On this day, November 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald went down

[edbermac]

SS Edmund Fitzgerald was an American Great Lakes freighter that sank in Lake Superior during a storm on November 10, 1975, with the loss of the entire crew of 29 men. When launched on June 7, 1958, she was the largest ship on North America's Great Lakes, and she remains the largest to have sunk there. She was located in deep water on November 14, 1975, by a U.S. Navy aircraft detecting magnetic anomalies, and found soon afterwards to be in two large pieces.

The disaster is one of the best known in the history of Great Lakes shipping. Canadian singer Gordon Lightfoot made it the subject of his 1976 hit song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" after reading an article, "The Cruelest Month", in the November 24, 1975, issue of Newsweek.

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[sarisataka]

1. The song is on the radio

As I am reading this.

[twodogsbarking]

2. Do they play it on cruise ships?

[mahatmakanejeeves]

3. Thanks. I was watching the Duluth ship canal YouTube channel

a few months back, when what should come sailing into view but SS Arthur M. Anderson, the vessel that was accompanying SS Edmund Fitzgerald.

[Blue Dawn]

4. I just watched "Shipwreck: The Mystery of the Edmund Fitzgerald" on YouTube.

It was a very informative documentary. I was especially moved by the ending, during which twenty years later--in the 90s--the family members gathered on a ship and each person got to ring the ship's bell when his/her family member's name was called out. I had not realized that the ship's bell had been recovered from the wreck and displayed as a memorial to the 29 men who lost their lives.

Also, I cried when the movie showed the new bell, which had been inscribed with each man's name along with his duty on the ship, installed 500 feet beneath the waves as a permanent memorial to the Edmund Fitzgerald.

I always tear up whenever I hear the song by Gordon Lightfoot.

[ProudMNDemocrat]

5. At the Maritime Museum in Duluth at Canal Park

There are artifacts from that giant ore ship.

I was living up in North Dakota then, my daughter was 7 months old then. I read the headlines the next day in the Grand Forks Herald about the sinking.

We were then living here in Minnesota by the time the song came out. Chilling and still harrowing to this day 48 years later.

It was July of 1979 when in Milwaukee, my husband and I were at Summerfest there along Lake Michigan. We took in the Gordon Lightfoot concert. Dusk was setting in when he and the band broke into the song. I had the goosebumps all through it as I looked out onto the Lake to see Sailboats and Ore Tankers off into the horizon. I will never forget that moment.