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Inside The Edmund Fitzgerald: What Really Sank America’s Most Famous Freighter

• Michele McAloon • Season 4 • Episode 146

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A freighter longer than a skyscraper is tall. Waves four seconds apart that can bend steel. A ballad recorded in a single take that changed how an entire industry thinks about risk. We sat down with John U. Bacon, author of The Gales of November, to trace the Edmund Fitzgerald from blueprint to bell, and from storm science to the quiet rooms where families still keep watch.

We unpack what makes the Great Lakes uniquely dangerous: freshwater’s sharper, closer-spaced waves; locally brewing systems that sit right over your head; and the long, narrow hulls forced by the Soo Locks. John explains how changes to the Plimsoll line let ships ride lower and heavier than intended, why welded seams and added tonnage tightened margins, and how a northern route, dark beacons, and dead radar turned one November run into a blind sprint. We revisit the race dynamics of the locks, the near-miss culture of “just one more trip,” and the accident chain that can turn routine into tragedy in minutes.

Beyond the mechanics, we spend time with the people whose choices and dreams were on board: a celebrated captain delaying retirement to pay for his wife’s care, a young deckhand saving for a road trip and a future he’d mapped out, an engineer mailing a ring home days before the lake took him. Then we follow the song—Gordon Lightfoot’s first-take recording that became a national memorial—and how attention, grief, and storytelling helped drive reforms. The most striking fact remains: from 1875 to 1975, the lakes saw thousands of wrecks; in the fifty years since the Fitzgerald, not one commercial ship has been lost.

If you care about maritime history, human resilience, and how culture can push safety forward, this conversation belongs in your queue. Listen, share with a friend who loves Great Lakes lore or music history, and if it moved you, subscribe and leave a review to help others find the show.

Michele McAloon:

You're listening to Crossword where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and the song tells the story. This is a great book, a great interview about actually what the whole world is talking about this week, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I really hope you enjoy this interview. I'm telling you, run, run to the bookstore and go get this book. It is a great book. It's a interesting read. And now you finally understand the words of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. If you want to know more about me, find me at bookclues.com. I'm also on Substack these days at Michelle McElhoon1. And as always, if you'd be so kind to leave me a good rating, I would much appreciate it. Thank you. God bless. Enjoy listening. Okay, folks, the story this week, it's not the government shutdown and the reopening, although that is a good thing. The story this week is the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. And we are so lucky to have John Bacon, the author of The Gales of November, the Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. And Mr. Bacon, this is it's the 50th anniversary this week, right? On November 10th.

John Bacon:

That is correct.

Michele McAloon:

Okay. We are lucky enough to have this author who has written a meticulously researched and actually a great narrative tale, and it's not a tale, it's nonfiction, of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. He, Mr. Bacon, John Bacon, is a New York Times bestselling author. He has, you have done a lot in your life. You really have. He is a writer, he's a public speaker, he's been a college instructor, he's a radio and TV commentator, high school hockey coach. He's had eight, eight bestsellers, I believe, on the you've had eight national bestsellers. Am I correct? That's correct. If you read this book, folks, you'll want to go read more of his stuff. His writing is crisp, clear, fast-paced, and it really it you just grab the reader with this story. Mr. Bacon, welcome to the show. Michelle, thank you.

John Bacon:

Please call me John.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, John. All right. I've been kind of fascinated this past week of how this this story has just captured the American imagination. I don't know if it's the song or the story itself, but has this surprised you at all? Have you seen this too?

John Bacon:

Well, we've certainly seen it. This morning we woke up and we're number 12 on Amazon all books and number three in nonfiction. So that's about as high as it can get. So that certainly got our attention. The event on Monday at Whitefish Point, the nearest point you can get to to where the ship is in Lakes Appear. That's where they store the bell. They display the bell from the ship. They brought it up years ago. I've just learned they've got half a million viewers from that ceremony on Friday on Monday night alone. So, and they're international, truly, including Germany, of course, but all across Europe, you name it, Asia. So this ship has to be the second most famous shipwreck, I believe, to Titanic. What has surprised us, Michelle, is A, the immense size of it, naturally, but also the variety. We thought for sure we'll do we'd do well with guys like me, you know, middle-aged dads who live in the Great Lakes and whatnot. We are we have been number two in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, number three in the Rockies, and number four in New England. Now, these are not places that are necessarily connected to the Great Lakes, obviously. And even more surprising for us is women. On goodreads.com, women readers have outreviewed the men by about two or three to one. And even younger readers, we've got an excerpt in Rolling Stone magazine on the song itself that you were just talking about. And it was the number one story on Rolling Stone for two days until Taylor Swift sneezed or something, probably. You have to know your place around here, Michelle. But nonetheless, the breadth of the interest has been surprising to us.

Michele McAloon:

It has been. I tell you, and you just the internet traffic and the extraffic and the it really has been. Let's get into this story. And I think you have to break this story, and you've done a really good job in it, but I have to organize it in a way that looking at the lakes, the environment, looking at the equipment, the mission, the men, which was the most important part of the story, the wreck and the consequences of it. Reading this book as a girl from Alabama, as my audience knows, you taught me a few things about the Great Lakes. And I didn't realize I've lived on the water my whole life. And I thought a wave was a wave was a wave. But that is not true. It's different in the Great Lakes. Explain that because that actually does play into the eventual wreck, doesn't it?

John Bacon:

It really does. And you're from Alabama. I'm from Ann Arbor, Michigan. I grew up on these lakes. I have sailed to Port Huron, Michigan to Mackinac sailboat race through Lake Huron. That's a three-day sailboat race, pretty serious. Gordon Life had did it too, by the way, and I think he won it, actually, the singer. I've swam in all these lakes. I've been to all these lakes. I thought I knew them quite well. And trust me, Michelle, 95% of what's in that book I did not know four years ago. So hope you feel better about that, including the shocking fact, to me, perhaps the most surprising fact I came across, is that those commercial sailors who've sailed on the ocean as well as the Great Lakes, and I mean by sailing I don't mean sailboat races. Right. I mean freighters, of course, and container ships and whatnot. They all said consistently and emphatically that the Great Lakes are more dangerous than the Atlantic Ocean. And that seems impossible. First of all, your listeners, here's how big the Great Lakes actually are. If you combine them, they are bigger than Roy Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and the state of New York are bigger than the entire Northeast, plus the state of New York. They hold 20% of the world's fresh water and 80% of the nation's. So this is serious stuff. Lake Superior itself is bigger than the island of Ireland.

Michele McAloon:

Wow, that's amazing.

John Bacon:

It is amazing, and we have no sense of this. And even those of us who live here don't have much sense of this. Michelle, you cannot see across any one of these five lakes. If you're in the middle of three of them, like here on Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, you're in the middle of them, you can't see either side. It's like being in the ocean. And ships have gotten lost by not knowing where they are in these things. It's possible. So that's how massive these things are. That's one huge surprise, probably for your listeners.

Michele McAloon:

Oh, it absolutely is. And tell I'll tell you one thing that I was just shocked by. I'm a salty growing up in the Gulf of Mexico. I'm not a Laker, right? Okay. But how the waves act differently in freshwater than salt water.

John Bacon:

They do. Also news to me. So don't feel too bad about that. But what I learned from the experts on this stuff is that salt water changes everything. So the waves you get on the ocean are certainly serious and dangerous, and you know, obviously a perfect storm and other plenty of shipwrecks on the ocean, naturally. But salt water takes the pointy waves of the Great Lakes and it takes off the point. It shaves off the point. So instead of a mountain range of waves, uh you get a gentle roller coaster. And it also spreads them out. The weight of the salt spreads them out. So instead of 10 to 16 seconds apart on the ocean, on the Great Lakes, those waves are four to eight seconds apart and they're sharp and pointy. And on top of that, on the ocean, the waves you're getting are probably from a storm 500 or 1,000 miles away. So by the time they get to you, you get this nice, gentle roller coaster, still scary, still dangerous, but not nearly as bad as what you get in the Great Lakes, which is this mountain range, these sharp, pointy waves, four to eight seconds apart, produced by what they call locally occurring storms. And I asked one of these guys, what does that mean? He goes, it's right over your damn head. Wow.

Michele McAloon:

Okay.

John Bacon:

And what that means, what does it all mean? Let's put it all together. So on the Great Lakes and not on the ocean. The ocean, you ride up and down these things. On the Great Lakes, you can have your bow stuck in a 30-foot wave at one end, and your stern, 700 feet later, because these things are gigantic, they're 700 feet long. Now they're 1,000 feet long. You can have your bow, your stern stuck in another 30-foot wave with nothing supporting the ship in the middle. It's caught. So what happens? With 26,000 tons of iron ore, that's the equivalent of 4,200 adult elephants, enough to build 7,000 cars per trip, the middle sags. Then it goes over these waves and is what's called hogs. It drapes over the wave and it sags again and it drapes it over it. Hogs, sags, hogs. Well, that does it, that happens 10,000 times a day in a storm. Take a paper clip and bend it back and forth 10,000 times. And what's gonna happen? That's what happens to these ships. I've got a chapter on the Bradley in 1958 and the Morel in 1966. These are two ships that got caught between two waves and just cracked in the middle. And here is a stunning stat for you. Between 1875 and 1975, there were 6,000 shipwrecks, commercial shipwrecks, on the Great Lakes. That's one per week, every week for a century. 30,000 crew lost. That is one per day every day for a century. That's how dangerous these things are.

Michele McAloon:

Wow. And we'll talk about it later, but since 1975, there has not been a commercial crash. Is that correct?

John Bacon:

That is correct. And that's because of this ship, Edmund Fitzgerald.

Michele McAloon:

Well, let's talk about the that this actual ship that I think was it was killed or it was launched in 1958, am I correct?

John Bacon:

June 7th, yep.

Michele McAloon:

How big is it? What are we talking dimension-wise?

John Bacon:

It was produced by a guy named Edmund Fitzgerald himself, the CEO of Northwestern Mutual Insurance, whose his grandfather and his five great uncles were all Great Lakes captains. So six men in one family. Out of 300, that's 2%. And has to be a Great Lakes record. So a sailing family, despite his insurance background, he had two edicts that this be the greatest ship the Great Lakes has ever seen, and it was. And two, that they did not name it after him. So he obviously ignored that one because the second he left the room, they had a vote behind his back and said, We're naming it after him. So that's what they did. But uh this ship was the longest at 729 feet, as the equivalent of a 73-story-tall skyscraper, but it's also incredibly narrow. These things can only be 75 foot wide max. That is less than the distance between home plate and first base in baseball. So why so narrow? The Sioux Locks. Your goal is to put as much cargo as you can on one ship and still get it through the narrow Sioux Locks at Sault Ste. Marie. That's what handles the 21-foot drop between Lake Superior and the north and Lake Huron in the south. So that's how you have to navigate that. These ships are designed like no other in the world. The container ships that are going across the Atlantic as we speak in the Pacific are not as long and much wider as you'd normally make ships. These things are like giraffe necks. Their evolution has made them very strangely long and thin, like a pencil, basically. So that's why.

Michele McAloon:

I grew up in a port city, Mobile, Alabama. I'm used to seeing, you know, these huge cargo ships bring in or bring out usually coal or wood or something like that. The book has great pictures in it, and you show pictures at the end of the Edmund Fitzgerald. So it is really good. Talk to us about the Plimsall line. Sure. Am I saying that right?

John Bacon:

You're saying that exactly right. Something I also did not know about four years ago. I'm a sports writer by trade, so I had a lot I had a lot to learn. Plimsaw was a British politician in the 1840s, 1850s who was tired of seeing these shipowners insure their ships and then overload them and intentionally basically sabotage their ships with crew on it who would who would die. So they call they called them floating coffins. So he got this edict passed, this law passed in Great Britain saying that you can only load your ship safely so far down in the water, and that's the line that your ship can be in the water line. So that's it used to be painted across, now it is welded across all these ships to this day. And internationally it still holds. If you go below that line, insurance won't cover you. But that's what enforces this line. Now, in the Emma Fitzgerald's case, it's built in 1958. It's the longest, it's one of the fastest, it breaks all the cargo records in the Great Lakes, every sort. Biggest load, fastest load, biggest, you know, season, 50 trips and so on. It is the queen of the Great Lakes. But I did not appreciate before I wrote the book, this ship was famous in shipping circles before it went down. It was the rock star out of 300. And people take pictures of it and it's going through Sioux Locks. It was a big deal. But it was built for what it was built for, about 22,000 long tons, basically. So that's, like I said, about 4,200 adult elephants. But in 69, 1971, and 1973, the government changed the rules on the plumps cell line for the Fitz and all the other ships, allowing them to sink much lower into the water than before. So they used to have 14 feet of freeboard. That is the amount of space between the deck and the water line. That's how it's built, that's how it's designed. Then all of a sudden, in after these three things pass, they allow them to get down to 11 feet of freeboard. So you're sinking three more feet into the water. Why does that matter? That is 4,000 tons. All right, that's the difference. So now you're carrying 4,000 tons more, about 20% more than you were designed to carry. And that's going to be a problem.

Michele McAloon:

Whew. I'm an army pilot and limits to equipment.

John Bacon:

Why did the Coast Guard, I mean, why when you're an Army pilot, there are strict limits on how many passengers you can carry. There are strict limits on how much cargo you can carry now and how you distribute it, of course, and all this stuff. They exist for a reason, right? On most trips it may not matter if you get 10% more. But as one of my great experts said, if you cheat the Plimsaw line and you're this very long and thin ship, it doesn't matter until you're in a storm. Then it matters a lot. So exactly.

Michele McAloon:

And it did matter a lot. Have they changed those regulations since 1975, the Plimsaw line?

John Bacon:

But what they did do is they got smarter about forecasting, about communicating that forecast to the captains. And even in 75, they could have done a better job on both those fronts, but it was a complacent business. It's kind of like national security before 9-11. It was a this was a wake-up call for the entire industry. And third, and perhaps most important, I'm jumping ahead here, Michelle, but so what? Common sense, frankly. So this time last year, I was at Whitefish Point, which is where the bell is, and the families gather for their 50th anniversary. And the next day, November 11th, 2024, it was 30, 40 mile per hour winds, 10-foot waves, nothing like they faced that night. That night they had 100 mile per hour winds, hurricane force, and waves up to 60 feet long, high, sorry, we now know based on computer modeling. So nowhere near that. And yet, on November 11th of last year, every single ship was anchored in Whitefish Bay. And I guarantee you, Michelle, 50 years earlier in the Fitzgerald's time, none of them would have been. They just go, go, go. The companies were greedier, frankly, and the captains were a lot more aggressive. So common sense has kicked in because of this ship, and that's why there's been zero since 1975, zero commercial shipwrecks since 75 in the Great Lakes. I'm not sure which stat is more stunning. 6,000 from 1875 to 1975, or zero from the next half century. They're both amazing.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, it really the story is truly amazing. One of the things that I was really shocked to learn is that they didn't, even in 1975, airplanes had better had radar and weather, and they didn't have this on the ship. Matter of fact, I was trying to figure out, you know, did they have a lot of what radar did they have on the ship? And it sounds like at the end of the day, there was nothing, and that's what happened.

John Bacon:

It's a lot of things at once. And I tend to side with John Tanner, the former superintendent of the Great Lakes Maritime Academy in Traverse City, Michigan. He said when a big ship like this goes down, it is rarely one thing. And it's probably like planes also. It's rarely one thing that brings it down. It's a confluence of forces. It is nature. This is the storm of the century. It's how the ship is constructed, as we said. And one more point about that. They've swapped out rivets for welds in this ship. Yes. Yes. Why is that? Because welds are cheaper to do, they're faster, and they're also lighter by 1.2 million pounds on the MF Hero. If you save 1.2 million pounds, you're not going lighter. You're replacing that with 1.2 million pounds of iron ore. So that means you can put 1.2 more million pounds of iron ore on every trip you make, and you make 50 trips a year. And these things are supposed to live for 80 or 90 years. So that margin is going to multiply itself many times over. So anyway, so it's the storm, it's the construction of the ship, it's things that went wrong that night. They did have long and short radar, and they both got knocked out that night. The lighthouse at Whitefish Point, the lighthouse you're trying to see, that's where the bell is carried now. That went out. The radio beacon from that lighthouse that tells you where you are, that also went out. This guy was selling blind. So all these things together start adding up. But again, when you're cheating the Plim cell line like that, and they they even cheated the what they're allowed, even though that was increased, they cheated that also. That's what all these ships did. So just the complacency you had in the entire industry that we'll we'll cheat on our safety net because the other safety net's gonna work. And they cheat on that safety net and the other safety net is gonna work. Well, if everyone starts cheating on the safety net after a while, it's going to add up. And it did.

Michele McAloon:

In aviation, and I'm sure in the shipping industry, you call it the accident chain. Accidents never happen in a void. There it is a series of decisions, of human decisions and technological failure that uh create accidents. And that's what accident investigations look at. They look at that human chain of decision making. And I tell you, your book lays it out really, really well because you do. You look at the environment, you look at the equipment. I would even say the one thing, the mission, too. And the mission, it was his last run of the season, right?

John Bacon:

It was worse than that, Michelle. I had gotten to six crew members who'd been in the ship the year before. So when I say the untold story, the Emma Fitzgerald, I know the story's been told many times. I've got 20 books behind me telling the story, but my version, I believe, is untold. I got to six crew members who'd been in the ship, obviously before it went down. All 29 men on that night are all down with the ship now. And they're all going to talk for the first time to a reporter. I got to half the family members, 14 of the 29 families. I got to one guy, Rick Barthuly, probably the last guy alive, who was on the Arthur Anderson that was sailing alongside the MM Fitzgerald that night. He was on the ship that night, and he can tell us as close as we can get what it's like to being on the M and Fitzgerald that night and how that storm functioned. So that's what it is.

Michele McAloon:

So Captain McSorley, and Captain McSorley is a real character in himself. He's a competent, well-seasoned uh captain. He has done this and done this. And matter of fact, he is on the verge of retiring. He is well respected in the industry. If anyone can do it on the Great Lakes, it is this man, Captain McSorley. So, what is the mission that day of what were they trying to achieve? And there's some things that you describe about the mission that raised some eyebrows.

John Bacon:

You raised a very good question. So I got to these six crewmen who'd been on the ship. Two of them were on the ship that year. One had just got bumped off in September, a month and a half before this ship goes down. They knew McSorty quite well. So I learned a lot of things about him. One, he was in fact the greatest captain on the Great Lakes. He was the best in rough weather, as you said. If there's any guy who can get him through, this is the guy. They all said it. Even his rivals said that. He's one of the greatest pilots on the Great Lakes. And by that means, guy Craig Sullivan, who'd been a cadet on this ship in 1972, he said, I saw that man take 729 feet of steel. All right, that's how long the ship is, and park it between two other freighters in two harbors, Minnesota, with five feet on either side, and not touch a damn thing. Like he's parallel parking his F F-154 pickup truck. That's how good he was. And he's also beloved, very surprisingly. These guys were tyrants back then. I'm sure in the military the same thing. You could get away with things 50 years ago you can't do now. Yeah. The old captains could throw hot coffee at their crew and you got to put up with it. And a lot of the guys did that kind of stuff. So he didn't. They loved him so much they'd follow him from ship to ship to ship, including his last promotion with the Fitzgerald. And back to your earlier point, I got to Craig Elquist, who had been a deck can on the ship in January of 1975. And he said at that time, at the end of that season, because you stopped for three months in February, March, and April, basically, he said there are five older guys, including McSurley, all debating if they're going to come back for this one last season or not. And then they all decided, of course, to come back, promising their wives, they're all married, promising their wives that, okay, this is it. This is my last season. I'm going to retire and be a much better grandfather than I ever was a father because they're gone nine months out of that. So that's what they're going to do. And in McSorney's case, he's about to retire the week before, one trip before, five days earlier, but told that Don Freericks of Silver Bay, Minnesota, a guy, I got to his son, who recalled the conversation, and said, No, I need to tack on one more trip. As a captain, you get a quota for your cargo. He's passed the quota, so you get a bonus. He needed that one more bonus check to pay for his wife, Nellie's health care. She probably had cancer. She's in 24-hour care in Toledo. This trip was to pay for her health care. So it was a tack on trip. They didn't necessarily have to go, but they did for that reason. Not greedy, he's being a good guy, obviously. But that's where these guys were incredibly. So that's why they went on this trip.

Michele McAloon:

Wow. You actually really lay out uh the culture of the Great Lakes around the steel industry, around the car industry. Taconite was their car that was their cargo, right? The Tacanite pellets, and they had what, 26,000 tons of it? I mean, that's an unheard of number.

John Bacon:

Yes, and there's there's a tacanite pellet for you.

Michele McAloon:

Oh, okay. Oh, they're teeny.

John Bacon:

There's marbles basically. So a whole little pile of these things right here.

Michele McAloon:

So, oh my goodness, right. They so this is what they were hauling. They were hauling this and hauled uncovered. It's all open to the elements. It's just right.

John Bacon:

It's covered by the cargo hatches. These ships are like gigantic canoes, the same way the Voyagers, the French-Canadian fur trappers who got 400 million beaver pellets back in the day. That's a crazy number, almost made the beaver extinct. How about that? But these guys, uh, they have 21 gigantic cargo holds, and a a deck crane lifts up the covers. Because these things are way too heavy for humans. So it lifts them up, puts them to the side, and these shoots in these gigantic docks that are 80 feet tall, 80 feet off the water, and can go a half mile into the water. That's how gigantic all this stuff is. When you see this stuff, you just can't believe it. But anyway, they loaded them up and it's like cocoa pebbles, basically. This this tachonite rolls in very easily, like pouring cereal into a bowl, basically. And once that's done, you put the hatch cover back on, these 21 hatch covers. And then these poor deck cans, in warm weather, they can just do the corners. Put these Kessner C clamps, basically, on the corners of each hatch. But in rough weather, including November, automatically done. They've got to do all uh 81 per hatch, which means 1,420 or so. And that's a solid hour of work for three men. The work is so hard that what even in the winter, when it's snowing out, you'll be finishing that work in your t-shirt because you're sweating so much.

Michele McAloon:

Wow. Wow. So that night, he's going with with another boat and he's compete, he's almost competing against another boat, right?

John Bacon:

He is. It's kind of a it kind of oscillates. Good read, by the way, Michelle. And I hope your listeners appreciate you do your homework. Uh you give me a couple of years. It's a great book. It's easy. That was easy. Well, you're kind. So these guys are always in competition. And why is that? Because the funny dynamics, basically, the logistics of the Great Lakes. There's a checkpoint on the for southbound ships right before uh the Sioux Locks. I mentioned there's a map of that in the book. And there's a southern checkpoint. So if you're going upbound or downbound, either way, to the Sioux Locks, uh, there's a checkpoint. And once you reach that checkpoint, you call in to the lock master at Sioux Locks. You get your number. It's like waiting for your donuts at the bakery. You take a tab, basically, you get your number. And you can't move that number. You mess around with that number, you're in big fat trouble, and it ain't gonna go well. But anyway, so you and I are racing to Parisian Island, to Isle Parisian. All right, if I beat your ship by one minute, I go to the locks first. If I go to the locks first, guess what? The lock takes one hour to fill up with millions of you know gallons of water to get my ship to the right level and go into Lake Huron. So I beat you by an hour. And if I beat you by an hour, guess what? We're both racing to Zug Island, Detroit to dump off this load for Ford Motor Company. And if I beat you there, it's a 14-hour process to unload that ship. So I've beaten you by four hours, you're waiting for me 14 hours to unload my ship. Michelle, if I beat you by one minute to that island, I've beaten you by 15 hours. And trust me when I tell you, your company in Gary, Indiana, or my company in Cleveland, Ohio, they know all about it. And you finish second too often, you ain't gonna be a captain very long. So it's part of the mindset of these guys, like football coaches, be it soccer or American football, to be incredibly competitive people. So they're always competing. But on this day, McSorley and Bert Cooper, the captain of the Arthur Anderson, and these guys are all good friends, and by and large, they decide to sail together the northern route I mentioned before. So they're together, and at some points, McSorley lets Cooper go ahead of him and he trails and so on, which is not like McSorty at all. But this is his last trip, so why not? But on the way down, he can't help himself, and he's going full blast on the way down, which is 16 miles an hour, pretty fast for these things. And the Arthur Anderson is not going full blast. He wants to go full blast, but I've got Rick Barthuly, my witness, in the engine room. He calls down a guy named Harry Ashcroft, who's actually basically openly gay in an era when that was hard to be, and this guy was pretty brave, I think. He turned on the turbines to slow it down from about 60 miles an hour to 12 miles per hour. Cooper, the captain, calls to complain in the back end. He picks it up, claims to have made some adjustments. How's that now? He didn't do anything. Uh he kept it going slow. And he made a basically a wink to Barthulley, like, pay attention, son, is what I'm doing. And and as Barthulli says, that's hanging it out there pretty far. All right, you can be docked pay, you can be fired, he even can be brought up on charges. This is Merchant Marine, after all, basically. He's risking his career at that point. But as Barthulli said, I learned a lesson that night, no matter what the captain asked for, if it's the wrong thing, you don't do it, even if it means losing your job, because he saved my life. And that's what he did. And on the fifths, they did not do that.

Michele McAloon:

Wow. And then he hits bottom. And this to me is incredible. One, if you're doing um shipping in the Mississippi or in the southern United States, you're using a bar pilot to if you get anywhere close to shore. But apparently, I mean, he was pretty close to shore. He had to be because it was pretty shallow and his and his ship hit the bottom of that that shoal, right?

John Bacon:

It did. You raised one very good point. That's a general point. Another reason why the Great Lakes are harder for captains than the ocean. When you're a salty captain, an ocean captain is their nicknamed, when you leave New York, it's a harbor pilot, it takes your ship out. All right. Then when you're in open water, the captain takes over. Then you got basically a week of clear sailing. You're not going to see any islands, any shoals, any canals, bridges, other ships, anything. You just point towards Portugal on autopilot. When you get close, a harbor pilot takes over your ship with tugboats and guides it in. On the Great Lakes, none of that is true. The captain has to do everything. There are no harbor pilots. There are no tugboats. So you have to engineer that 700-foot ship out yourself, past the breakwaters, the canals, the bridges, the locks, the shoals, rivers, canals, whatever else you got going on, other ships. And of course, you've got to handle it yourself. And all that stuff's got to be in your head. The currents, the depths, all this stuff's got to be in your head. You can't consult the book when it's heavy weather out. You have to know this stuff. So what happened, I can see where you think that, but actually, what they ran into going down when he lost his radar and everything else, basically, sailing blind. Caribou Island is this little spit of land, this nasty little swampy, bug infested island, no humans. Caribou either, by the way, the caribou even left. They probably swam across to Canada because screw this, it's not that far. This is actually in the middle of the northeast corner of Lake Superior. Around it, it's a thousand feet deep, which is obviously huge. But here you have this little island, and in front of that island on the north side, you have what's called Six Fathom Shoal. Fathom, as you know, is six feet. So this is thirty-six feet deep is the advertisement, but it's false advertisement. In some areas, it's only eleven feet deep. That's no deeper than your backyard pool, deep end, basically. So as a ship like this that drafts twenty-nine feet on a good day, and again, this is not a good day, you should be nowhere near any of this. There's no reason to be, there's nothing to gain. But if you don't know where you are, and here's the other catch, he does not know this route. He takes the southern route fifty times a year, which is a hundred times a round trip. He's done that his entire career, he's been a captain for thirty-two years. He's done this literally thousands of times. And this northern route though, my crew members I talked to, they said, We never took the northern route, not once, even in rough weather. So he does not know this route as well. He probably does not have a sense of where Caribou Island is. And if you're if your radar is knocked out and everything else, you're sailing blind. So that's why he might have gone over it. I think there's a ninety percent chance that he did. Uh if you did, then you bottom out hard with all this weight slamming at once, and you probably damaged the hull of your ship. And therefore, now you have water coming in. Which explains why when he calls Cooper later on, he explains that he's got a list. A list is when your ship leans to one side or the other, in this case starboard to the right. That means you can't steer it very well. Uh you're already compromised. I'm sure it's like a a plane tilting one way, you don't want it. Right. Um and then two, you're now more vulnerable to a a wave pinning you down. And three, you're also more vulnerable to capsizing since you're already half capsized anyway. You're tilting already toward towards capsize. So all that's dangerous and it's all bad news.

Michele McAloon:

Well the picture at the end that you show, and it it's of the hull of the Emmett Fitzgerald and the writing is upside down. In the end, do they think capsized are just split apart, right? Because there's two parts on the the I want to say the ocean floor, on the lake floor. That is the mystery. The mystery too was why the Coast Guard didn't respond. The one guy, what was going on there?

John Bacon:

Great question. You raise a few things at once. Like the song says, it might have kept size, it might have broke deep and took water. We don't know. And the best line from that, I already said John Tanner, there's always a lot of things that add up to these disasters. Um the the construction, the storm, some decisions by Z McSorty. His very rational, cautious decision to take the northern route might have backfired for all the reasons I described. And that I mean, I can't fault him for taking that decision in that weather. So he did the rational thing, but there you are. But we also don't know exactly how the end came. We can say with 99% certainty, and all the books behind me have a different theory and they all argue about everything. We all agree that it w when the end happened, it happened fast. Because McSorley, a great captain, did not even get an SOS out. And that takes ten seconds. So if he had ten seconds to say, Hey, we're going down, here are our coordinates, he would have done so. He didn't do so. The life rafts and the lifeboats, two of each, uh, were still fastened, were still pinned when it went down. So no attempt was made to to leave the ship, basically. And no one jumped over either. So all that figures in. But what happened at the end, we're not quite sure. It could have cracked on the surface, like the Bradley Morel did, as I said. It could have also cracked once it's going down, it's five hundred and thirty feet down at the bottom of Lake Superior, and that's you know, a five hundred and thirty uh that's a fifty-three story uh skyscraper. It's obviously a lot of water and it's dark down there. It's all day long, it's dark down there. It's freezing, of course. Um and yet this ship is 729 feet long. So even when you smack the bow at 530 feet, you have 200 feet still sticking out of that of the water. That's how long this thing is. So it could have cracked on the surface and it could have cracked when it hit. I tend to think it cracked when it hit, but we can't be sure. Did it capsize? That's possible also. It also just could have been each time you go into one of these waves, you go underwater, basically. And green water, not the splashy white stuff, the green water is the scary stuff. That means you are underwater. All right. That goes over your ship and you try to pull out. And each time this thing pulls out, pulls out, pulls out, but eventually it might not have pulled out. So that's I think probably the most likely theory, but again, we're guessing. And the best line comes from Ruth Hudson, the mother of Bruce Hudson, her only child, very sad. She said, ultimately, 30 no, 29 men and God, and no one's talking. And I'll be damned if she ain't right.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, that's that's a great line. I tell you, one thing that you do really well in this book, it is, I mean, it was an accident chain of, you know, mission equipment decisions made, but ultimately there were 29 men that lost their lives, and their families were deeply, deeply affected by this, and they still are today. I have to ask you a question, John Bacon. Edmund Bacon Fitzgerald. Relation?

John Bacon:

I don't know, but it's actually possible because my this is a Milwaukee-based family. My great-great-grandfather was Winchell Bacon in Waukeshaw, Wisconsin. Uh so the the families might have mixed somewhere along the line. He was kind of a big shot in Wisconsin, made a lot of money, which my great-grandfather pissed away.

Michele McAloon:

Okay.

John Bacon:

But trust me, I I inherited none of that. Uh but the the kind of families that might have met, basically. So it's all I can say is it's possible, and I'm too lazy so far to look it up. But I will when the book's out, of course, and doing well in 2026. I'm gonna look that one up. We've already talked about McSurley and his wife Nellie at home, waiting for him to retire. We've got Bruce Hudson, I mentioned Ruth Hudson, his mom. Bruce had gone to Ohio State for a couple years, dropped out to be a deck hand on the Emmett Fitzgerald. And why? Because it's unbelievably good money. You can make three times, four times what a teacher makes back at that era in current dollars, US dollars. A deck hand back then made $170,000 to $180,000 with overtime. That's I'm sorry, that's serious money. You don't even need a high school degree. You have to know what you're doing. It's a hard job. But anyway, so he's making good money, he's saving it, he's salting it away, being being very smart, except for his one indulgence is a 1972 Dodge Challenger muscle car. We found the car, Michelle. It is in it is in mint condition, it's not in the family anymore. But whoever has it has got it in a mint condition. In the back passenger window is a sticker with the logo from the smokestack of the MM Fitzgerald, DC with a star for Columbia Transportation. That's how proud he was of being on the Fitz. So he and his buddy Mark Thomas, a fellow dead can from Cleveland, they're both from Cleveland. The car is waiting for them in the dock in Toledo three days later. He's gonna hop in that car and go on this epic cross-country bombing road trip. They got a month to themselves, they got a pile of money. Let's do it. And back then, of course, they wanted to go to Colorado to get Coors beer back when that was exotic.

Michele McAloon:

Right, remember? Yeah, yeah.

John Bacon:

How about that? Go to LA and come back along Route 66. Pretty cool trip. But then in the meantime, he finds out from a payphone at one of the sailor bars in Silver Bay, Minnesota, where they're loading, that his girlfriend, Cindy Reynolds, a waitress in Toledo, is pregnant. He's gotta think fast. And he says, Don't worry, we'll move in together, we'll raise a child ourselves, I've got money, we're gonna be okay. And she's obviously very relieved to hear that. And then she says, You know what? Go on that trip anyway. It's only a month, the baby's not due till June, you've earned it. And that's when he thinks he's gonna marry this girl, as he probably should as the mother of his child, but anyway. But that's where he stayed. He's headed for the most momentous year of his life. An epic road trip, followed by becoming a husband and a father, and he's ready to do it. He's 22 and he can he can handle this. So that's his life. You got Eddie Bindon, who's 47 years old. He is a first assistant engineer, very high ranking guy. He's been most of his almost all his adult life on a ship. He's about to retire. He and Helen are living in Cleveland also. He has they have no children. So they retire with a full pension and he'll be all set. And they have their twenty-fifth anniversary coming up. He goes across the border from Sapiro, Wisconsin, where they're loading, to uh Duluth, Minnesota, to a jewelry store there. And he buys a two carat diamond ring for his wife's twenty-fifth anniversary, their twenty-fifth anniversary. But instead of stuffing that into a duffel bag like you normally would, she's gonna be there in the dock in three days in Toledo. He gives it to a friend and with a love note wrapped around it and says, Please give you know, mail this, send this to my wife. And Michelle, we have no idea why he did this. Only Eddie Binden knows there's no trouble ahead that they could see at that time. But of course, three days after the wreck, she gets in the mail, a two-carat diamond ring with a love note from her husband. And she wore that diamond ring the rest of her life and she never remarried. So these are the kind of stories you have. And of course, when the ship goes down, Bruce Hudson is gone. And Aunt Ruth thinks that she's lost her only child, and she has, of course, and therefore all of her family. And she learns six months later that Cindy Reynolds, whom she knew, Bruce's girlfriend, calls her up and says, In one month, you're gonna be a grandmother. And that was entirely unexpected. Of course she was. And Heather, I just saw Heather up at the Whitefish Point a couple days ago. Heather is now 49 years old, as you might imagine. She has four children, and the oldest is Austin, who looks just like Bruce Hudson. And Ruth said, I loved all my grand my great-grandchildren equally, but I played favorites.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, that's great. I mean, you really do. You handle the stories, you really do. A great backstory on all these men. A lot of them were were simple men, they were hardworking men, they were family men. A lot of this from my military experiences is the same with deployments where you know dad's gone for months and months at a time.

John Bacon:

You can relate. I mean, um I was wondering shipping itself is we depend on this completely in North America, but really around the world. Next to this region, the Great Lakes region for uh producing crops, only Germany, Germany's number two, and this region is number one. Uh as far as exporting uh grain and whatnot around the world. Man, the cement in your basement, the car in your driveway, and the food in your on your table, if you live in North America, it probably comes from these ships. And yet it's invisible, this industry, and I couldn't figure out why. And one of my experts said, Look, man, we know the fisherman, the the factory worker, the farmer, the miner, but nobody knows the sailor. And I thought, why is that? And I then I realized you only have thirty crew on a this gigantic ship. It's a very small crew. And even in the heyday, you only had 300 ships. That's 9,000 guys spread out over eight Great Lakes states and Ontario. Uh so you're not gonna meet them. And even if they live next door, Michelle, you're still not gonna meet 'em because as you say, they're deployed nine months out of the year. Back then, no breaks for graduations, weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, nothing. You're on a ship for nine months every year. And as one of my great sources said, I was a very devoted dad. I love my three kids. I didn't teach any of them how to throw a baseball or how to ride a bike. And that's gotta break your heart, and that's military life too, basically.

Michele McAloon:

How is shipping on the Great Lakes now? Is it still the robust industry?

John Bacon:

Is it you said 11 million jobs depend on actually uh no a crazy number, and if they close the suit locks for six months, we would all feel it. You'd feel it in Germany. That's how serious this is because all the stuff what come you got lumber, of course, still comes from the northern lakes. You've got limestone is essential to turn iron into steel. That's what they do in Gary, Indiana. You've got, of course, iron ore itself, copper, all this stuff, crops, it all comes from these upper lakes and goes to the lower lakes where it's produced, where it's processed. So we depend on this, and yet we know almost nothing about it, incredibly.

Michele McAloon:

It's incredible. It's absolutely incredible. Okay, now we gotta talk about the song. I mean, that is uh that has in a lot of ways that is made this story so memorable, right? It is seared seared into the American imagination. What do you think?

John Bacon:

Oh, let let's be humble about this. If you're writing a book about the MFS Gerald, there is no book without the song first. Um and look, I mean, every book on my shelf, including mine, we all bower a line from the song. The Legend Lives On, Telltale Sound, mine is the gale is up to November. You can't ignore it. Uh without the and I think the song also played an important role. The song brought so much attention to this shipwreck that it finally shamed the industry into reforming itself. And that's why there's zero, one reason why there are zero shipwrecks, as we said, between 75 and the present. But anyway, the song was wonderful about it, in my opinion, and beautiful. It was never supposed to get recorded, it was never supposed to be a hit. So that story, Gordon Lightfoot, an experienced Great Lakes sailor, he knows what he's talking about. He was working on an Irish sea shanty that night, November 10th, thinking to himself, drinking coffee in Toronto must be hell on superior tonight. He's right about that. So he already feels connected. Then the words come in for his song. He didn't have any words. So Harry Atkins of the Associated Press, he's 84 years old now. He wrote the first story, and I found Harry's a friend of mine, it turns out. I had no idea he did this. So he's got the original copy, you know, printed out. We got uh Jim Gaines of Newsweek, two weeks later, he did a wonderful job. He's a University of Michigan grad, we have mutual friends, he's still alive, he's still sharp. We talked about that. His story was so beautiful in a Newsweek article. This is very rare, that four or five lines were lifted basically by Gordon Lightfoot for the for the song, which I spell out in the book. So he's got the words, but he still does not want to play it for anybody. And they're recording this the next album, uh Summertime Dream, in spring of 1976. They've got eleven songs ready to go. This is not one of them. It's not ready, he says. So they're doing eleven songs. They've got five days to record it in the studio. They finish after three and a half days. They're a tight band. And they're literally Michelle packing up their guitar cases, their drums. And the producer, Ken Friesen, says over the PA, says, Hey Gord, why don't you try that song you've been screwing around with, you know, between takes? I go, it's not ready. So but he says, you know what? I'm charging you for five days, whether you do it or not. We're here with the we're here with the board. The band is here, why not give it a shot? So he gets talked into it. Finally. So he says, dim the lights. And he's quiet for about a minute, kind of gathering the mood of that he wanted for this song. In the meantime, Barry Keane, 24-year-old drummer who's also still around, and I got to him, and he's been a great source. He says, What do you want me to do? He's never heard the song. And he says, I'll give you a nod when I want you to come in. Okay. So Lightfoot goes for a minute and a half. And Barry Keane thinks this song's about to end and he's forgotten all about me. That's how long songs were back then, about two minutes. Right. Um, and then nope, at 1 34 exactly, Gordon Lightfoot nods to Barry Keane, and he comes in with that part you cannot imagine the song without anymore. It's the storm. You know, when a quiet pause and the storm comes in with the TomToms and so on. A beautiful and gutsy, I think, uh drum fill, and they keep going, and they finish the song in six minutes and twenty-eight seconds. That's three times longer than a normal song at that time. And I think, you know what, that wasn't half bad. Let's try it again. He's a perfectionist. They tried it again, they tried it again, they tried it again, they tried again five, ten times the next day. And they said, you know what? We did not get it as good as we did the first time. And it turns out the producer recorded the first one, which they would did not realize that he had. And they used that one. So the song we've heard on the radio for fifty years now, or forty-nine, is the not only the first take, and Barry Kane, who's been on five hundred albums literally, he said, I've seen five or ten first takes in my career. This is the first time we ever played a song. You know how often that happens? Never. Never ever ever ever. And and I said, Why? How did it work this time? He said, Man, this is not a song you think your way through. This is a song you have to feel. And we felt it the most the first time when we were basically making it up. Uh that's just incredible. And the song comes out, and even at that, they think, okay, it's you know, it's a song in the album, but so what? They're on the Midnight Special, this Friday night concert series that you might recall in Alabama. I recall growing up on Friday nights, they go they're allowed to play six songs from that album out of eleven. They don't pick this one. All right, they're on Saturday Night Live a little while later. They're they're all three or four songs. They don't play this one. They don't think this song will ever be a hit. It has no chorus, it has no guitar solo, it has no, as Barry Keene says, yummy, yummy, yummy, I've got love in my tummy. There's nothing that sticks with you, you know, from that point of view. And yet it starts crawling up. They turn it into a single, they can't believe it. And then at the end of the year it finishes number two behind Rod Stewart's Tonight's the Night with his hot Swedish model girlfriend, uh Britt Eklund cooing in the background, as you and I both know, that was the 70s. That's the me generation. Right, yeah, sure, sure. This song is the opposite of all that. It's six and a half minutes long, it's just a story, basically. And yet you look at I looked at all the songs from 76. This is the one that gets played the most, even now. It's incredible. It is incredible. It is. The families at first, two-thirds liked it right away. One third were not sure. They weren't sure where he's coming from, who is this guy. He won them over. Uh, whenever he played in their towns, he invited them backstage. He got to know them personally, they had his phone number, all this business. When Aunt Ruth is on her deathbed on November 9th, uh, 2015, Gordon Lightfoot and his bass player Rick Haynes, and Rick Haynes has been great also, he's still around. They traveled to Whitefish Point, and trust me when I tell you, Michelle, unlike mobile Alabama, Whitefish Point is on the way to nothing. You're either desperately lost or you're going to Whitefish Point, to where the bell is. That's where they're going. They're just to pay their respects, not to play, and not for a PR thing. Uh just a private moment with the family. So that's how cool these guys are, in my opinion. So he walks in the cruise quarters, that's where the VIPs stay, uh, in the kitchen, and he says to Aunt Ruth's niece, Pam Whitig, Where's Anne Ruth? Because she's she's a I wish I had met her. She's apparently four foot nine, and she told you she's five foot five, and you believed her. That's the kind of person she was. Um and he says, Where's Aunt Ruth? And Pam says she's on her deathbed in South Carolina. Give me a phone. And that's the photo we have in the book of Gordon Lightfoot in the cruise quarters kitchen on the phone, talking to Aunt Ruth on her deathbed. And she's telling Gordon Lightfoot that I promised Bruce Hudson by prayer that I would be with him in heaven for the 40th anniversary of the sinking. He's been alone too long. And that's what she tells Gordon Lightfoot. And he's of course getting choked up hearing this. She hangs up and she turns to Cindy Reynolds, the girlfriend of Bruce Hudson, the mother of her child, and she says, I was talking to Gordon. Uh that's how close they were. Uh that's how what a good guy Gordon Lightfoot was. And of course, she fulfilled her word. Three or four hours later, she passed away on November 9th, and was in heaven apparently by November 10th. Um so that's pretty amazing. The last thing I'll say about that is Cindy Reynolds, the girlfriend of Bruce, to this day, when she hears the song, she pulls over and has to cry. And that's the best review any musician could ever get.

Michele McAloon:

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Did you ever get a chance to meet Gordon Lightfoot? Because he just died recently, didn't he?

John Bacon:

He did. He died two and a half years ago. I was within 20 feet of meeting him. I saw him play in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He still sounded an 83-year-old man, 90 minutes standing up, he did his job. I saw him at the end, just briefly through mutual friends, and almost pulled it off. But I thought I'd have more time and I gave him a letter and some other books and so on. And then of course he passed away. But I did get to Barry Keene, the drummer, and uh Rick Haynes, the bass player, who are still playing, by the way. They have a new singer, Andy Mock, who's quite good. And their band is otherwise still together. They're still drawn a thousand, two thousand fans, and they still sound great. And they tell great stories also, so it's a wonderful experience. But anyway, those guys were wonderful for me.

Michele McAloon:

That's wonderful. I tell you, folks, I can as animated as John Bacon has been, read this book. It really, you know what? It's a great American tale. It's an American tragedy, but it's also an American tale. It's a very American story. One of my good friends said, you know, the song is one of our true folklore songs, and we don't have many of those. Part of our national identity, sort of. And and this really is it's an American story. I hope the seas and all seas, all lakes have been made safer because of the Edmund Fitzgerald. And that actually was maybe the sacrifices men made. And I know that's cold comfort to families, but maybe there was some good that shined out of it.

John Bacon:

I gotta tell you, the families are two things that surprise me a little bit. One is that they really don't care how it went down anymore. They said the first few years we were curious, now it can't possibly matter. It's not gonna change anything. And as Heidi Braben told me, Heidi Wilhelm back then, she was a 12-year-old girl when she got the news that she's six of seven child children, that her dad's ship went down. And she said, you know what? You don't get over this, you get used to it. And that's happens probably from used to be. She still misses her father and it's fifty years later. But they really don't care how it went down, but they care greatly. And they're very aware of this fact that there's not been one shipwreck on the Great Lakes since. And they take pride in the fact that this got so much attention that it reforms that we we have suffered, but thanks to our suffering, no one has had to suffer since. And they're aware of that fact and they're proud of that fact and should be.

Michele McAloon:

It made the industry great. Well John Bacon, thank you very much for taking time out of what I know is a momentous week for you and for this book. Thank you so much. And I hope you're not done writing. I hope you got some projects in the the the pipeline because you are a heck of an author.

John Bacon:

Well, you're very kind. I've had a truly great time. Your listeners, I hope, are aware. Michelle McAlloon does her homework. Okay, thank you.

Michele McAloon:

Well, it's easy, but you can read the book. The book is.

John Bacon:

Well, yeah, but I mean, this has been a real pleasure for me. We we by the way, we make our list, we've done about a hundred interviews by now, believe it or not. So we make our list of our favorites and our less favorites. I will I will not deny it. You're you're strongly on the favorite side. We'd be happy to come back. And for your listeners, uh, you can find out more on johnhubacon.com. That is my website. Information on the book is there. How to order it anywhere uh in the United States or any probably overseas. Uh the Amazon link, Farms and Noble, but also it's got a program that if you punch in your zip code, it'll tell you exactly where the best local bookstore is. Local bookstores have been fantastic on this book, and I appreciate that too.

Michele McAloon:

That's great. I imagine they are because I think it probably draws men and it draws a whole wide range of audience. We didn't even talk about the song Brandy, but you gotta come back at some point, okay?

John Bacon:

We'll do that one too. I interviewed that guy too, as you know, and he was great, Elliot Lurry.

Michele McAloon:

That's cool. That's really cool. All right, thank you so much.

Gordon Lightfoot:

The legend lives from the Chipotle homedown. The big lake big old chicken. The legend of November.