Any Midwest follower of social media knows the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald lives in our heads as much as reveries about the Roman Empire, and WCCO Radio in Minneapolis has a chance to re-live the historic and horrific event with a live radio play tonight.
Listen at 9 p.m. on your smart speaker, phone, desktop, TuneIn, iHeart or Audacy app. And if you miss it live, don't worry! You can rewind to the show on Audacy's player, either on app or desktop.
Anyone who needs evidence that we still care just needs to start a sentence "The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down of the big lake, they called Gitche Gumee ..." and if the person you're talking to doesn't hum Gordon Lightfoot or tell you about what happens "when the skies of November turn gloomy" they're probably best known as ex friends. (We joke!)
So, why do we care so much about this shipwreck in particular? While losing 29 seamen in 1975 to the worst storm ever recorded on Lake Superior should be in the history books, perhaps nothing compares to the power of a song.
“As much as we like to think we do a great job of keeping the memory alive, we really can’t hold a candle to Gordon Lightfoot,” Bruce Lynn, the executive director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, told the CBC. “If it wasn’t for him, it would be a fraction of the people now who know about this story and this ship.”
Officials with the shipwreck museum at the Whitefish Point Light Station in Michigan — roughly an hour from Sault Ste. Marie — will honor the ageless song by Lightfoot, the boat and its crew Monday.
Anticipation is high.
“We’ve been getting calls from people for more than three months,” Lynn said. “People have been asking how soon they can be there or how early to get a parking spot. They’re utterly fascinated by this story and by the shipwreck.”
Hal Barnes, who wrote the play that will air tonight on WCCO, added that he's been fascinated by the wreck and the high drama surrounding it for decades. He wrote the play in 1983 and put it in a drawer until it was revived in the wake of Gordon Lightfoot's death.
Barnes said listeners may find some surprises about the wreck, even if they think they know all there is to know about it. "That evening, when the stuff started to go down the last couple of hours, there were ships that were safely at anchor in Whitefish Bay. And they sit there and they listened on the monitor on the radio when it started to get bad. One of the mates on the William Clay Ford which was on anchor at Whitefish Bay ran tape and so we had a tape recording of what was actually said on the radio between the Fitz and the Coast Guard," Barnes told Vineeta Sawker.
He added there have been worse tragedies on the Great Lakes, a storm on Superior in 1913, for instance, lost 17 vessels in one evening. And we don't remember their names. But the Fitz? She's different.
"The Fitz had such a great reputation and when she went down it was a shock. And even though it was an industrial accident, and there was really no avoiding it, people just didn't believe it happened. But I do believe that that haunting song had a lot to do with it," Barnes added.