Hi, I’m Deborah Holdship, Editor of Michigan Today.

It’s been a while since we’ve talked! I retired the Listen in Michigan podcast after 60 episodes, but I’m resurrecting it for this special episode with author John U. Bacon, two-time Michigan graduate, and best-selling author. His new book: The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, is on shelves now, in advance of the 50th anniversary of the tragedy on Lake Superior that virtually every child of the Great Lakes has heard at some point.

Especially those of us of a certain age who may have been fans of CKLW. Mostly because the disaster, which claimed the lives of 29 men on Nov,. 10, 1975, inspired one of the eeriest popular songs in modern history. If you’ve never heard it – or if it’s been decades, since you have — I dare you to search YouTube and listen to Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” as soon as you are done listening to this episode.

As kids we were always quick to change the station. The folky dirge is like a ghost story or a horror film. You know the ending. You don’t want to know the ending.. But you DO know it and it never changes, and it’s scary and sad and SO evocative. When Lightfoot, evoking the ship’s old cook sings, “fellas it’s been good to know ya” I LOSE my mind. Just reading the lyrics will bring tears to your eyes.

I listened to it once – and only once — after speaking with John and reading the book. I had chills the entire time. And one reason is that in John’s book he introduces you to those 29 men and you get very attached. He interviewed family members and loved ones and uncovered the most poignant personal gems that humanize this tragedy in a way the melds beautifully with Lightfoot’s musical eulogy.

And there was a method to his madness, John told me. Since we already know the ending of the tale he needs the reader to suspend disbelief, get on board this doomed ship, and invest in these sailors. And pretty soon you’re locked in, and you almost forget the destiny that awaits. Until it happens. Powerful stuff.

OK, I’ll stop talking. Here’s John, ever enthusiastic, reflecting on some of the wild stuff he learned about one of his main characters: the Great Lakes.

John Bacon: I had no idea and would never have guessed that the experienced sailors who’ve done both the Atlantic and the Great Lakes say the Great Lakes are more dangerous. That it’s not even close. And that was just stunning to me. And also the mere fact that between 1875 and 1975, 6,000-10,000 Great Lakes shipwrecks occurred taking down 30,000 men. These are all low estimates. That’s a shipwreck a week for a century. That’s a casualty a day for a century. So yes these Great Lakes are no joke.

Deborah Holdship: Who chooses this as their career like and these people are obviously such interesting characters unto themselves, you know?

JB: And you’re right about that. Who gets on is a guy like Captains McSorley and these other guys born in the 1910s and 1920s. You’ve survived the Great Depression and these are blue-collar families. All of them. Until you get to the deckhands. Young deckhands in the 70s, they grew up grateful for any work they could get, and of course they most of them served in World War II, often with great distinction.

These are guys who are trying to get off the farm or avoid the mines or the factories. And compared to those jobs, being in a freighter after World War II is a very good job, especially with the unions kicking in the 1940s and 50s. The lowest ranking guy on the ship Edmund Fitzgerald, that guy’s making $180,000 in today’s dollars and you’re 20 years old. And you also eat like a king. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying it’s always fun. It’s dangerous, but compared to the options, it’s pretty good.

And the really hard part, I think. these guys you are gone… I wondered how come I don’t know any sailors, any commercial sailors? Here’s why. Because there’s only 30 per ship and even at the heyday only 300 ships in 1975. That’s 9000 people spread out over eight Great Lakes states: a lot in Duluth, a lot in Toledo, a lot in Cleveland, some in Michigan, of course. But that’s not great ratios. And even if the guy’s living next to you, you wouldn’t meet him because he’s on a ship nine months out of the year. No vacations, no breaks, no weddings, no birthdays. And one of the guys, John Hayes, a proud graduate of the Great Lakes Maritime Academy, he said, “I’ve got three kids. I’m very close to all three. I didn’t teach any of them how to ride a bike.” And that’s got to break your heart.

DH: The thing about these stories is you just wanted to end a different way. It’s compelling and it’s such an adventure story and it’s these guys are so great.

JB: And then you have to care about, you have to know these guys and care about them before that last trip. It can’t just be the end and we tell the story right? In what we call the Tick Tock section, no relation to the website, we have 11 chapters on the last run. All the other sections are four or five chapters. Once you get into the last run, you shouldn’t want to stop. And the details of it, hopefully you keep moving.

The model here is James Cameron’s Titanic, the great movie. I know the ship goes down. I’m pretty sure of that. But you suspend disbelief to think that maybe this time it turns out differently because you care about the people.

DH: Well, and it’s so interesting to hear from the grandchildren or the children of these guys. And their memories of them, there were 29 of them.

JB: These guys are just genuinely good guys and they aren’t on all ships. They’re an unusually happy ship due to an unusually in enlightened Captain.

DH: So talk to me a little bit about McSorley.

JB: He was not a tyrant. Unlike a lot of them at that time, he didn’t yell and scream. Didn’t throw coffee at people, which others did. And there was not the usual division between the engine – it’s like offense and defense on a football team. You got the engine group and the below deck. Of course they handle the engine, all the other mechanics and you got the pilot house group, that’s the captain, first mates and so on. But usually they’re above deck, they’re at the bow in this case. And they almost never get along. These guys got along famously. And that was very good.

There was a generational gap. You had three quarters basically were World War II vets and one quarter were trying to avoid Vietnam. So that’s two very different groups there. And you can see that the haircuts are the brush cuts versus the long hair and the lamb chops. I mean it’s very stereotypical and on most ships that was a problem and on this ship it wasn’t. And the answer to all those things was McSorley. He was very good to everybody on the ship. They all loved him. He had very high standards, but they all said he was utterly fair. If you did your job, he’s got no problem with you. Also, these guys were so loyal to him that they moved from ship to ship whenever he got promoted. One guy, Craig Alquist, who’s on the ship a few months earlier, he had a great line, which I will not use here, this is family programming, but he said, “I’m pretty sure McSorleyy had very strict ‘no jerks’ policy.” He used another word that I will not use here but you get the idea. Patrick Devine, son of a judge in Toledo, a Marquette student, said, “I’ve been on 10 ships, and seen plenty of weirdos.” And this is the 70s, so more weirdos than usual perhaps during that stretch. And he said, “We didn’t have that in the on the Fitz.” These are just generally good guys you wanted to work with. And he said, “It’s very simple. This is the greatest ship in the Great Lakes. This is the greatest captain on the Great Lakes.” And everyone said the same thing. You fight to stay on that ship. And that was that.

The ship when it was built, Edmund Fitzgerald was the CEO of Northwestern Mutual Insurance in Milwaukee. Right now, it’s like a $30-billion company, but his grandfather and six brothers were all Great Lakes captains and that’s a large percentage of what was out there. Just a crazy family. And his Dad was the best shipbuilder in Milwaukee. So he wanted to build one specification: “We’re going to build the greatest ship the Great Lakes has ever seen.” And they did it.

It was the longest and 729 feet. It carried the most cargo. It was one of the fastest. It very quickly broke every record in the Great Lakes and started breaking its own for 13 years nonstop for cargo loads, cargo speed, seasonal hauls, all this stuff. But here’s the catch. It’s 729 feet long. And you, Michiganders, should get this one. That’s one foot shorter than the tallest building in the Renaissance Center. So that’s how long these things are. Yeah, they’re crazy long, but it’s only 75 feet wide. That’s less than the distance from home plate to first base by 15 feet. Like a giraffe’s neck.

Why does this exist? Two reasons: They’re trying to maximize the cargo that they can get through on each trip and you got to squeeze through the Soo locks. The Soo Locks are the bottleneck of the operation. They are very crucial – a 20-foot drop from Lake Superior to Lake Huron. And this ship was within specifications to one foot on both sides so you can maximize that. And there are no ships like this built anywhere else in the world. You don’t make anything that absurdly long, which means, all right, with the waves we’re talking about in the Great Lakes — which are worse in many ways due to lack of salt on the on the ocean. The salt in the waves squeezes down the top of the waves – the top gets shaved off because the salt water packs it down and then it spreads them out. Also the weight of this water on the Great Lakes the waves are pointing like this. So instead of 10 to 16 seconds apart they’re 4 to 8 seconds apart. You can have the bow of this ship on one 30-foot wave and nothing in the middle and your sterns is on top of another 30-foot wave. You’ve got 26,000 tons of taconite in the middle. 26,000 tons of taconite is equivalent to 4200 adult elephants, right? Put your bow on that end and your stern at that end. What’s gonna happen the middle with 4200 hundred adult elephants? The equivalent of enough taconite to build 7000 cars per shipload?

Well, it’s gonna crack. It’s gonna bend back and forth. It’s called sagging like this. And then the next wave, it goes over the wave. It hogs, sags, hogs, sags, hogs. Do that 10,000 times in a day. That’s how many waves you get. You bend a paper clip back and forth like that 10,000 times… What’s going to happen eventually? And again, I had no idea.

So I love it when online before the book came out, you see all these comments: What “new” can we possibly know about this, All of it?

DH: Just with any one story, when you start digging, you start learning stuff. I mean, you got the guy that had the diamond ring that he didn’t take with him on the ship. You got the guy whose girlfriend is pregnant and now the mother has a descendant that she can, you know, substitute for her lost boy. Just the stories are so beautiful.

JB: Working on so many fronts, I got lucky to find six crewmen who were still alive. They’re not making more of those. There might be a few others out there, but boy, I bet not more than two or three because this is 50 years ago. I got families, of course, willing to talk to me. Also this: The stories that I discovered through the families were just incredible. And when you pitch a book proposal in New York to the publishers, you;re basically a geologist promising them, “look, there’s oil down there, I promise.” Then you get a contract and they call your bluff and, “Ohh, crap. I gotta go find the oil.”

But it kept coming, as you can see in the book. It just kept on springing up stories that I never expected. We talked about McSorley. McSorley was going to retire after this run and pay for his wife’s medical care. One more trip for a bonus. He’s gonna retire after this run. And that was because she’s in a healthcare already. We think cancer, but I’m not quite sure. That’s a good guy. He’s not being greedy, he’s not pushing it. He’s a good guy. T

Then you’ve got Bruce Hudson, 23 year old, went to Ohio State, took a year off to get on the ship. Can’t blame him. It’s $180,000 in today’s dollars. And while he’s doing it, he’s got one weakness and that’s his muscle car parked. He and a buddy, Mark Thomas, also from suburban Cleveland, are going to hop in this car in three days. A Burgundy, 1973 Dodge Challenger 72, I think. Sorry. They’re gonna hop in this thing and go West. Back then getting Coors beer in Colorado is exotic.

DH: Oh yeah. Remember that.

JB: And then go to LA and then go back on Route 66. They had it all mapped out. And then he finds out from his girlfriend, Bruce Hudson does, while he’s in a bar in Silver Bay, MN, and his girlfriend in Toledo, Cindy Reynolds is pregnant. So that will change your plans. He says, “don’t worry, we’ll move in together, we’ll waves the child ourselves, we’ll be OK.” She was very relieved about that, as you might imagine. And then she says, ”you know what, go on that trip anyway, because that’s November and the baby’s not due till June. We’ll be OK.” So then he thinks he might be marrying her, so he got the right girl. Of course, this ship goes down and Bruce Hudson’s mother thinks she’s lost her only child. She has. But the she was surprised to learn six months later that she’s going to be a grandmother. She has no idea about this. So heartbreaking in many ways, but also she doted on that kid, Heather, like you can’t believe — took her shopping all the time. And then Heather has four children. One of them, Austin, looks just like. Bruce Hudson, the son that she lost. So guess what? She played favorites with Austin. So that was a bittersweet story.

Then you’ve got Eddie Benton, who you mentioned. He’s 47 years old. He’s about to retire after 25 years on the Great Lakes. He’s had got a Navy pension. Also, he’s got no kids, but a wife of 25 years. There’s a picture of them in the book. The day before they leave on this trip, he gets to port from Superior, WI, which is a port city right next to Duluth. He goes across the border to buy a fancy diamond ring for their 25th anniversary and for reasons, Deb, I have no idea and no one does except for him, he gives it to a friend to mail to his wife instead of just putting in his duffel bag. You’re gonna see her in three days. She’s gonna be at the dock in Toledo’s, gonna pick you up, drive you a couple hours to where they live. And we have no idea why he did this, but a week after the ship went down, she gets a package in the mail and it’s her 25th anniversary ring.

DH: Oh my God. And even just the the irony that Edmund Fitzgerald really did not want them to name this ship after him.

JB: He did not have a great ego. He was really a quite beloved, humble guy. A very successful CEO. They named it after him. He did not want it. So they arranged for him to get out of the room for something, and they named it for him against his back.

DH: They think they’re doing him some honor. And he’s like, no, no.

JB: I mean, he’s in the era where these ships were going down on a regular basis. He e knows the risks. If it goes down, you’re attached to it. Yeah. So his son, also Edmond Bacon Fitzgerald, no relation that I know of, but he’s the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers. He’s the one who brought the Brewers to town. He said the day “the ship was launched on June 23rd, 1958, it was the best day of my dad’s life. The day it went down was the worst.”

DH: Cannot even fathom it. All right, Well, Speaking of the day it went down, the reporting, I loved the excerpt you gave me and the stuff about the reporting and just how just effective and efficient and amazing and accurate this was.

JB: For the time being, as far as the reporting goes, how many guys from ‘75 were at all involved in the story are still around? It turns out that Harry Atkins, the guy who did the Associated Press story at the time, he’s in his 80s. He’s a friend of mine from the press box at University of Michigan. He was the AP reporter for sports for the state of Michigan for decades. They gave that job to Larry Lage, also a friend of mine, Pioneer grad here in town, and we’re working out one day in Ann Arbor and he said, “Hey, Harry Atkins wrote that story.” I couldn’t believe it. Harry Atkins is still alive and based in Harbor Springs. He still had the original and he did a great job. He drove up that night. But in that story that went out to 6500 outlets via the AP there’s a detail – the director, the pastor of Mariners Church in Detroit, went out and rang the bell 29 times. The next day Harry Atkins said “I didn’t report that. I’m in Saulte St. Marie.” We have no idea to this day who went out there. We interviewed the people who made the assignments and one guy said “I’m the guy would have assigned it, but somebody did it.” And the pastor talked about that later on. He did do it. It’s not made up. We have no idea who the reporter was, who found the person, who found the pastor ringing the bell. But here, Atkins includes this. He does a beautiful job of the story.

And all on 24 hours notice, no cell phone, no Internet. There were a lot of ways to screw that story up. He did a wonderful job because he cared about it. Cared about it more than he had to. We know how that works. Of course, from there, Newsweek picks it up two weeks later. And who picks it up? James Gaines is the byline. Jim Gaines, a proud Michigan graduate who was at the Michigan Daily. We talked about that, how that’s where he lived his life. You know, that goes, that’s where most of those guys lived their lives.

Gaines only had about 500 some words to do it. And he did such a beautiful job. He said, “look, this is basically an obituary and it’s breaking news kind of in two weeks.” But it’s more of a poem and and he took such care with it and there are so many beautiful lines in such a small space. Gordon Lightfoot reads his story. Too, four or five lines from that piece – It truly was lyrical and those became lyrics.

So look, without Harry Atkins doing his job better than he had to, Jim Gaines doing better than he did. And he’s still alive too, by the way, and very sharp. Then Gordon Lightfoot does his job better than he has to. Without all that, I’m not writing a book, so those guys matter a great deal.

It’s so amazing. And then you had assistance, some insight from some of our faculty in engineering. Shipbuilding is, you know, a big thing again. And we have a pretty robust program here in engineering and they’re trying to answer the call to build more ships for United States. It’s probably nice to know you’re getting your expertise from your alma mater.

JB: And in this case, it was Matthew Collette. Apparently, he’s a legend at the Naval Architecture school. One of his graduate students, Brendan Falkowski, was also very helpful. These guys are great.

And it’s, it’s Collette who told me how the water works, told me how these ships work in general. He also had the theory too, and I quoted him on this as well, is that when a ship like this goes down, it’s rarely just one thing. It’s a series of events: It’s nature, it’s mechanics, and it’s human decisions. He also says, “I am reluctant to judge those in that moment because you only have so many cards to play. Most of them aren’t very good and you have to make a decision right now without consulting and no hindsight.” So he pointed out just what the options really were. So I thought Matthew Collette was as good as advertised. Brendan Falkowski, he made the point that usually in the Great Lakes we’re slow to adapt to new innovations, you know, new technology, new innovations and so on. In this case, they weren’t.

They went with modular construction of the Fitzgerald: Three sections were shipped to Great Lakes Engineering Works in Detroit, right there in Zug Island, where the ship was built. And I talked to some of the sons of the people who built it. Kind of cool. So that’s unusual. And then it’s also unusual that they swapped out thousands if not hundreds of thousands of rivets for welds. Welds are cheaper to do: they’re faster and they’re lighter, all things that appeal to a shipping company. Lighter –1.2 million pounds lighter — which means you can carry 1.2 pounds more of steel, iron, sorry, every time you get on the ship you do that 50 times a year. It ships are made to be, you know, live 100 years. So that 1.2 million pounds – it adds up dramatically. But these two things both come with a catch. Welds are not quite as strong as rivets. And the modular construction makes it even more flexible. These things are designed to be flexible the way a skyscraper is in the wind. But everyone said this was the most flexible ship on the Great Lakes, which, again, we’re back to the paper clip. You can’t [bend] it forever.

Long story short about all this, Deborah, without the long arm of the University of Michigan, it’s not going to work. I can’t do what I do. I’m sitting down to write a book about college football… I already know half the story, basically. But this case, I meanspecif. So thank you to all your helpful alums and professors and. All that good stuff and fans it, it works, so thank you.

DH: I just love all the Michigan connections that arise in John’s book — just another example of the vast Michigan network of expertise, experience, and reach. Never forget your U-M connections, people. They will take you far. OK, on that note, enjoy the excerpt John provided and as always, Go Blue!