I started high school in September of 1975. My strongest memory of those earliest months of, what would turn out to be, my laboured secondary school education, was not of something scholastic, but learning of a grand ship's sinking with all hands.
Even at that young age I had "long" been into shipping. Hearing the news of one of the Great Lakes' finest ore freighters succumbing to a sudden and horrible storm saddened me but also fascinated me. Youth protects one somewhat from the realities of tragedy. Some of the Edmund Fitzgerald's sailors were not a lot older than I was at the time: a few were in their early twenties, a couple were barely out of high school.
During much of the 1970s, my family and I were living at Canadian Forces Base Borden, here in Ontario. Like many folk who live in that region, the Great Lakes will draw one to Wasaga Beach, a small town which sits on the "world's longest freshwater beach", which itself cups the lower end of Georgian Bay, and therefore Lake Huron. I knew what a huge lake looked like, even if it wasn't Lake Superior, the tumultuous body of water where the Edmund Fitzgerald and her twenty-nine souls met their end. How it all happened exactly is still open to much conjecture and speculation. My own feeling is that she "bottomed out". However, perhaps some secrets are best kept to the lake.
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Dr. Joseph MacInnis' book Fitzgerald's Storm - The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is excellent. "Doctor Joe" was a client of a video company I worked at here in Toronto. My own copy is autographed by the author, no surprise. By the way, the last chapter of the book covers the creation and resulting fame of Gordon Lightfoot's classic song, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald". The songwriter was living in Toronto's "Yorkville" neighbourhood at the time.
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