A Tale of Death at Sea and Two Songs

From Wikipedia, image of The Edmund Fitzgerald underway in 1971.

I just finished a book that I’d recommend to any fellow history buffs: “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by John U. Bacon.

I’m a history fan—I majored in history (and communication-journalism) as an undergraduate. There are, for me, times and events that are particularly fascinating and that I have read a fair amount about. For example, my father was a WWII veteran, and the two big wars of the 20th Century, World Wars I and II, have long been of interest to me. The moon landing is in my living memory, and I’ve read some about the early space program. If you grew up in the U.S. and are into history, it’s hard to avoid the twin giants of our national narrative: the two American revolutions, the first one when we told the king to go to heck and the (un)civil one when we almost tore apart our union to protect inhumane human property rights that are clearly wrong.

Image from Amazon.

And big events of my own life, of course, draw my attention. I was a senior in high school in November of 1975. I don’t remember tuning into news of the Edmund Fitzgerald at the time, although I was in the habit of paying attention to news (my family subscribed to three daily newspapers and watched the evening news most nights), so it’s likely I heard about it.

But what I clearly remember most was a tune from the next year. I certainly heard on the radio Gordon Lightfoot’s song about the shipwreck that became a big hit in the autumn of my high school graduation year, 1976. And I bought the album that the song is on on as a result of my enjoying the song.

Anyway, I am not sure Bacon’s book title is entirely accurate, since the story was told at the time and then retold in popular music—but I thoroughly enjoyed his detailed exploration of the story of the end of one of the largest freighters ever to ply the waters of our enormous northern lakes.

I’ve seen Lake Michigan, but have not traveled to the other lakes much yet. I hope to visit Duluth sometime this year and view the largest of these inland seas, the mighty one that they call Gitche Gumee. The fresh, cold, deep waters there aren’t for swimming (too cold, year-round), but I would like to stand on the shore and contemplate life at the edge of something vast, dangerous and beautiful. You can feel small when you stand beside the ocean, but from all accounts, Lake Superior will do, too.

Anyway, the book has all kinds of fascinating tidbits. The nature of taconite, not something that I was aware of, for instance. The danger of Superior, and how many thousands of mariners it has claimed since large-scale commercial shipping began in the 19th century. Most of all, the personal stories of the men who chose (and choose) a life of wandering those waters, fueling America’s old iron-based industrial base with their labor.

It's a story of fundamental elements, of water and iron and weather and humanity.

Bacon tells the story well. We get to meet the 17-year-old pregnant girlfriend of a sailor and worry for her future. Spoiler: Her child is born a healthy girl who has a son who, to the delight of one family of the 29, looks like his departed grandfather.

We learn the story of Ernest McSorley, a 63-year-old ship captain from Toledo, Ohio, who struggled unsuccessfully to bring his ship and crew to safety. We learn of many other engineers and oilers and wipers and porters who crewed the mighty Fitz.

We learn of the competitive instincts and machismo culture and corporate greed that contributed to the tragedy.

Yeah, as a history major, I try to understand that history in school can seem dull, but I never have shared that attitude. History is ours and everyone else’s collective story, and I don’t quite get humans who aren’t fascinated by other human’s experience. Sharing a collective knowledge by telling our shared stories is one of the few things that makes us unique and uniquely human.

Anyway, another thing that makes us human—sure, many animals make musical notes, but we have the combination of abstract language and both resonate sound chambers in our bodies and instruments that we construct to create musical works, to translate our experiences in a resonate way that touches our emotions as well as our minds.

We sing. And we write songs.

Two of those songs feature prominently in the tale Bacon tells. Great Lakes sailors back in the 1970s were pretty much all men, and during breaks in their journeys, those men congregated in dive bars in rough harbor towns and put some of their coins into juke boxes.

They played “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” a pop song written by Elliot Lurie and performed by the group he fronted, Looking Glass. The 1972 pop song was common ground between the country-western older sailor crowd and the young rockers who also worked on the ships.

 

I’ve never been in love with that song, but I didn’t hate it either. It was just interesting to read how that particular song, which I was aware of but didn’t seek out, took on a special life for a special group of lonely seafarers.

So it goes, I suppose. Music doesn’t just mean what the writer or performer intends—like all art (music and books), it takes new form as it is invested with significance by an audience.

Of course, where the Edmund Fitzgerald is concerned, the main song in any book about the shipwreck isn’t the one written in the early 1970s, but another one written in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy.

It’s only an aside in the book, yet I really enjoyed learning more about “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot—how the Canadian troubadour had been noodling for a while with a melody related to old sea shanties. How a half-page report in Newsweek captured his attention and caused him to seek out every news article about the ship that he could find. How he carefully crafted lyrics to both fit his melody and be as accurate to history as he could.

And the recording of the song was fascinating, too. He and the musicians he was working with had a week to lay down the final tracks to Lightfoot’s “Summertime Dream” album. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday—according to Bacon, Lightfoot had a strong work ethic and put in full shifts those workdays with his bandmates, but he ended each session by playing a bit of his sea shanty melody.

The singer and band worked so hard that they completed the album tracks in four days although they had the studio reserved for the full workweek. At the end of the session Thursday, one of the other musicians strongly encouraged Lightfoot to dig into the song that they had all heard all week but had never performed—the sea ditty Lightfoot composted based on a recent real shipwreck.

The song begins with low key instrumentation, and the drummer was waiting for a signal from Lightfoot before joining in. After almost two minutes, the signal hadn’t yet come, and the drummer was worried that he’d been overlooked. Then, after the slow initial two verses, Lightfoot gave him the nod. And that iconic stormy drumming right before “the wind in the wires made a tattletale sound” became part of music history.

Of the two songs, I have always enjoyed “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” more. It’s a deeper, sadder, truer song. It’s long for a pop song at 6 minutes, and musically very repetitive—but it works for me.

In that recording session, Bacon reports, the band came back and played it multiple times on Friday, their final day of working on the album. However, in the end, their first recording, the one that they made without much rehearsal on Thursday, was the track used on the album and for the single that played so much on the radio during my high school graduation year 50 years ago.

Lightfoot had mixed feelings about the song, which is understandable. He didn’t want to seem like he was taking advantage of a raw tragedy. In the end, his tune kept the memory of the event alive, and helped the families of the 29 come to terms with their deep, tragic loss.

I’ll let Elizabeth, The Charismatic Voice, who knows a lot more about music than I do, unpack a bit more about the song:

Again—tell me once more how history is boring? Sorry, you’re wrong.

Back to Bacon’s book. The later chapters when the ship is taking the northern route across the big lake and facing an increasingly powerful storm are bit like the movie “Titanic.” Not a spoiler alert: In “Titanic,” something bad happens to the ship. So, too, the story of The Edmund Fitzgerald doesn’t have a happy resolution.

Still, there’s a lot to take away from this book. One positive note—since that tragic night on Nov. 10, 1975, exactly zero additional large ships have gone down on the lakes. Reforms made in the wake of this event have saved many lives.

Another story in the book: How families of the sailors worked to protect the site of the wreck. However, they allowed the ship's bell to be recovered. Image from Wikipedia.

Disturbingly, we’re in the wake of a global pandemic that struck us six years ago and cost the U.S.A. more than 1 million souls. We’re not coping that well with the story of that time, partly because powerful politicians seem intent on re-writing pandemic history in an inaccurate way.

Maybe we’ll learn our own history better in the long run. After the Edmund Fitzgerald sank, the way captains think about the Greak Lakes, the way communication about weather is handled, the nature of radars and forecasts—things have changed for the better.

That’s what knowledge of history can do for you, if you let it--it can make things better. Also when you feel it appropriately, in your bones and in your music.

How We Frame Memories of 9/11

Plumes of smoke from The World Trade Center twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001. From Wikimedia Commons via flickr poster Michael Foran.

Today is Sept. 4, which means the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States is one week from today.

The 9/11 events were so big that “9/11” is all one has to say and everyone knows you don’t mean any Sept. 11—you mean that Sept. 11.

The world didn’t exactly change 20 years ago. The forces that attacked my country that day had been at work for some time—indeed, there had previous bombing attempts to destroy the World Trade Center. But that September day, sunny and beautiful in Iowa, at least in my memory, was still a pivotal day.

From the FBI's web site, FBI.gov, a timeline of Sept. 11, 2001.

I have a little trouble picturing myself at 43. I was already greying—did I still have some dark hair? A man in his 60s has a little trouble picturing the world of the 40-something year old. Much in my life has remained the same, and much has changed.

On Sept. 11, 2001, I had a son in elementary school. My oldest daughter was nearing the end of high school, but was adjusting to a large public school—Linn Mar High School—after her first two years of secondary education had been at a tiny Catholic High School—St. Mary’s in Storm Lake, Iowa.

We had just bought a house in Cedar Rapids. The next year would be financially a little dicey for us, as we owned two houses. But both my wife and I had jobs, she at the birth center at Mercy Medical Center (where she would become the nurse manager in a few years), me at the start of a new career. I was fresh out of the world of journalism and into the world of academia, less than a month into my new job teaching at what was then Mount Mercy College.

A hole in the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, 2001. Defense Department image by Cpl. Jason Ingersoll, USMC, downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

That Tuesday, I was buying tires for our van. I was at a tire shop near Lindale Mall that morning, and it was a very strange morning. Very few people were out, and I was the only customer at what would usually be a busy shop. I think six guys were working on replacing my tires, each taking 2-minute shifts or so before they traded off—the rest to join me in the customer lounge, watching TV. Special report from New York, a plane has struck the World Trade Center. Then, another. The Pentagon. A planned second attack on Washington, D.C., ending with a crashed plane in Pennsylvania.

I can’t recall a lot from that day other than the sense of shock. I was teaching a class that fall that I’m teaching this semester, too—CO 280, Writing for Public Relations. It was an afternoon class, I think, and I scrapped my lesson plan.

We rearranged the room in a big circle. And the students and I just talked about it, the big news of the day.

My wife and I visited the Newseum in Washington, D.C. during spring break, March, 2015. This is a ruined TV tower that been atop the World Trade Center on display at that museum.

And here we are, almost 20 years later. Two decade of grappling with new realities, of questioning what freedom means, of foreign wars and increasing polarization at home. The internet existed in 2001, but way back then we didn’t carry it around in our pockets and we still watched big events on a chunky, square TV in the customer lounge of a tire shop.

I am just starting to look into it, but I don’t think our current era of struggling with fakery on social media is unrelated to 9/11. That day shook America to its core, and became one of those improbable, shocking events around which wild conspiracy theories swirl.

Another image from that 2015 visit to the Newseum. A wall of headlines reporting 9/11 attacks, from an era when news media mattered more than social media.

Partly, of course, because it was the result of a shadowy conspiracy, and unpacking it is a process historians will be tied up with for decades.

What does it all mean? A lot, and I’m glad that Mount Mercy University will spend some time grappling with this key world event.

Every year, faculty at MMU designated a topic for a series of public discussions—the Fall Faculty Series. I am proud to have helped start this with our first series in 2014 being on the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I.

This year, the Series has a very simple title: 9/11: Twenty Years Later.” Five faculty members, including me, will give free, public Wednesday talks, all of which will start at 6 p.m., and all of which will take place in Flaherty Community Room in Basile Hall.

Logo of 2021 Fall Faculty Series at Mount Mercy University.

Here is the schedule, the topics and the speakers:

• Sept. 29, Precursor Events: At War before 9/11, James Jacobs, associate professor of computer science.
• Oct. 6, Conspiracy, Myth, and Misinformation, Joe Sheller, associate professor of communication & MMU Times advisor.
• Oct. 27, Heroism and Sacrifice after the Attack, Norma Linda Mattingly, associate professor of education.
• Nov. 9, Fear and Trauma after 9/11, Dennis Dew, associate professor of psychology.
• December 1, Reflections of a Muslim-American Immigrant, Ayman Amer | associate professor of economics.
  

When Does the Media Turn Doctors into Santa Claus?

Some good news and not so good news from my media life this week:

A son-in-law was featured in an English newspaper because his earlier genetic research contributed to new cancer treatments. That’s good news.

Dr. Martin speaking Thursday. Her presentation was part of the fall Vietnam series at MMU.

A professor at Mount Mercy University reminded her audience that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is not Santa Claus, and that the answer to the old question posed in a 1960s anti-war folk song—“when we they ever learn?”—sadly, seems to be “not yet.”

Congratulations Dr. Matthew Moscou for the research you’re part of that makes the world a better place. However, it’s important to recall that Moscou isn’t a magician who waived his magic wand and came up with a new cancer treatment—but part of a community of dedicated scientists working quietly behind the scenes, slowly uncovering mysteries of the universe. Someone else applied the genetic knowledge Matt uncovered studying barley to cancer cells in humans.

A link to the story about Matt is at the end of this post.

And media don’t always report well on science, which is a problem. Our public support for science has not always been high, and we have a cultural distrust of intellectuals of all sorts, including scientists. That has clear and negative impacts on our political life, such as denying, and failing to talk intelligently, about big issues such as global warming.

Anyway, it was nice to see Dr. Matt in the news in a positive way. Shifting gears, Dr. Martin spoke at Mount Mercy Thursday of last week about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and a famous speech he gave in which he articulated his reasons for opposing the Vietnam War. Since King had benefited from  civil rights legislation pushed by President Johnson, that opposition was gutsy.

And King spoke of the folly of our involvement in no uncertain terms.

Dr. Martin speeaking.

King tends to be remembered today for the “I Have a Dream” speech and his language about a society where the color of skin does not matter. That message is sometimes co-opted today by people who argue against efforts to promote diversity, on the grounds that such efforts are not color blind.

I don’t want to get into that particular quagmire right now, partly because I’m no expert on the topic and partly because I’m personally conflicted. But certainly our modern use of King's words out of context do him and his cause no favors.

Final view of Dr. Martin.

I do want to note something Martin said. I don’t know which writer she was quoting, but she recalled that someone once said that today there tends to be a “Santa Claus-ification” of King—to remember his 1963 speech, and ignore some of the harder criticisms and more controversial positions he took beyond that speech.

King had courage. As Dr. Martin noted, his concerns about military policy and nonviolence should echo today.

And we in the media should be careful of our tendency to simplify stories in order to create more digestible narratives. King was not Santa Clause. Scientists aren’t magicians.

But Matt sure does look nice in his British lab outfit! See the story.