• Bridge is excerpting two chapters of The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ 
• The chapters detail how the freighter was built to set records for hauling cargo and became a legend of the lakes
• But construction included tradeoffs and choices that didn’t prepare the crew for a mighty storm

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Next month marks the 50th anniversary of the Great Lakes’ last major shipwreck, the Edmund Fitzgerald, which has been made immortal by the song by Gordon Lightfoot but was already famous when it sank in Lake Superior and killed 29 crew members.

Ann Arbor author John U. Bacon, a New York Times bestselling author of “The Great Halifax Explosion,” delves into the lore and history of the freighter in his new book, “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

It goes on sale Tuesday.

“Like a lot of Michiganders, I grew up fascinated by the Great Lakes in general and the Edmund Fitzgerald in par­ticular,” Bacon told Bridge Michigan.

“I was 11 years old when the ship went down, and I still remember it — and the haunting feeling it gave me whenever I looked out across any of the Great Lakes. Once you’ve caught the bug, it’s hard to shake.”

Bacon began his book in 2022 with the goal to “humanize the 29 men who went down with the ship.” In the process of researching the doomed freighter, though, Bacon said he discovered so much new information that “90% of this has (book) been told before.”

Bridge Michigan is excerpting two chapters of the book that chronicle construction of the freighter in Detroit, the importance of Great Lakes shipping on the world economy after World War II and the fateful compromises made by the owners of the Edmund Fitzgerald that presaged its sinking on Nov. 10, 1975.

The biggest and the fastest

In the three decades following World War II, Detroit was the beating heart of the most robust economy the world had ever seen, and Great Lakes shipping served as the circulatory system.

When it comes to hauling goods, trains are roughly twice as efficient as trucks, but ships are almost three times more efficient than trains, and six times more efficient than trucks. The difference between ships and trucks is not 6 percent or 60 percent—margins any corporation would covet—but 600 percent, an astronomical savings.

Shipping has been the most efficient form of transportation the world has seen since humans built their first boats, and it’s never been close. For those who wanted to make a splash in the Great Lakes’ booming postwar economy, the challenge was simple: build a better boat.

Northwestern Mutual Insurance President Edmund Fitzgerald insisted on one clear if daunting specification: that the Edmund Fitzgerald be the best ship on the Great Lakes. To fulfill its mission, Great Lakes Engineering Works (GLEW) engineers first had to determine the limits. The Army Corps of Engineers had mandated that no ship could pass through the MacArthur Lock in Sault Ste. Marie that was longer than 730 feet, wider than 75 feet, or drafted more than 29.5 feet. That same year, 1957, the United States and Canada had begun digging out the St. Lawrence Seaway, whose measurements could accommodate ships no longer than 729 feet.

So that’s exactly how the GLEW engineers designed the Edmund Fitzgerald, right down to the last inch: 729 feet long by 75 feet wide. More than 80 percent of the Fitzgerald ’s 729 feet were devoted to its three cavernous cargo holds, with its pilothouse in the bow and its engine seven hundred feet behind it in the stern. This made the Fitzgerald ’s three cargo holds the best in class. That was the whole point, after all. These dimensions were designed to get as much cargo through the narrow Soo Locks as possible, without much consideration for the ship’s ability to handle big waves. 

“You only make money hauling cargo, as much as you can, and you want to reload as fast as you can,” former Great Lakes Maritime Academy (GLMA) superintendent John Tanner explains. “So they made the freighters as long as possible, too, and open on top so they can load and unload them efficiently. That’s why they look like big, open canoes— shallow, long, and easy to get the cargo in and out. But that also makes them weaker, by design.

“That usually doesn’t matter, until you’re in a storm. Then it matters a lot.”

On the Great Lakes a ship as long as the Fitzgerald can impale its bow in one wave, which can lift it up thirty feet or more, while the ship’s stern can be simultaneously stuck in the wave coming right behind it, raising the ship’s back end in the air another thirty feet. That leaves its midsection, which could be loaded with 58 million pounds of iron ore—the equivalent of 4,200 adult elephants—suspended between the two waves, with nothing supporting it. That creates a phenomenon naval architects call “sagging,” in which the unsupported middle of the ship sags toward the water below it, exerting a tremendous strain on the hull.

After sagging between two waves, just seconds later the ship might face another threat: riding over the peak of a single colossal wave. This creates a condition known as “hogging,” the opposite of sagging, where the vessel drapes over the wave’s crest, with both the bow and stern drooping downward, again placing immense pressure on the center of the ship’s hull.

A ship fighting through a serious storm can get caught in a harrowing cycle of hogging and sagging every few seconds. This weakens the ship’s hull and increases the likelihood of a major structural failure, like bending a paper clip back and forth too many times before it finally snaps. But the chances of that seemed so slim that there is no record of anyone involved in the design or construction of the Fitzgerald expressing any concerns over the ship’s ability to handle the big waves. 

The Edmund Fitzgerald would not only be the largest ship the Great Lakes had ever seen, but with her 7,500-horsepower Westinghouse steam turbine engine, she would be able to sail at sixteen miles per hour, making her one of the faster freighters on the Great Lakes, too.

Few endeavors have bound time so mercilessly to money as Great Lakes shipping did at its peak. And no vessel had been more perfectly designed to maximize those elements than the Edmund Fitzgerald.

By determining the absolute limits of Great Lakes shipbuilding, and pushing the Fitzgerald right up to those lines, Great Lakes Engineering Works had created a ship built to do exactly what President Edmund Fitzgerald had dreamed it would: shatter every shipping record on the Great Lakes, and make unprecedented profits doing so.

Like most Great Lakes freighters, the Edmund Fitzgerald was built to last a century.

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The Fitzgerald’s architects went all out on the ship’s dimensions, engine, and other performance features, but they made cooler calculations on safety. Even their budget wasn’t without limits, after all, and there were fewer safety regulations in 1958. The Fitzgerald ’s architects did not include any automated system to alert the crew if water invaded the cargo holds, such as cargo-hold sounding tubes, although those were not legally required. So if water seeped into the cargo holds, whether through the hatches on top or a damaged hull below, the crew probably wouldn’t know it.

Some omissions were harder to understand, creating problems that were easier to predict. Easy example: “The binoculars they provided were so weak you wouldn’t even buy them for your own use,” former GLMA superintendent John Tanner says. “But that’s what happens when bean counters control things.”

For some reason the Coast Guard and the American Bureau of Shipping did not require ships in 1958 (or even in 1975) to be equipped with electronic sounding gear or depth gauges (sometimes called fathometers). Even with a skilled captain, angry seas and poor visibility make estimating the depth an imprecise art, at best. Where Lake Superior runs one thousand feet deep or more, it hardly matters. But when a captain must navigate around Lake Superior’s Six Fathom Shoal—a fathom is six feet, so the name indicates the shoal is only thirty-six feet deep, though it actually can run as shallow as eleven—in Lake Superior’s northeast corner, knowing the exact depth can be a matter of life and death.

Hull 301: ‘The limberest boat I’ve ever been on’

The construction of the ship started on Wednesday, August 7, 1957, when Great Lakes Engineering Works brought together hundreds of machinists, pipefitters, welders, and crane operators, and laid down the first keel plate for “Hull 301,” as the Fitzgerald was known until she launched.

“The big thing about Great Lakes shipping is, we’re pretty slow to take to changes, and we’re usually behind the curve,” says University of Michigan naval architect Brendan Falkowski. “But that’s not a bad thing. That means everything has been tested and proven before we adopt new technologies.”

But the Fitzgerald was an exception to this rule, too. Unlike most ships, which were built entirely on site, the GLEW architects decided to try a new system with Hull 301: building the ship’s body in three pre-fabricated sections elsewhere, then shipping them to GLEW, where they were carefully lowered onto the hull’s bottom plates.

They then went a step farther, employing a new hybrid method of welding and riveting the sections together. Recent innovations had made welding faster and cheaper than riveting. Because rivets are heavier than welds, and also require a joiner plate over each one, welding also reduced the ship’s final weight by some 1.2 million pounds. This in turn would allow the ship to take on more cargo and go faster. 

Thus, this approach saved time and money in both the construction and operation of the ship, while the designers were confident the final product would be just as good, if not better, than relying on rivets only.

The Hull 301 architects were about a decade ahead of the competition, which would not make welding the primary method of Great Lakes ship construction until the late 1960s. That also meant that Hull 301, by being such an early adopter of several innovations, would be sailing on systems that had not been thoroughly tested before launching.

Buildings, bridges, and boats are all built to bend, but how much bending is acceptable?

Years later, Craig Silliven served on the Fitzgerald as a green cadet fresh from the Great Lakes Maritime Academy in Traverse City. 

When Silliven and Captain Ernest McSorley were walking from the bow to the stern to get lunch in the galley one rough day, they took one of the two tunnels built just under the deck that rode along both sides of the ship. At one point McSorley stopped and turned around to look back at the tunnel heading toward the bow.

“We were watching that thing flex so much that the bow would go down, out of sight, then come back up,” Silliven says. “McSorley told me, ‘I’ve been on a lot of ships, and this is the limberest boat I’ve ever been on.’ ”

The architects had made the Fitzgerald flexible so it could take on the biggest loads in the worst seas, bounce back, and keep going. Whether their decision to construct the Fitzgerald out of three modular sections, and swap rivets for welds, which break more easily than rivets, ended up making the Fitzgerald more flexible than they intended is impossible to say. The engineers weren’t on the ship to experience what McSorley and Silliven had seen that day.

“They say it was made to do that, but it still gets you,” Silliven says. “When you see it flex like that, you think twice.

For the christening of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, Northwestern Mutual went all out. President Edmund Fitzgerald invited the public to join the launch ceremony on Saturday, June 7, 1958, at the GLEW dock on the Detroit River.

The launch attracted an impressive fifteen thousand spectators, more than the Detroit Tigers averaged per game that season. A veritable flotilla of 250 recreational boats—many of them Michigan-made Chris Crafts, with their distinctive white hulls and chocolate-brown mahogany decks—flying American flags from wooden poles off their sterns, bobbed in the waters nearby to get a closer look.

The Fitzgerald ’s baptism at 12:34 p.m. produced a mighty splash, a wave big enough to douse many of the well-wishers on the far side of the inlet, and a thunderous ovation from the expectant crowd— and then another splash, as the ship rocked back and forth until she banged into the opposite pier, hard.

The Detroit News called it “the biggest object ever dropped into fresh water.”

A new level of luxury 

The Edmund Fitzgerald fulfilled all the aspirations its creators hoped it would achieve, and more: Beyond being the biggest and the best, its many admirers deemed it the most luxurious freighter on the Great Lakes. To outfit the Fitzgerald, Northwestern Mutual hired Detroit’s legendary downtown department store, J. L. Hudson, and told the retailer to spare no expense.

The captain’s pilothouse featured top-end navigational equipment and a chart room—normally a no-nonsense space devoted solely to storing and viewing charts—with exquisite trim and spectacular views. In 1958 carpeting and air-conditioning were considered luxuries in homes and cars, and virtually unheard of in factories. Likewise, televisions were still sufficiently rare that motels that had them saw fit to brag about this feature on roadside signs. The Fitz was ahead of them all, with carpeting, air-conditioning and TVs throughout the living quarters.

The captain’s quarters had its own bath, toilet, adjoining office, and a large living room and bedroom. The rest of the officers were given their own private rooms, and the designers treated the crew, too, with two spacious recreation rooms, one at the bow and the other in the stern, with televisions, libraries, and writing desks. At every level in the chain of command, from the captain to the deckhands, the engineers to the oilers, each crew member could be certain that no one at their rank had better accommodations on the Great Lakes.

The purpose of all this was not to indulge employees, but to attract the very best crewmen at every position.

The Fitzgerald also introduced a new level of luxury with two large guest rooms to host up to six VIP passengers. Those staterooms featured deep pile carpeting, tiled bathrooms, and “stately drapes over the portholes,” plus a glassed-in observation lounge where guests could sit in leather swivel chairs and look out onto the ship itself and the vastness of the Great Lakes all around her.

“Magnificent,” one reporter opined, “certainly the equal of anything then available on commercial ocean liners.”

The Fitzgerald ’s owners knew that even the industry’s most impressive ship and crew couldn’t leave port without customers willing to pay for their services. The ship’s clients were high-powered executives and their spouses, who had already sampled many of the world’s delights and were hard to impress. But even the upper crust had never experienced anything like this: one of only two four-star rooms on the greatest, most productive freighter the Great Lakes had ever seen, an opportunity so rare you couldn’t buy it at any price. 

VIP guests woke up in their state rooms to the smell of fresh coffee being brewed just for them, plus donuts and pastries right out of the oven. That did not count as breakfast, however, which the ship served at 8 a.m. in the dining room, where anyone onboard—VIPs, officers, and crewmen—could request eggs, pancakes, French toast, or omelets to order. Lunch arrived at noon, and was usually something simple but hearty like hot soup and a warm sandwich.

But dinner at 6 p.m. was when the cooks showcased their skills, and could include baked red snapper, New York strip steak, prime rib and Cornish game hen under glass with wild rice. On each five-day round trip the captain would schedule one special candlelight dinner for the VIPs featuring a “surf and turf” of lobster and filet mignon or prime rib, and a special punch served by mess-jacketed stewards. 

When Tom Walton served as a porter on the Fitzgerald, his duties included serving the VIPs. He recalls that “the passengers always complimented the food—and I mean, always. And they were right: The food was outstanding, and the presentation first-rate.”

The captain himself would arrive in full uniform at the head of the table, ready to answer questions and regale his guests with tales of maritime adventures.

Fan favorite

Even people on shore with no particular connection to the ship were so taken by the mighty Fitz that they tracked her travels and crowded near her whenever they could. The tourists collected at the docks in Toledo, the shoreline of the Detroit River, and under the Bluewater Bridge, where Lake Huron funnels into the St. Clair River, just to see the great ship.

The Fitz was always the fans’ favorite. At 729 feet she was as long as a seventy-three-story skyscraper on its side—the height of the tallest building in Detroit’s Renaissance Center complex—a rare enough sight by itself. The deckhands repainted the SS Edmund Fitzgerald every season and would touch her up before she went through the Soo Locks again. She was the star attraction, her various captains and crews knew it, and they made sure she didn’t disappoint the folks who might get only one chance to see her. 

“Everywhere we went we were a tourist attraction,” says Tom Walton, the former porter. “Standing on that ship, when hundreds were taking photos, you couldn’t help but feel a bit like a rockstar. We loved being on the Fitzgerald. Out on the lakes, when we’d pass other ships, the other crews would all come out on deck and wave at the guys they knew on the Fitz. You could see the pride of the crew.”

A legend of the lakes

Officials have been keeping shipping records on the Great Lakes since 1887, and not for sport, but commerce. Yes, ego and bragging rights have always played a part in Great Lakes shipping, but profit is the point.

The authoritative annual “Statistical Report of Lake Commerce Passing through St. Marys Falls Canal, Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan” tracks such categories as “largest single cargo” for one trip and “greatest amount of freight carried” for the season. In 1958, the Fitzgerald ’s first season, she set the record for the largest single cargo, of 22,509 long tons. (A long ton equals 2,240 pounds.) The next year, 1959, she broke her own record by carrying 22,943 long tons, or 45,886,000 pounds—about 130 Statues of Liberty, on a single trip— enough taconite to build 7,000 cars per shipload.

But with three hundred ships on the Great Lakes all trying to set records, a challenger was never far away. Each time an upstart came after the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, the Fitz delivered her best, taking back the crown in 1961, again in 1965 and 1966, and every season from 1968 to 1971, showing no decline as she aged. When the Fitz was at her best, no ship was better. 

“When (Gordon) Lightfoot sang, ‘She was the pride of the American side,’ he nailed it, right there,” Sault native Roger Lelievre says. “She was the Big Fitz, the Mighty Fitz. And everyone knew her. She was simply the best —  and that’s before anything happened.”

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