History Daily - Saturday Matinee: Ship History Radio

Episode Date: November 22, 2025

On today’s Saturday Matinee, we dive deep into the tragedy that took place seventeen miles off the coast of Michigan 50 years ago- the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Link to The Ship History Radio: shiphistory.org/radio Support the show! Join Into History for ad-free listening and more. History Daily is a co-production of Airship and Noiser.Go to HistoryDaily.com for more history, daily.

If you will indulge me, I'm going to be a little petty. Running a This Day in History show as I have for years, it's still always a little shocking at the presumption of some of my listeners when it comes to topic selection. Some listeners feel compelled to tell me in comments, reviews, and social media just how ignorant, misguided, or inappropriate our topic selections are. How dare you not cover Topic X today? They will scream painfully unaware that we covered that event last year. It's unconscionable not to celebrate why today when we have plans to cover topic why next year

upon its 250th anniversary. No one wants to hear about Z when K is clearly more important, says someone who thinks only American history exists. I tell you, it's exhausting and it's disappointing, and it happened again recently on November 10th when we did not cover the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald on its 50th anniversary. But look, I understand. The sinking of that ship is an event that people know and care about, made immortal by Gordon Lightfoot's song. But it's not the worst shipwreck in history. That's the M.V. Wilhelm Gustloff, which sank in the Baltic Sea on January 30th, 1945, taking an estimated 9,000 passengers with it. It's not even the worst shipwreck in the Great Lakes. That's the SS Eastland, which sank on July 24, 1915, killing 844.

Still, the 50th anniversary of a well-known tragedy is something to mark. And we're going to do so on today's Saturday matinee with an episode from the podcast Ship History Radio from the Steamship Historical Society of America. Okay, petty mode off. I hope you enjoy. While you're listening, be sure to search for and follow Ship History Radio. We put a link in the show notes to make it easy for you. On November 10, 1975, 29 crew members were allowed. when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down in a storm on Lake Superior.

Today, we remember them and reflect on the 50th anniversary of the tragedy. You're listening to Ship History Radio from the Steamship Historical Society of America. Through recording, preserving, and educating, our mission is to share the impact of engine-powered vessels, their crews, and their passengers with future generations. My name is Amy Baccharia and I am the education director. Today I'm joined by Mark Sprang, who is the archivist for the historical collections of the Great Lakes at Bowling Green State University. We'll be talking about the Edmund Fitzgerald anniversary and why the specific shipwreck is so popular.

We will discuss changes that followed the tragedy and the related materials in Mark's collections. We've just released a film version of this interview that features the primary sources discussed here. You can find it on our YouTube channel at the handle at Ship History. There is that line in the Lightfoot song, and it's a big quote of how Lake Superior never gives up her dead. It's not actually folklore. So because the water in Lake Superior are so cold and so many parts of it are so inoxic that the bacteria that would normally cause a body to bloat and float to the surface can't survive. So they don't float to the surface like you would get in warmer waters.

The lake it is said never gives up her dead when the skies of November turn gloomy. Tell us a little bit about yourself first, a little bit maybe about your background in archives and how you got into the position you're in today. My name is Mark Sprang. I'm archivist at Bowling Green State University with our Great Lakes historical collections. Before that, I worked for the state of South Carolina for a couple of years, Detroit Historical Society, Naval History and Heritage Command. I went to graduate school at University of Michigan. I already had the marine bug before that, but I wanted to work in collections specifically. related to maritime history. I do just about anything related to the history,

maritime history of the Great Lakes region. I do processing of collections. I do appraisals and donor relations. I do reference, lots of reference and research questions, outreach, lots of assistance with publication for people doing broadcasts, documentaries, books, articles, interviews, even presentations at local historical societies.

So it keeps me very busy. Our collection founder was named Dr. Richard Wright. He did several seasons as a coal passer in the 1950s and then decided to go back to school to be a history professor. He wanted to teach and preserve Great Lakes Maritime history because there weren't a lot of academics really doing that at the time. Got his master's and doctorate, both of them on Ohio-specific shipping topics. Got a job here as a tenure track professor. He both was a teaching professor and he founded what became what is now called the Center for Archival collections here. But the Great Lakes collection, basically our scope is anything related to

the maritime history of the whole region, including like the St. Lawrence Seaway. So that's a pretty big geographic area. Not compared to like the, not compared to like the SSHSA's scope, which is like the oceans, we're our little inland seas here, but it's everything. There's obviously a massive photograph collection, which is of course our most used resource, a mix of copies and originals from a lot of different shipyards and trade groups and things. A lot of manuscript collections related to shipbuilding companies, shipping companies, individual researchers and photographers. You know, a researcher would donate their research product later, for example.

Logbook collection of local logbooks, well, local to our region logbooks. Some audiovisual stuff, but not a ton. Although I'm getting a donor who's providing a ton of born digital. photography and video of shipwrecks that he's discovered over the last 20 years with his friends. So that's really cool to see because it's like raw, raw video. That's big. We have a large newspaper scrapbook collection. I mean, a lot of newspapers are available online in different ways, but some still aren't.

And these are just the collected marine related articles. And then we also have a really large collection of plans and blueprints for vessels built on the Great Lakes, mainly for Great Lakes service, but somewhere for ocean service, especially. during both World Wars. Sometimes it's people doing shipwreck research. For example, like we have the Edmund Fitzgerald's original builder's plans as built in just north of us by Detroit. That's very impressive.

And I will say the SSHSA scope is massive. It's literally any engine powered vessels. You have way more material than we would on the Great Lakes. So that's why, you know, I wanted to chat with you because we do have a lot of members and followers in our social media channels, and anytime we post anything Great Lakes related, it is like, boom. You know, there's just so many people interested in this topic,

and I found a lot of the presentations when we were at the Maritime Heritage Conference together, fascinating on Great Lakes. So it's a topic. I think we need to, you know, make sure we're representing because we do have a lot of people interested. The enthusiast community here, well, they would affectionately call themselves boat nerds,

because there is a great website called boatnerd.com. And they have the boat nerds of Facebook Facebook group, mostly for current ships. Because you can use the free marine traffic app, and you can see where any commercial ship is in the world at any given time. So someone will say, oh, it's going to be in Cleveland in an hour or so, or it's going to be coming into Duluth at 4 a.m. I got to be there in the cold to take pictures of it.

So it's a semi-tight-knit community just in terms of numbers compared to, like, you know, ocean-bice shipping, but I think because the ships are always so close to shore, yeah, there's so many people doing great photography out there. Community is so well informed, too. So if you're wrong, they will let you know in various modes of politeness. Something about this region, I don't know why. I think because so much of the industry of the rust belt was fueled by the shipping here,

you know, the iron ore and coal for steel production and cars, etc. I think that's part of it too. It was much bigger part of helping the Midwest become the powerhouse it used to be. The Edmund Fitzgerald's story gets a lot of attention. And I think it gets a lot of attention because of sort of the mystery of why the ship went down. But do you have any other thoughts on why this particular shipwreck does get so much attention? I mean, I know the song is a big part of it because that was the follow. year and it became sort of a smash hit.

The ship was the pride of the American side. Coming back from some bill in Wisconsin, as the big freighters go, it was bigger than most with a crew and good captain well-season. That was, it spread through popular culture like almost no other shipwreck has, maybe other than the Titanic, just because of its, uh, the scale. But I think the recency bias, too, because it was 1975. 1975, and that's not a time. People would think about a shipwreck with all hands lost,

especially for, you know, there's still sailors around. I mean, they're retired now, but they remember it. For a lot of them, it was their friends. They knew each other. And because the Great Lakes shipping community is such more tight knit in terms of numbers and number of sailors and things like that, I think it's just, so it had a much more personal impact. I think that's why, because the community was so small. I mean, it was only a couple hundred to few hundred ships at most at the time. So losing a whole one with everybody was a big deal. The previous large shipwreck on the lakes was 1966.

The Daniel J. Marell sank and Lake Huron, but they know what caused that and one person survived out of the whole crew. In this case, yeah, it was they just disappeared, you know, no remains, no one. floated up, no survivors. So I think that's probably the other part is the the recency bias, the mystery of not really knowing what happened for sure. There's lots, all these competing theories with various levels of credence to them. And then having a pop culture song written about it, which is not something that usually happens for a shipwreck in modern times. It was very common, you know, in the 19th, 18th, early 20th centuries

to do that. But it tended to be more focused on that area. You know, the song was known by people from, this is where the ship was based or where the captain was based or where it was built. So it just had a bunch of coincidental things to make it the big phenomenon that it is. The Fitzgerald gets a lot of attention in our region because seven out of the 29 crew were from the Toledo area, including the captain, who was literally on his last trip before retirement. There was some changes made to regulations, though, after the sinking, right? would they even make those recommendations for changes if they can't accurately pinpoint what caused the sinking in the first place? There's at least a few things.

A few ships were already piloting the use of survival suits for the crew before that. But that became mandatory. By 1980 or so, Loran Sea started to be required, but that was surpassed. by GPS later. That was a requirement. All the vessels were required to have depth finders, which it still blows my mind that the fish derail did not have a mechanical depth finder. They were still using the manual line at 1975.

And they have to get annual inspections by the Coast Guard. I believe also having to have emergency radio beacons that can be activated in an emergency so they can be located right away. There were some congressional panel recommendations and some other improvements from American Bureau of Shipping. Fortunately, there's always an upside to a shipwreck for what it's worth, but it's sort of that quote about regulations are written in blood. Like, well, yeah, we should have done these before, but now that people died, we're actually going to implement this. And a couple of years before, the Coast Guard had permitted lower freeboard and load line. so that means your vessel

could sit a few feet lower in the water, but that means also if you're washed over, it's harder to recover. So those were rescinded as well, thankfully. Because I don't know if that played a role or not, but I'm sure it didn't help that they were known for

overloading. I know one of the items I sent you is a loading log from a donor, a sailor who worked on the ship in 72, 73, but you can tell it was designed for this, but they kept breaking, carrying records, and it's like, well, there's a point where you're carrying too much. Because it's, well, if we get a few more hundred tons more on this trip, we'll make X-Modars more.

Even more confusing for me, because the ship was operated by Columbia Transportation, Ogle Bay Norton Company, but owned by Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance. So they operated several ships as an investment, but had an actual shipping line to the management and all that. The wreck site of the Edmund Fitzgerald being, I think the only one, is it the only one in the Great Lakes that you can't dive? Because it's considered. Yeah. It's for the reasons of it being a protected grave site. And it's just mostly just over the line into Canadian waters as well.

So you're not even allowed to sonar scan it, like a side scan. I mean, it's deep. It's 500 foot. But in the 90s, there was. was there were a couple of divers who were able to make it with the special like pressure suits like you'd see in the abyss kind of. But yeah, it's I think just because of the recency and because so many people were around who were affected by it, they were able to press for that, especially from the province of Ontario government to be like, no, you can't come here. You can't visit the site. Even just to do sonar like shipwreck searching in Ontario waters, you have to get government.

permission to do it. In the U.S., you just go. So, yeah, it is very unusual that, because it's a 50th anniversary, and there's people who were like, we would love to just, we don't want to go down to it. We just want to scan it and see how, how it's deteriorating. But you can't even do that. I think enough people seem to be respecting it at this case, because the last time anyone has been to the wreck is mid-90s, so it's been 30 years. So I know a couple of people who got to go on a submersible down to it. the 90s, so they got to see it. So, but since then, people just want to know, is it, is the, is the water pressure? Is it crushing the rack? How does it look? You know, they're not trying to look for

remains or anything. It's just, what is the status of the ship itself? When people talk about this, everybody talks about, they just love to argue about why the ship went down. And I don't think that's valuable. I think 29 people lost their lives and we should remember them. And, you know, I like talking about sort of the changes that came after it to make sure that crew members are safe in the future. But it is just such a popular ship and shipwreck. Yeah, it is. You know, so I think it's important to talk about. Yeah, because that is, that was also that there were, you know, there was a, the Daniel J. Meryl sank in Lake Huron in 1969.

There was a survivor. The Carl Bradley sank and Henry Steinbrenner both sank in like, Michigan, one in 58 and one of 53, but there was always one or two people who made it. There was the big armistice day storm of 1940 on the Great Lakes in which several ships were lost in Lake Michigan. Yeah, almost one day off from the day that Fitzgerald sank, because it was November 11th versus November 10th. And it's like, yeah, every couple of decades, we get an almost identical storm at an almost

identical time of year. There was one from the ninth to the... the 13th of 1913. That was still the biggest known storm on the Great Lakes because 12 ships were lost, about 250 sailors lost, and a bunch of ships damaged and lots of power outages and things all over the region. So each time you see improvements in the weather forecasting, because 1913 wireless communication is still super new. I mean, and only some lake ships and fleets were adopting it. It wasn't universal. So, I mean, the Titanic was the year before, April of 1912 and it was still

that was still considered pretty new at that point. So the bomb cyclones that beelines the Great Lakes always are either Alberta Clippers or they're a low pressure system that gets over the Rockies hits the panhandle of Oklahoma, coalesces and like B-line straight for us every time. They always hit a slightly different section of the lakes but the same thing always happens.

There was another one in the 90s like that. Yeah, and we can reconciled. the Fitzgerald storm because I believe that also in 1975 was when NOAA launched their first ghost satellite, so their first official weather satellite that was sending back imagery from space so we could actually see the images. And you can actually, you have to dig a while, but you can find that sort of historical imagery on NOAA's site, which is really, really cool that you can do that. So that's why it was so bad for the Fitzgerald, because reconstructing all the weather data and looking at it. They were in this little sort of oval of eastern Lake Superior where the wave

height was the highest. The sustained winds were the highest. The precipitation was like it was the worst possible situation because they were because they had the whole length of Lake Superior was the fetch for the wind. Because when they left after they left Duluth and they got the first, you know, weather advisories, the wind was from the north. So they hugged the north shore, which totally makes sense. That's what you do to shelter from the weather. But then it switched left. So you had the whole length. And I mean, you had 20 to 25 foot waves. Captain Cooper of the Anderson, who was miles behind the Fitzgerald, said, I think we've got 30 to 35 feet going over our decks at some of these waves. So which isn't surprising for the ocean, but that's how

bad the lakes can get too. And the waves are closer together here because the, so you're getting hit by them more quickly in succession. We have logs from, other not from the Fitzgerald of course because they're at the bottom uh but from other ships that were out at the same time so they're recording their weather data and what's happening and even the western end of lake erie when we were just getting brushed by a little little arm of the storm we were still getting 10 foot waves on the west end here so that's how bad it was so a lot of ships stayed in port at that time and others that were out in the storm the coast guard said hey well our coast guard cutters still it would being fitted in deluth so they're like hey you

can all these freighters can you guys go and look for them instead look for them for us which they did it's still fascinating that there's like we they were relying on civilians to do the search and rescue stuff which you wouldn't think about so yeah there's just so much related to it in terms of uh regulations and of course there's the late carriage association quick plug for our collection because we have their historical records uh they've been around since uh 1880 roughly so they're basically the the trade group that represents all the shipping companies on the league. So I know one of the items I sent over to you is their president's protest against the Coast Guard's report because the Coast Guard is like, well, obviously it was these hatch clamps. And they're like, no,

there's no way. We've been using these for decades and haven't had any problems. There were a lot of them. There were about 60 per, I want to say 60 per hatch. I'm probably wrong. And 21 hatches. And they, you had to, you know, the deck hands had to do each one of those. So they wouldn't always do every single one or they would do it as on as they were on the trip but one or two of them being you know not all the way down on a six out of 60 is not going to loosen the hatch enough to make a difference you know the captain had 40 years of experience captain exorily so he knew i mean he knew what he was doing but they did interview prior captains for the coast guard board of inquiry and stuff too so it's interesting to get their perspectives on what happened and surprisingly the

Wikipedia article. I don't always recommend Wikipedia as a source, but they actually do a good job. Whoever the authors have been, they don't take a side. And they just present the major theories. And like, here's the different ones and what they think happened because the Coast Guard had theirs and the NTSB had theirs. A book that came out in late 90s, 2000s by one of the guys at Great Lakes Engineering Works who designed it did his own. and there's another one just based. There's another one done by, you know, weather expert. And then you have more general ones. It's like any popular history topic. You have the entire spectrum of publication. So you have, you know, very serious, academically rigorous to sort of pop history type stuff. And they're not always differentiated between which is which. So, and as you're right about,

you mentioned the shipwreck preservation. So there's some great ones in, all of the lakes, but Superior has the ones that are the best preserved. We are a diving mecca to an extent, but I think because of the water temperatures, people tend to lay love to do more shipwreck diving in like the Caribbean or the Mediterranean, somewhere where it's warmer, right? Because Lake Superior, even in the summer is barely, barely into the 60s, if that. Lake Erie, the visibility is too bad. But, you know, we have, I know in the lake system, we have at least three or four schooners

that sank in the 19th century where the master's still standing. There's a bunch in Lake Superior where some of the paint still on it. Intact windows. It depends on how they sank, right? If they sank violently, it's all busted up. But some of them just went gently to the bottom. There was a yacht called the Gunilda that sank in the early 1900s. Great representation of rich people hubris because, you know, they came into the lakes from like New York City, right, on their yacht.

and they're in Lake Superior. The guy's like, oh, I don't need a local pilot to make sure I know where stuff is so I don't hit it. Of course, they ran on a reef. And yes, there are reefs in, not coral reefs, but we have reefs in the Great Lakes. You know, locals are like, well, you're going to need two tugs to get you off properly. And it's like, oh, I only need one. And of course, that didn't work. And so it just kind of did this, like slid off and went to the bottom.

But because it sank gently, everything's intact. Like, you can go into the lounge and the piano is still standing up. And, like, the dishes are still sitting there and the skylight's intact. And the building is still on the bow. You know, it's, so it's considered sort of like one of the gold standards for shipwreck for every call. I think it was Jacques Cousteau actually said that. He's like, this is one of the best preserved things I've ever seen before.

Can we talk a bit about the materials that you have related to the Edmund Fitzgerald specifically? Biggest thing is the original builder's plans from Great Lakes Engineering Works. They only built two ships after the Fitzgerald before they closed in the early 60s. So it's a big deal. So we have pretty much a full set because not really anything was modified before it sank in 75. So over 17, 18 years, it didn't really go through that much change. A photograph collection, some of which are original summer copies. There's kind of a conglomeration, as many of our photophiles are.

Of course, the newspaper collection, we have a couple of films of it. One is a promotional film done by Willis Jeep and the Toledo Port Authority together in 1960. Promoting the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway and how great it's going to be for the Great League's region. It only kind of was. Cargo of all descriptions long has been transported by water from one country to another. Today, moving freight by ships to and from the United States is big business. And when we speak of foreign shipping, we usually think of ports at New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, or San Francisco. Our story starts at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Lock, one of the seven new locks in the St. Lawrence Seaway that permit larger ocean-going vessels to reach Toledo.

It is near Messina, New York. The longest freighter on the Great Lakes, the Edmund Fitzgerald, also makes Toledo a regular port of call. The vessel is 729 feet long and can carry more than 20,000 tons of iron ore. More than four and a half million tons of iron ore have passed through the Toledo port in a single season.

It was known as the Toledo Express because Superior Wisconsin to Toledo, Ohio was its most common route. So it did that hundreds and hundreds of times over its career. A few things we have copies of, but they're not. There's many copies out there, like the Coast Guard's report, widely panned, the National Transportation Safety Boards report,

a little information on the recovery of the ship's bell in the mid-1990s. It was replaced with a new bell engraved with the crew members' names. We have a couple of nice little taconite samples, which is the basically pelletized iron that it would usually carry. Of course, we have a copy of Gordon Lightfoot sheet music for the song. and then some other material like the specifications, the first paper the designers presented at the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers. Here's the design of our new ship because at the time of its launch,

it was what was called Queen of the Lakes, which is the title given to the longest ship on the lakes generally. So it was only, it wasn't that long before it was surpassed by Canadian ship by just a little bit. The current largest ship is 1,013 feet long. So it's stuck in the lakes. There's no way you can get out. So there's, yeah, there's a lot related to that and the sort of machinery design and inspections and American Bureau of Shipping approvals and that sort of thing. So there's quite a bit.

So you had sent a couple pictures that I found especially intriguing and they were of passenger accommodations and a passenger dining room. And I had never seen pictures of the interior of this ship at all and honestly didn't know that there would have been. And I know that on, you know, most cargo vessels, especially ocean-going cargo vessels, there would have been small accommodations for passengers. And they would have carried, you know, four to 12 or something like that. But I had never really thought about that on the Great Lakes. And so when you sent these pictures, I was like, oh, my gosh, that is so interesting. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that, how common it would have been for people to travel on a ship like the Edmund Fitzgerald.

So the flagship is of a number of fleets usually had. some sort of passenger quarters and like an owner's quarter slash lounge that they could use on a whim basically. You know, if they have business interests at the other end of that ship's regular trip, they'll just, sometimes they would just ride the boat instead. And you could still, until, especially until the COVID years, it was a lot easier. You could still get passenger passage on a number of the freighters on the Great Lakes.

So, you know, they'd have a special steward who just, cater to you and your guests. And, you know, it's the same thing. It's only a handful of people. Now you can only do it if it's like a raffle or something. Because, I mean, post-9-11, it was already starting to be restricted. But then the companies took advantage during the COVID years to like kind of permanently restrict passenger access.

Yeah. And if it's your own case, they had sort of state-of-the-art cabins. But the one picture you'll probably show of the guest state room, you can kind of, you can actually kind of see the curve of the side of the cabin there. So you had nice pasture state rooms. They had a nice, they probably used the officer's mess, I would guess, to eat in because it was fancier. You know, you could whine and dine the big wiggs while you were at court unloading. Not loading, maybe loading too, but usually you were at a big sort of gravity dock situation.

It wouldn't have been as easy to do that. But a lot of times, in the earlier years, it was usually family members of, especially of the captain. and bring the wife and kids along for a trip or, you know, something along those lines. And of course, the more recent you get, the more difficult that was to do. Prior to the sort of standard Great Lakes freighter design, tons of the ships on the Great Lakes were sort of, they were passenger and package freight, so you had the freight deck and you had a passenger deck on them, so that was more common. And then once trains and automobiles came along, that kind of really slowed it down.

So the passenger trade on the lakes now is very light. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Ship History Radio and our interview with Mark Sprang on the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. You can find images and links to the film and the historical collections of the Great Lakes at shiphistory.org slash radio. Learn more about our organization at s-sh-h-sha.org. Until next time, fair winds and following scenes.