Monday, November 10, 2008

Today In History: The gales of November came early.

On this day in 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald went down with all hands in a storm on Lake Superior.
Posted by @
Labels: ,

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most...

Carpet Shark LOVES that damn song. He sings along, even.

7:53 AM, November 10, 2008
karrde said...

Aye, the storms can blow in hard on Lake Superior.

I've been told (by someone who still lives in the Keweenaw Peninsula near Lake Superior) that on the night the Fitzgerald sunk, 20-foot rollers were coming into shore. In one area, where a breakwater had been set up around a harbor, the waves rolled in as if the breakwater wasn't there.

Under normal conditions, that breakwater was a pile of rocks 6-7 feet above the Lake surface. That night, it was a pile of rocks regularly washed over by huge waves...

9:50 AM, November 10, 2008
Anonymous said...

God bless them. I spend a lot of time on the shore in Rhode Island, and all the fishing ports have monuments for local boats lost in one bad storm or another.
I topped trees for Cersosimo Lumber up in Vermont one summer. The life expectancy for toppers was three years and two months.
Something to thing about next time you open a can of tunafish, burn some coal, or buy a two by four.
And as earworms for us ADD types, it is a good song, worthy of the men it's sung about. Right up there with Streets of New York by the Wolfe Tones, or The Roving Dies Hard by Battlefield Band.
None of them PC of course. Can't have the little kiddies exposed to testosterone in their music now, can we?

11:38 AM, November 10, 2008
Anonymous said...

It's looking a little rough up there on Gitchee Gumee today:

http://users.vianet.ca/naturenorth/5.html

cheers, erich martell

1:17 PM, November 10, 2008
rick said...

Believe it or not, my 6th grade choir performed that song during our annual recital in 1977. I still get the chills every time I hear it.

9:39 PM, November 10, 2008
Anonymous said...

I lived in MI on Lake Huron for about 2 years. Every bar and restaurant, and I mean every one, had a photo of the "Fitzgerald" on the wall.

And the song gives me chills, too.

10:53 PM, November 10, 2008

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)