Edmund Fitzgerald

 Thanks http://janesjewels.blogspot.com

This Day In History

Greetings!

A new feature at Jane's Jewels will be the occasional 'This Day In History'. Today's story takes place on Lake Superior, that huge, treacherous, yet oh so beautiful Great Lake. I lived in Thunder Bay for six years during my late teens/early twenties, and what I remember most about my time there was the wind, which never seemed to stop blowing.

The SS Edmund Fitzgerald was an American Great Lakes freighter that made headlines after sinking in a Lake Superior storm on November 10, 1975, with the loss of the entire crew. When launched on June 8, 1958, she was the largest boat on the Great Lakes, and remains the largest boat to have sunk there. Nicknamed the "Mighty Fitz", "Fitz", or "Big Fitz", the ship suffered a series of mishaps during her launch: it took three attempts to break the champagne bottle used to christen her and she collided with a pier when she entered the water. (Wiki)

Gordon Lightfoot immortalized this tragedy in his haunting 'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald'. This song quite often comes to mind when I hear or see the word November; in fact that's how I ended up profiling this story.