
- [16:46]
C
That's true. And that was the plum assignment in the Great lakes out of 300 was to be the captain of this ship. So it was a pinnacle of his career. Certainly he became a Captain at age 31, youngest in the Great Lakes at that time. And then he's still a captain, of course, when he's 63. So that's more than half his life. By all accounts, the best captain on the Great Lakes, as you say. I've got a great quote from Craig Sullivan, who had been on the ship in 1972, who said, I saw that man park 729ft of steel between two freighters with 5ft on either side and didn't touch a damn thing. Like he's backing up his Ford pickup truck. But unlike his peers, he was not a tyrant, he was not a bully. And most of these guys were. It's kind of like coaches and teachers and bosses 50 years ago. He was beloved, and that was very rare. And so beloved that his crew would follow him from ship to ship to ship as he was promoted. So unusual combination of qualities. But as you say, he had promised his wife before that season started that this would be his last season. Five of his buddies in the pilot house mainly said the same thing to their wives. Then they tack on one more trip because he's passed his quota for cargo. He gets a bonus. And this bonus is to pay for his wife's medical care. She's in 24 hour facility at that point, I think for cancer. I can't quite nail that down. But some guys have said that. So this is for her medical care. He's not being greedy, he's not being egotistical. He's trying to take care of home base, basically. So if you're writing this for Hollywood, they'd probably say too much. Yeah, but this is true.
- [18:11]
B
We'll be right back.
- [18:29]
C
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B
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- [19:22]
A
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- [20:02]
B
Welcome back. This is the Book Review Podcast. I'm Gilbert Cruz and I'm here with John U. Bacon, author of the Gales of the Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. You write in the book everyone on the Titanic knew the night she went down that the iceberg was the culprit, yet no one could find the ship. For 73 years, the Edmund Fitzgerald has been the opposite. Finding the ship has proven far easier than determining why it sank. What happened? What happened? First of all, tell us how they found the ship and then tell us what the view was at the time of what happened and now tell us how that view has been complicated.
- [20:43]
C
They found it very quickly. They found it that week. They found it from a sonar being dragged by Woodrush Coast Guard ship. And now what did it? The Coast Guard claimed early on that it was the hatch covers had either been not sufficiently latched or poorly latched or not latched at all. Which basically blames the three deckhands and the first mate who's in charge of those people. So. So that was pretty quickly thrown out by most experts that I've talked to. A because I can see a Lot of them being hatched properly, latched properly on the bottom. So. And I've got two witnesses who were on the ship that year who were also deckhands and they said there's no way ever you'd even leave port in November without all 1400 of these Kessner C clamp looking devices all clamped by these three peers of theirs they knew very well. So they weren't slackers by any means. So that seems very unlikely. Then you're into all kinds of other theories. And man, there's a book per theory, at least at this point. I think the most likely are a. It's overloaded. We know that pretty much for sure.
- [21:38]
B
When you say overloaded, you mean they put on more iron ore than they or they took on more iron ore than they should have?
- [21:44]
C
Yes. And part of that was allowed by the government, as the government allowed from 69, 71 and 73, what's called freeboard. Freeboard is how much space you have from the water line to the top of your deck. And the government determines how much that is. It's called a Plimsoll line. And the government allowed the Fitzgerald and the other ships to go from 14ft above water to then 11ft above water in just five years, basically. And the engineers did not design it for that. And as one of my experts said, that doesn't matter most days until you're in a storm and then it matters a lot.
- [22:18]
B
So because you're closer to the water.
- [22:20]
C
You'Re close to the water and get this, on the Great Lakes and not on the ocean, because of the water I described earlier, you can have your bow stuck in a 30 foot wave at one end, nothing supporting it in the middle, and your stern in a second 30 foot wave at the end with nothing supporting that. Then it sags, of course, in the middle and then it goes over those waves and it hogs, which is the opposite of sagging as it drapes over that wave. Well, do that back and forth 10,000 times a day because that's how many waves you're going to see do that to a paperclip. What happens if you do a paperclip like that 10,000 times is going to snap. And the Bradley snapped in 1958 and the Morel snapped in 1966. So that's another real possibility here. And the question is, did it snap on the surface or after it already hit the floor seconds later, basically. So we're not quite sure about that. Another possibility, and I tend to believe it, is that he went over six fathoms shoal. A fathom is six feet. So six fathoms is therefore 36ft. But Gilbert, it's also false advertising in itself. In some places it's only 11ft and that is no deeper than your backyard pool. So a ship that draws 29ft on a good day, and this is not a good day, has no business being anywhere near this little spot of land in the northeast corner of Lake Superior. So he might have gone over that. McSorley. And Bernie Cooper, the captain of the Arthur Anderson, thinks that he did on his radar. He thought he saw it. So that's one possibility. If he went over Six Fathom Shoal, they almost certainly bottomed out. If they bottomed out, they would have done damage to the hull. And in which case that would explain why he did admit Maxorily. He's got a starboard list, which means it's tilting permanently to the right side and he's riding that the whole way in. That can only happen a few different ways. And one of them, of course, is water in the hull. So that's a real possibility there. Once you're listing, you can't steer it nearly as well. You're also far more vulnerable to any of these big waves pinning you down or cracking you in half like a three legged animal in the wild. You're in trouble.
- [24:21]
B
You are describing a lot of different possibilities, but you're also describing a lot of different factors. And I think you say at one point in the book it is very unlikely that only one factor led to the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. So whether it was mental fatigue, whether it was a wave, whether he bottomed out on this shoal, it was possibly a combination of all those things that led to water getting into the ship and the ship going down so quickly. He just happened to go into one of the worst storms that had been on that lake in a very long time.
- [24:56]
C
Yeah. One of my experts, John Tanner, the former superintendent of the Great Lakes Maritime academy, he had two cadets on this ship out of the 29. He said, look, it's rarely in a ship this size, this good, it's rarely one thing. It's a series of dominoes that start falling. And once they start falling, it can get scary very fast. What do you have here? You have the storm of the century. You have a ship that's really not designed to do what it's doing now in terms of the weight. And also, by the way, an aside, they swapped out rivets for welds when they built the ship. Why? Because they're 1.2 million pounds lighter. That's more iron ore you can put on your ship. Of course, there's that factor and there's, like I said, the shoals and some other factors. It's a lot of things at once. I tend to side with Ruth Hudson, her only child. Bruce Hudson is a deckhand on this ship, and he's lost, of course, and her, I think, memorable line is only 30 know 29 men and God. And they're not talking. So there are no witnesses here. So we have to guess. But those are pretty good guesses right there.
- [25:52]
B
As you said at the beginning, the. The story of the actual cause for the Edmund Fitzgerald is likely never to be known. And that was not something that you had set out to do or could reasonably achieve. But you were able to fill in the backstory for a lot of these people on the ship. You know, I guess if you grew up in the Midwest, maybe you knew 29 men went down. If you listened to the song by Gordon Lightfoot, you knew there were all these men on the ship. But maybe, or very likely, you had no idea who they were. And in reading your book, we get to find out who they are, and we also get to find out who they left behind. I was wondering how you reached and how you convinced a lot of these family members who had never really spoken robustly about their story to do so after all these years.
- [26:44]
C
Part of that was luck, frankly. But to get to these people. These are not rich or famous people. I'm used to doing college football books, as you point out, so they're accustomed to this, and they're not that concerned about what you have to say, frankly. These people are necessarily very concerned about what you're going to say about their uncle or their father or their boyfriend, because it might be the only time they're ever really discussed. None of these people had ever talked to a reporter before. So there's that hurdle there. A guy named Bruce Lynn is the executive director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point. That is the closest land point to where the ship went down. 17 miles out there, and they have the bell from the ship brought up in his museum. He's got to know the families very well over a couple decades, basically, and gain their trust, and rightly so. He's a very honorable man. Luckily for me, he did his master's work at Eastern Michigan University right near Ann Arbor. So he heard me on Michigan Public Radio all these years talking about football. The guy went to Ohio State. He's a Buckeye, went to the University of Michigan. We got past this, but he was a listener. And then he read my previous book, the Great Halifax Explosion. So he liked that. So we started getting along quite well. He essentially gave me the keys to the kingdom. When they all came in for the anniversary three years ago on November 10th at his museum and his they put him up in their cruise quarters. I met them then we started talking. And one thing I assured them is I will send you your quotes before they go out to make sure we got them right. Once I did that, that certainly increased trust as well. And trust me, I put these poor folks through. I know several in person interviews, but five or ten calls each probably, and then a back and forth and all this stuff. It's not an invitation to write the book. I'm not trying to pander to these people. I have to write the book I got to write. But they can at least be assured they're going to be quoted accurately about their fathers. And that clarity matters a great deal to them. And I'm pleased to report they're very pleased with the book.
- [28:34]
B
What is your sense? I'm sure it differs from family to family, but if you feel comfortable generalizing or characterizing, at least it's been 50 years now. Are they tired of talking about it, thinking about it? Are some of them and the other ones want to keep talking and thinking about it in order to keep the memory of their loved ones alive. Like when you're a family member of someone who's been involved in a famous disaster, I imagine you can exist anywhere within that spectrum.
- [29:02]
C
That's true. And I talked to 14 of the families out of the 29, so not all. And as you say, there's a range, naturally, but they've already seen the ghouls and the goblins and the grifters, so obviously they're used to that. But I think they all seem to have the sense this is their chance to tell the story in full. And a lot of these guys got their own chapters, so that certainly felt good to them. And then we got it right. So I think that they felt almost cathartic, I think would be fair to say. And I saw one of them, Deb Shampeau on the book tour in Milwaukee last week and gave me a big hug and she's, you know, teary eyed and so on. And that's the reaction I'm getting from them, which certainly feels good. I didn't make these guys out to be angels. I mean there's plenty of Drinking and other stuff. But they're real and they're sealed in human. I think you have to care for these guys once you know them. I can also say, too surprising to me, they really don't care what the final answer is on how the ship went down. They said they did care for five or 10 years maybe, but now it's been 50 years. And as one of them said to me, what can it possibly change at this stage? And you gotta say, she's right.
- [30:01]
B
Why do you think shipwrecks in particular hold such a morbid or just such a fascination for people? I remember as a kid being both obsessed with and terrified of course, at the story of the Titanic. That feeling was recreated this weekend when I was googling images for the Edmund Fitzgerald and there are pictures of it at the bottom of Lake Superior. And I felt like a little kid again in that I was actually scared to look at these images. But I also wanted to at the same time. What is this dynamic that exists with shipwrecks?
- [30:34]
C
That is something that didn't even occur to me until I started my work. And then after a while you realize this is a central question and it was not one of my questions that got me started. I think it's just something truly elemental, fundamental to our existence. Titanic. Consider that for a second. It goes down in 1912. The movie comes out, I think in 1999. It's three hours long and I sat down pretty sure I knew how this was going to end. And yet it grips you and you see the water coming in and you know my. My breathing is halted. It has that elemental aspect to it. The family members also have had the additional issue of trying to imagine their fathers and cousins and uncles last minutes. And they all. I was amazed how many of them have dreamt about this for years afterwards, continually, years they try to figure out based on the shifts where they're loved one would be in the engine room, the pilot house, in the galley, wherever.
- [31:30]
B
That's terrible.
- [31:31]
C
I guess it is terrible. There's one Soless is that almost everyone agrees, despite the endless debate on what happened, that it happened, the end happened very quickly. And the best proof of that is that Captain McSorty again one of the best in the Great Lakes, he didn't have apparently 10 seconds to get out word sos that this ship is going down and give the coordinates the lifeboats had. There's no sign of them ever being tampered with. They were not being released. We have found one crew member down at the bottom with a Life jacket. Nobody else. They do take solace in that. But that brings us back to your question. Water is our friend. We need it to live. The Great Lakes are fun, as you say. This is kind of Jaws on a nice day, right? And when it turns nasty, it turns nasty fast. It's amazing how quickly water becomes your enemy and when you see it coming into your ship, how ominous that really is. And that is something beyond rational thinking. That is, I mean, it is rational thinking. You can drown, you can sink, but there's something. You're a kid from the Bronx, I'm the kid from Ann Arbor. I am landlocked. And yet it still gets me in my body, in my breathing. When I see these scenes that you just saw this weekend, it's elemental.
- [32:39]
B
What, if anything, changed in terms of shipping on the Great Lakes, in terms of safety, safety standards? It's my understanding that there's, there's just basically not really been any major disasters following what happened to the Fitzgerald.
- [32:55]
C
That's correct. The, the laws, the regulations have not changed very much. And maybe they should have. But what has changed is three basic things. One, the forecasting has greatly improved. And honestly, you've got better GPs and weather on your phone than these guys had in the pilot house. But even at that time, they could have done a better job reporting to the Fitzgerald what was out there. Fitzgerald knew very little about the storm that was coming, and that's part of the problem. Two, as I already just said, communication. Not just knowing the information, but getting that on a regular basis to all these captains on the lakes. And three, basic common sense. The photo you see of me on the flap of the book is taken on November 11th of last year, the day after the Whitefish Point 49th anniversary, with the family members there and so on. Well, I'm looking pretty grim because it's about a 30, 40 mile per hour wind. 10 foot waves are out there. You know, 10 to 15ft maybe pretty bad, but nothing like they saw that night. Every single ship on my phone program, the maritime program, every single ship at Whitefish Bay was anchored that day. And I guarantee you, Gilbert, 50 years ago, not one of them would be so the same greed of the companies and machismo of the captains that has been flipped 180. And I've heard from many experts, these guys will tuck in behind a peninsula or an island at 30 mile per hour winds every time. And they never did that before. So common sense has finally kicked in. And get this, there are 6,000 shipwrecks between 1875 and 1975. That is an insane number. And that's the low number. Some say 10,000, some say more, but let's call it 6,000. That's one per week every week for a century. 30,000 crew lost since November 10, 1975. There have been zero. Exactly zero. And the families are very aware of that record and they're very proud of it. So their suffering has not been for. For naught, that no one's had to go through this since. And they feel very good about that.
- [34:48]
B
I've saved my questions about the song until towards the end of our conversation here. The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the ballad by Gordon Lightfoot. How important was this song to, would you say? To the longevity of our knowledge about this shipwreck. Would we still be talking about the fits if it wasn't for this song?
- [35:10]
C
Any author on a book in the Edmund Fitzgerald better be humble enough to admit that without that song there is no book, period. There are no books. That song is everything. And I grand you. I was just with the band in Aurelio, Ontario, which is Gordon Lightfoot's hometown for Lightfoot days. They invited me up there for that and I made the case that honestly, without the song coming out about six months after the accident, that's pretty fast by music standards, certainly without the spotlight that put on this, this tragedy. I think that song helped save thousands of lives because that embarrassed the industry so much that they had reports, official reports, not just, you know, books coming out, official reports coming out three and four years after the fact, which never happened before. So again, 6,000 ships for a century, zero for 50 years. And let's also very easily admit there are 6,000 shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. Name one and this is it. And even in Michigan, Gilbert, it's all we can name is this ship. So this, the song is everything.
- [36:08]
B
So this was a song that he was noodling around with. He based the melody on an Irish Sea shanty that he recalled hearing when he was a kid. And it's an interesting story how it was recorded. How was it recorded.
- [36:25]
C
Gordon Lightfoot is an experienced sailor, very serious. He had the Port Huron, Michigan to Mackinac sailboat race. That's like a three day race. I've done it and it's brutal. So this guy was pretty serious. He's doing this song that he'd heard when he was three and a half, his first musical memory. And Monday, November 10th, he's at his attic in Toronto working on this song. He has no lyrics and he has the thought as he's pouring coffee to keep himself going. That, man, it must be hell on Lake Superior tonight. He felt this connection with this group from the start, basically. So he's working on this. He takes the articles, and he's pretty serious about it. The song is about 95% accurate. He did actually a very good job, I think. But they're recording this, the album, in March of 76 in Toronto, and they've got five days to record 11 songs. This is not one of them. He did not think it was ready. So they're doing the other songs after three and a half days. They finish early and he says thank you very much to the band members. And they're literally packing up their instruments. And the producer comes on the intercom and says, why don't you try that song you've been, as you say, noodling around with, which is utterly fair. And he says, it's not ready. It's not ready. Producer says, look, man, I'm charging you for five days, whether you use five days or not. I'm here right now. So is the band. We're not going to be here in, you know, two days, so why not give it a shot? He says, okay. So he asked the lights to be dim and he's quiet for, like, a minute to recapture this mood in his own heart. And then the drummer, Barry Keane, who's, God bless him, still alive and still sharp, he says, what do you want me to do? And he has no idea because he's never heard the song. And he says, I'll give you a nod when I want you to come in. He says, okay. Well, he goes for a minute and a half, and back then, that's how long a song is, pretty much. And Barry Keane thinks he's forgotten all about me. No, he hasn't. At 1:34 exactly. And, yes, I've measured that several times. Gordon Lightfoot turns to Barry Keane, gives him the nod. That's when Barry, I think, very courageously comes in with a very strong drum. Fill of the Storm basically just makes it up. They play for six and a half minutes. They finish the song. They kind of look around and say, you know what? That wasn't half bad. Let's try it again. Not as good. They tried it three or four more times that afternoon. They tried it five or six times the next day. Never as good. And this is the crazy part. The song you hear on the radio today is not just a first take, which, as Barry said, those happen once in a blue moon. But they happen. This is the first time the band has ever played the song. And Barry has been on 500 albums, by the way. And Barry says, I don't think it's ever happened before or since in the history of records. And I asked why, and he said, because this is not a song you think your way through. This is a song you have to feel. And if you feel it, the technical aspects are not as important as the feeling the listener's gonna get. And that's why I think it works.
- [39:09]
B
A very unique song. Certainly unique in terms of the type of songs that begin hits, as you say, six plus minutes long, doesn't have a chorus, is a real story song. And Gordon Lightfoot got almost everything right. And when he realized he got a couple things wrong, he would correct those in live performances in the future. You know, I get the impression that he was worried and certainly family members were pro emptively angry about someone writing a song about the deaths of their family members. Who's this guy who's trying to make money off the death of my father, my brother, my husband? But he became close with at least a few of these family members in the decades after.
- [39:57]
C
Exactly right. He was very concerned. And look, I know exactly. I'm not Gordon Lightfoot, and I don't have any gold albums. But I can tell you I had the exact same sensation when I was writing my book. There are a lot of ways to screw this up. It can be inaccurate, you can be unfair, you can be come across as callous or sensationalizing or simply not being compassionate enough. So he had all those fears going into it. And at first, probably two thirds of the families liked it right away, and one third, as you say, had serious misgivings, as well as some former crew members that I talked to. But once they heard the song more often, once they saw the reaction to it, and. And once they got to know Gordon Lightfoot himself, who made it a point to reach out to these people, to invite him backstage repeatedly for decades. Always invited him backstage. Had their cell phones, they had his. And he also took some of the profits and supported several scholarships in their name at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy. So I have to call him a hero in this story. And as one of the family members said, look, without the song, nobody knows my father anymore. And at family reunions, they play the song repeatedly around the Midwest for the grandkids who never met their grandfather, this is who he was.
- [41:01]
B
That's incredible. As is the story that you tell here, John. The Gales of November The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. John Yu Bacon, thank you so much for coming on the Book Review podcast to talk about it.
- [41:14]
C
Gilbert My pleasure, truly.
- [41:18]
B
That was my conversation with John U. Bacon, author of the Gales of the Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thanks for listening. Limu Emu and Doug, Here we have.
- [41:42]
C
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- [41:58]
B
Cut the camera.
- [41:59]
C
They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com savings. Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.