MICHIGAN — The Great Lakes are forces of nature, and one stands apart from the rest.
Lake Superior is the biggest and deepest of the five Great Lakes.
For centuries, humankind has fought to navigate the waters that serve as a critical artery in the heartbeat of North American commerce.
Taking on Superior is no small challenge, but it’s one men like Ransom Cundy didn’t shy away from.
“He was driven; he enjoyed sailing. I can’t imagine what that would be to be a father with young children at home. I just have a deep appreciation for what mariners do. Somebody’s got to do the job,” said Cundy’s grandson, Darren Muljo.
“He was always joking around, but he was the one that people would go to when they had something - a problem or needed someone to talk to. It just shows the character and how good a person he was,” said another of Cundy’s grandsons, Kevin Soumis.
Oliver ‘Buck’ Champeau also chose the life of a Great Lakes mariner.
“I was daddy’s girl, and he was this big guy that had this laugh that would fill a room. He didn’t always say he loved what he did, that it was kind of a lonely life being out there on the ship, but he was close to all the guys who were on the ship with him; they were like brothers and sons and a very close-knit group. He ended up not graduating from high school and went to work because his dad died young and he had to provide for the family, so he was very devoted to family, said Buck’s daughter, Deborah Gomez-Felder.
And in November of 1975, Cundy, Champeau and 27 other men found themselves on board the finest freighter the Great Lakes had to offer: the Edmund Fitzgerald.
“This was a ship that was built to carry steel, carry iron ore, basically. It was built to be fast. It was going to have some of the finest appointments on board. If you were a crewman, this was where you could be pretty happy, pretty proud that you were serving on the ‘Queen of the Lakes’, the Edmund Fitzgerald, one of the fastest ships, one of the newer ships that were operating,” explained Bruce Lynn, Executive Director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society.
Owned by the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, the ship was named for the outgoing company president.
“The Fitzgerald was the creme de la creme. This was going to be the largest object ever dropped into fresh water. It stopped a five-year drought of shipbuilding in Michigan,” said shipwreck explorer and historian Ric Mixter.
By the time she was ready to launch in June of 1958, the Fitzgerald brought the promise of both profit and prestige.
“The Fitzgerald was in a class all its own. It was outfitted by Hudson’s of Detroit so that any of the big muckety-mucks from the steel companies would ride along on up for a summer vacation to take a cruise on board the ship. It had beautiful furnishings, had the best cook in Columbia’s fleet, Red Burgner, had the best captains and the best crew, and it was a ship to behold. Not only was it the first to get into the 30,000 range and the taconite, but it was the first to break the million-ton record for a year,” said Mixter.
Those records earned her nicknames like ‘The Toledo Express’ and the ‘Mighty Fitz’.
“I just thought it was cool that my grandfather was climbing on board the thing, right?
My mother packed up five kids, and we went over and visited with him and had lunch in Duluth superior area, probably in August of 75. But we were fortunate enough, actually, to go back with him to the Fitzgerald and actually watch him climb the ladder to board it along with his best friend, Freddy Beetcher. It was just majestic, right? And nothing like I’d ever seen before,” recalled Muljo.
By 1975, the Fitzgerald wasn’t breaking records at the same blistering pace, but she was still one of the workhorses of the Great Lakes and no stranger to the challenges of sailing them.
“For two years in a row, Fitzgerald had the most storms, and that was under Captain Pulcer. When McSorley came, every time you’d look at the chart, the Fitzgerald would be in there taking on these gales. In 1975, it was no different from spring to fall. They had been in no less than five storms, one on Lake Huron and four others with gale force winds that were coming out of Lake Superior,” said Mixter.
And as the end of the Great Lakes Shipping season approached, the Fitzgerald and her crew were preparing to face off once again with Lake Superior’s infamous gales of November.
On Nov. 9, 1975, the Edmund Fitzgerald and her crew prepared to set out from Superior, Wisconsin, bound for Zug Island near Detroit.
They’re led by seasoned Great Lakes Captain Ernest McSorley.
Following behind The Fitz is the Arthur M. Anderson, led by Captain Bernie Cooper.
“The weather when they departed was fantastic. Unseasonably warm, beautiful weather. But they knew that there was something brewing on the lake and actually was brewing in other areas and converging on the lake,” said Lynn.
Both captains know this late-season run could be a bumpy ride.
Both ships opt for a route along the northern side of Lake Superior.
“Small craft warnings were coming out. No small boats were allowed out. They knew it was going to escalate as the front left Oklahoma and came up. The question was, as it approached Marquette, how long would it take to get across Lake Superior and then change the wind direction from a nor’easter to the northwest, where those winds would now be pushed by 70-mile-an-hour winds that would push those waves so tall they’d be as big as a three-story building. The problem is that both Captains Cooper and McSorley miss guessed on how fast. It was easily an hour faster than they thought,” said Mixter.
“They weren’t having seas that were boarding them or causing them any real problems until they made that turn and started heading down to Whitefish Bay. Snow squalls were coming and going. Again, the waves were getting higher, winds were increasing in intensity,” said Lynn.
The afternoon of Nov. 10 brought the first signs of trouble for the Fitzgerald
“He called me up at 3:00 in the afternoon and he said I’ve got a little problem. He said my fence rail is down, he said I’ve got two vents missing and I’ve taken a starboard list. I asked him if he had his pumps on and he said yes, but later on he said he wasn’t gaining anything by pumping out, so the water was coming in the hull as fast as they were pumping it out. From that time on he was sinking. The water would get into these side tanks and if these side tanks weren’t tight, the water would start leaking through them into the cargo hold, and there’s no way of getting the water out with the pellets in there,” recalled Capt. Cooper in a 1993 interview.
As the storm intensified, the Fitzgerald was sailing blind, relying on the Anderson to guide her.
“He called one time I can remember, and told me my big radar is gone and the small one is only getting out three and a half miles. The last transmission I had with the first mate, I was down below, the first mate Morgan Clark, he called the Fitzgerald and told him about these three ships, these saltwater ships that were coming out of the bay, it was McSorley he was talking to, and he said am I going to clear them, and Morgan says yeah you’ll be well clear of them, and then morgan as an afterthought says how you doing, he says we’re holding our own. That was at 7:10,” recalled Cooper.
A short time later, Captain Cooper and his crew made a horrifying discovery
“When we missed him was when it cleared up, in fact, it cleared up right shortly after it sank, I think we saw the three vessels coming out of the bay, and no Fitzgerald lights,” said Capt. Cooper.
Radio chatter between Captain Cooper and the Coast Guard captured those alarming first moments after the Fitzgerald disappeared.
USCG: Just for confirmation, sir, he couldn’t see any lights or pick him up on radar. Is that correct?
Capt. Cooper: I don’t know, I thought we were picking him up on radar when I went up and talked to the mate. The receiver antenna is real bad, but I thought we had the target, but I don’t know. Now I wonder.
USCG: At what time was the last time that you had any contact? That you notice that you had the Fitzgerald in front of you? - over.
Capt Cooper: 19-hundred, he was approximately 15 miles from the high up at Crisp Point. That was when I was talking to him; he was 15 miles from the lamp.
USCG: You said you had him visually and on the radar, and you lost him in both respects?
Capt. Cooper: No, I didn’t have him visually; I had him on the radar. He was exactly 10 miles ahead of us. I asked him at the time how everything was going, and I asked him if he was making out with his problem. He said he lost those vents, and he had a list and he said he was holding his own. The last time I talked with him, he said he was holding his own and, uh, that’s the last time uh, I lost contact after that.
USCG: Roger that, and also we understand there were three up-bounders that were to keep an eye out for this, for the Fitzgerald, and they’ve had negative contact, is that correct?
Capt. Cooper: Roger on that, we tried to call him about 6 or 8 times on the emergency FM; we could not reach him.
USCG: Do you think there’s any possibility that you could come about and go back there and do any searching? Over.
Capt. Cooper: Oh God, I don’t know. Uh. Uh. The sea out there is tremendously large. If you want me to, I can, but I’m not going to be making any time. I’ll be lucky to make 2 to 3 miles per hour going back out that way.
“I was reluctant to go, really I was, but he said there’s a ship on the bottom and I felt like saying there could be two if I go back. I still thought it was an exercise in futility with what had happened with the sudden disappearance; he had to be on the bottom with no maydays or anything. I was just scared the hell I was going to find somebody, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. It was quite a bit before daylight when we started running through a lot of debris, gas tanks like for the stove, life preservers, ores, canisters, but no sign of anybody else,” said Cooper.
By the morning of Nov. 11, 1975, it was clear, the Edmund Fitzgerald and her crew were gone.
Word slowly started reaching the families of the 29 men who were on board.
“I was in kindergarten or preschool or something like that back then, and, my, the rest of my brothers and sisters had gone to school, and I was home with my youngest sister and just sometime in that morning, word started to spread that there was a ship missing. It came out later that it had been Fitzgerald. Of course, we knew what that man my mother did. As kids, we obviously experienced the anguish and the heartache and the gathering of family who didn’t have any answers because we never heard anything but what we got from the news. The families were never contacted by the owner of the ship directly. It was something that we had to get through the media at that time. So, to process that and realize that, yeah, he wasn’t coming home, and then the days that followed, having a casket, without a body, for a funeral, was pretty tough,” said Muljo.
“I was 17 when he passed away, and it took us a while to know what happened, but once we found out that it was a sure thing, that he was on the Fritz, it was pretty devastating to his family and my family. I was graduating from high school, and I thought my dad wouldn’t have stopped for anything to be at my graduation. He was a good swimmer. He swam to a cave. I thought all kinds of things unanswered,” said Gomez-Felder.
“By morning, they realized 29 guys were gone. That was the big mystery. How did 29 guys vanish in 1975 when we had a weather satellite in the sky, we had what we thought were modern boats, radio direction finders? How did that happen?” explained Mixter.
It’s a question that’s never been definitively answered, but all historians and researchers have ever concluded is that whatever happened to the Fitzgerald happened fast.
“The ship just disappeared completely, it had to have just dove under, and that screw on the ship just acted like a propeller on a submarine and just drove it right to the bottom. To me, she just went down so fast and so quickly just nobody had a chance. I don’t think there can be any conjecture about that, hell, all he had to do was pick up the phone and say mayday, mayday, and there was nothing,” recalled Capt. Cooper.
“I wanted to know how he died. What was he thinking at the end? Did he know this was the end? But I understand through time and talking to other engineers that it was very quick. If he was at his post, which I believe he was, they didn’t have time to even know what was going on. Was he praying? Was he scared? Was he trying to protect others?” said Gomez Felder.
The loss also ripped through the maritime community.
“It shook it so hard that we didn’t see another big loss after that. We found most of the crew of the Bradley. We had two survivors in 1958. In 1966, when the Morrell went down, Dennis Hale survived. Most of the bodies were found, but the Fitzgerald 29 guys vanished. That’s when the world went crazy. That’s why Newsweek wrote the article. That’s why Gordon Lightfoot saw it and said, I’m going to write a song about that, that disappearance of 29 guys in modern time,” said Mixter.
“Gordon Lightfoot had a huge impact on the telling of this story and putting this shipwreck, and maybe to a certain degree shipwrecks in general, on the Great Lakes into the public consciousness. It’s a great song. It tells the story really, really well and pretty accurately. But it also made people learn whether they wanted to or not about this ship called the Edmund Fitzgerald,” said Lynn.
The song helped make the Fitzgerald the most well-known and most talked about shipwreck on the Great Lakes.
The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point is now home to the Fitzgerald’s bell, serving as a lasting link to the ship and her crew.
“That’s the closest that I can get to my dad. When we ring it, I just imagine that it was ringing back then with that storm 50 years ago. I come here and I touch the bell, I kiss the bell. It means more to me than the symbolization of it. It was the soul of the ship, and it was the closest thing to my dad,” said Gomez-Felder.
“The bell, I mean, it’s the heart of the ship. It got a little emotional here. It’s a piece of this ship where there’s nothing else. It’s something concrete where you can see it,” said Muljo.
There have only been a handful of dives to the wreck site of the Fitzgerald in the years since her sinking.
“Until you’re in a submarine and you go up to the letters of the Edmund Fitzgerald that are this wide, and you realize how big that vessel is, and then you start to see the humanity of the ship. That’s the blankets that are hanging out of the windows. We saw, I think, weather tarps that were used to keep the splashing from coming up onto the deck that was torn away. Maybe I mistook that for blankets, but I got this feeling that this was not just a ship. This was a place where men worked and lived,” recalled Mixter.
The dive to retrieve the ship’s bell in July of 1995 was the last dive on the Fitzgerald.
And the Fitzgerald families hope that remains the case.
“We’ve got protection over the site. We’ve asked the province of Ontario and the state of Michigan, which’ve enacted laws to protect sites against dive and photographing remains. I feel like we’ve got that closure, and I think it’s left to others who want the ultimate answer,” said Muljo.
“I just want his remains left in peace. That’s why I come up here every year. That’s why I’m emotional. Because I don’t believe anymore in closure. I don’t think it exists. When you lose a loved one. If the tables were turned and that was me on the Fitz, my dad wouldn’t have stopped at anything to figure out how to protect me,” said Gomez-Felder.
We’ll likely never know everything that may have happened that November night half a century ago.
For the families of the 29 men lost when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down, their focus isn’t on theories about why or even how.
What matters most 50 years later is making sure the memories of the ship and her crew live on.
“To me, the most important thing to do is remember those crewmen. By virtue of that, remember all of the sailors that are lost in the Great Lakes and passengers that were on passenger vessels and lifesaving service crewmen that were out there trying to rescue people on shipwrecks,” said Lynn.
“Legends are made to be repeated. I think they’ll probably be remembered a lot more than you realize by the ships that are still sailing. I think the thought would cross their mind when you go over wherever the Fitzgerald was sunk, you go oh boy, there’s the Fitzgerald down there,” said Capt. Cooper.
“I’d like to just have respect for the family. Have respect for the men who went down. That’s what I would want,” expressed Soumis.
“I don’t want the 50th anniversary of the Fitzgerald sinking to be just about the man and the Fitzgerald. It should be about the dedication, the courage it takes for all mariners who are still sailing today. Providing us with the service. At the end of the day, people just have to understand the dedication, the courage, and the sacrifice of the maritime community, not just across the Great Lakes but across the oceans as well. They sacrifice a lot to support their families, and at the end of the day, and we never we never got closure. Grandpa never came home. The legend lives on,” said Muljo.
“It doesn’t seem, even after 50 years, that it gets easier. I look for closure, but I don’t think there is any closure. My eyes are on the ship all the time, so that’s what I’ve told my grandchildren. That’s what I told my sons and my daughters to always look out for. Eyes on the Fitz. Eyes on the Fitz, because at some point, I don’t know when, I don’t think I’ll be alive. But it’s still going to be protected by family members, so the legacy does live on,” said Gomez-Felder.
The Edmund Fitzgerald Crew:
Michael Armagost
Frederick Beetcher
Thomas Bentsen
Edward Bindon
Thomas Borgeson
Oliver Champeau
Nolan Church
Ransom Chudy
Thomas Edwards
Russell Haskell
George Hall
Bruce Hudson
Allen Kalmon
Gordon F. Maclellan
Joseph Mazes
John McCarthy
Ernest McSorley
Eugene O’Brien
Karl Peckol
John Poviach