Editor's Note: This version corrects the date of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald
The sinking 39 autumns ago of the Great Lakes freighter Edmund Fitzgerald remains one of the best-known shipwrecks in American history in part because it’s one of the most mysterious.
But Christopher Gillcrist, executive director of the National Museum of the Great Lakes in Toledo, argued Wednesday night that speculation about what sent the Big Fitz and its 29-man crew to the bottom of Lake Superior during a Nov. 10, 1975 storm overshadows other interesting aspects of the vessel and its history.
Instead, Mr. Gillcrist told about 60 people at the museum, there’s plenty of other history to explore.
Why did Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co. invest in the construction and operation of a Great Lakes freighter?
Who were the people who served aboard it, and how did its sinking affect its crew’s friends and relatives?
Why is there such intense interest in Fitzgerald memorabilia, yet its logbooks and other key artifacts are missing?
And why, despite the writing of a famous song and a reference in the famous Seinfeld television series, has no major motion picture been made about the ship?
Mr. Gillcrist theorized that Northwestern Mutual, the first large insurance company to invest in a ship, was possibly supporting earlier investments in the mining industry that needed such ships to move mineral cargoes.
Now is the time to research those and other questions, he said, because the people with the memories and knowledge are at risk of dying off.
En route to a Detroit steel mill from Superior, Wis., where it had loaded iron-ore pellets, the Fitzgerald sank in about 500 feet of water without a mayday call, although its captain, Ottawa Hills resident Ernest McSorley, had reported numerous and worsening problems to another freighter nearby, the Arthur Anderson, before his ship vanished from radar.
A Coast Guard investigation blamed improperly secured hatch covers for allowing water from the lake’s huge waves to inundate the Fitz’s cargo holds, while a National Transportation Safety Board inquiry concluded the freighter had struck an improperly charted Lake Superior shoal that, unbeknownst to the crew, breached its hull.
Yet another theory, advanced by Toledoan Richard Orgel, who had served on the Fitzgerald during previous sailing seasons, is that the freighter was structurally unsound and broke apart from the combined strain of too much cargo and a heavy sea.
The sinking was most famously memorialized by Gordon Lightfoot’s song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” and it also inspired an annual Nov. 10 ceremony at the Mariners’ Church in Detroit honoring the freighter’s lost crew and, more recently, all mariners who have perished on the Great Lakes.
One of Mr. Gillcrist’s suggested research topics got at least a partial answer during a question period after his presentation.
Audience member Thomas Tillander, a recent Northwestern Mutual retiree who worked in the company’s headquarters when the Fitzgerald sank and now lives in Holland, dismissed the notion of a diversification play and said his employer probably viewed the freighter “as a good investment” as well as a company symbol.
It was named after Northwestern Mutual’s president, and when it sank, “you would have thought he [Mr. Fitzgerald] lost every kid in his house,” Mr. Tillander said, adding that had it endured, the Big Fitz could well have been donated to a museum rather than scrapped once its sailing days ended.
Contact David Patch at: dpatch@theblade.com or 419-724-6094.
First Published October 23, 2014, 4:00 a.m.
