Edmund Fitzgerald: Wyoming Meteorologist Vividly Recalls 'The Witch Of November'

Don Day, meteorologist for Cowboy State Daily, was on the path to becoming a weather buff from an early age. He recalls the way his adolescent ears perked up as the storm bulletins crackled through the kitchen radio of his home in Farmington, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit.

And though he was only 8 years old, he uniquely remembers what came through the radio on Nov. 10, 1975, when a meteorological phenomenon known as the “Witch of November” sank the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, killing all 29 crew members. 

“I remember it vividly. Anybody who was around the Great Lakes region in the mid 70s will remember when it happened.”

‘The Wind In The Wires Made A Tattletale Sound’

Not a single body was recovered, and with neither survivors nor witnesses, the tragedy remains fogged in mystery 50 years later.

Yet it’s a mystery that continues to grip the imaginations of Western culture, all thanks to the folk singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, who memorialized the tragedy in “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” a visceral ballad with an unorthodox structure that belies its chart-topping success. 

This is according to John U. Bacon, author of the “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” who explained to Cowboy State Daily how the song is central to the tragedy's memory.

“Let’s be honest, without that song, I don't think anybody — with the expectation of the insiders — would still remember this shipwreck,” Bacon said. "There were 6,000 shipwrecks in the Great Lakes for 100 years, between 1875 and 1975, but most people can name only one.

"It’s probably the second most famous shipwreck in the world next to the Titanic, and that's all because of Lightfoot.”

The Canadian songwriter researched laboriously in order to reconstruct every known detail of the incident, but the ballad’s real power stems from Lightfoot's unsheltered sincerity, which Bacon attributes to the singer’s experience as a sailor earlier in his own life.

The result is a ballad that’s both historically accurate and emotionally heartfelt, with visceral imagery that puts listeners right beside the embattled sailors on deck.

“The wind in the wires made a tattletale sound/and the wave broke over the railing. And every man knew as the captain did, too/ ‘Twas The Witch of November come stealing,” Lightfoot sings. 

It's stanzas like these that make the song not just moving but relatable, even to Wyomingites. 

“When he sings that the winds in the wires made a tattletale sound, that’s my favorite line,” said Day. “I think anybody that’s spent time outside in a Wyoming windstorm knows exactly what that is. Just like wind going through barbed wire,  telephone wires, highline wires, Wyoming people can relate.”

Day finds the song doubly relatable as a former resident of the Great Lakes area. Lightfoot’s ballad captures the cultural history and nuance of the region and its shipping industry, Day said.

“You can tell how much research he did. He refers to what the Chippewa [Native American tribe] called Lake Gitche Gumee, and he uses the Great Lakes’ phrase ‘Witch of November.’ He was able to describe the incident and the wreck and blend in the local culture. I think he wove it all in perfectly,” said Day.

'The Lake It Is Said, Never Gives Up Her Dead'

Though much of the Fitgerald’s demise remains obscure, the lives of its sailors, and the emotional toll on the families, has come into clearer view.

Captain McSorley, 63, had been a captain for more than half his life when he decided that the 1975 shipping season would be his last; he wanted to retire to spend time with his ailing wife, Nellie.

His season was originally scheduled to end in the first week of November, but he signed on for one last voyage to help pay for his wife’s medical care. 

“He promised his wife, Nellie, he’d retire after that season, and the season was supposed to end the week before, but he tacked on one more trip so he could get his captain’s bonus to pay for his wife's treatment. She was in 24-hour care for cancer,” Bacon said.

McSorley had a reputation for pushing through storms and did not send a distress signal. Rather, his last known words, at 7:10 p.m. on Nov. 10, 1975, were, “We are holding our own.”

“The lake it is said, never gives up her dead/When the skies of November turn gloomy,” Lightfoot sings.

These and other details fueled speculation, not least from the National Enquirer, which promoted the notion of extraterrestrial involvement. 

‘All That Remains Is The Faces And The Names'

While McSorley had taken the job in mind of a loved one near the end of life, sailors elsewhere on the Edmund Fitzgerald had the next generation on their minds.

Bruce Hudson was a 22-year-old Ohioan with a unique combination of traits. He had the resourcefulness of an Eagle Scout as well as a penchant for sewing wild oats.

He made for a striking figure with lambchop sideburns and long hair that whipped in the wind as he motorcycled around the Great Lakes region. He left university early to take a job as a deckhand on the Fitzgerald.

Shortly before boarding the Fitzgerald on that fateful November day, he took a call on a payphone at a bar in Silver Bay, Minnesota. It was his girlfriend, a Toledo-based waitress named Heather, who had big news: she was pregnant with Hudson’s child. 

“Hudson told her, ‘Don't worry about it. We'll move in together and we'll raise the child ourselves,” said Bacon, who interviewed family members. “She was relieved and told him, 'Go ahead on your [Fitzgerald] trip, it's only a month long and the baby is not due for another six months.'” 

Hudson never met his son, but he did leave a legacy for his mother, Ruth Hudson.

“Ruth Hudson loses her only child, and she thinks that's it — that's the end of my family. But then she finds out six months later that she's going to be a grandmother,” Bacon said, adding that in a touch of grace, the boy has become the spitting image of his father. “Someone played favourites in that one.”

Where Hudson left behind a genetic posterity, others left heirlooms of love.

Eddie Benton, 47, had been in the industry for 30 years, and by 1975 he was ready to get off the water for good. He told his wife this trip would be his last, and that when he returned to Ohio they’d celebrate his retirement along with their 25th anniversary. 

The day before he boarded the Edmund Fitzgerald, he bought his wife a 2-carat diamond ring in Duluth, Minnesota, as an anniversary gift.

“But instead of tucking it away into his duffle bag, which is strange because he’s planning to see her in Toledo at the docks in a short period anyway, he gives it to a friend, and for reasons only Eddie Bennett knows, he tells his friend, 'Please mail this to my wife,'” Bacon said. 

“Three days after the ship goes down, his wife gets a package in the mail from her husband with a 2-carat diamond ring and a love note. She wore that ring the rest of her life, and she never remarried,” he said.

As Lightfoot sings: “And all that remains is the faces and the names/Of the wives and the sons and the daughters.”

'Pride Of The American Side'

Edmund Fitzgerald was a man who came from a long line of Great Lakes shipping captains, from his grandfather down to six of his uncles. 

Although he himself pursued a career in the insurance sector — becoming the CEO of Northwestern Mutual Insurance, which is today a corporation worth $31 billion and headquartered in Milwaukee — Fitzgerald was motivated by his heritage to build the biggest, fastest and greatest ship the Great Lakes had ever seen. 

He succeeded, and the eponymous vessel launched from Detroit in 1958.

In addition to size and speed, it was also the most luxurious shipping vessel of the era, with so-called first-in-class cabins meant to attract the best possible crews. 

“The ship was the pride of the American side,” Lightfoot sings.

However, there was one specific aspect of the build that was not the best of the best.

“There were design flaws in the ship itself compared to other ships. They swapped out rivets and instead used welds, because welds were cheaper, faster and lighter. But they were not as strong,” Bacon explained, adding that the logic was to lighten the vessel so that it could ferry heavier loads of ore.

The ship was eventually discovered bifurcated at the bottom of the lake.

Weather expert Day, however, views the outcome as a convergence of wicked weather and human hubris.

'Waves Turn The Minutes To Hours'

"The Witch of November” refers to the seasonal storms of late fall in the Great Lakes region. They arise when cold air fronts come down from Canada and interact with the comparatively warm water atmosphere hovering over the lakes. That temperature differential drives storm activity. 

On that specific day, however, there was an additional factor as a low-pressure system simultaneously brought moist air up from the Southern Plains. 

“When you have cold Canadian air mixing with warm, moist air from the southern plains, a lot of things can happen, with a rapid intensification of storms,” Day said.

What most don’t realize is that sailing is more dangerous on the Great Lakes than the great oceans. A big reason for this is that salt water has the effect of flattening and stretching waves out, or lowering their frequency. 

In the Atlantic Ocean, for instance, waves occur on average 10 to 16 seconds apart. 

On the Great Lakes, they are between 4 and 8 seconds apart, which means for a 700-foot ore carrier, “You can have your bow stuck in one wave, and your stern stuck in another wave behind you,” said Bacon. 

On this day, the waves averaged 30 feet in height, but the crew also battled many 40- to 50-foot waves, along with a handful of 60-foot waves, according to a mathematical standard known as the Rayleigh Distribution, which produce what are called “rogue waves.”

Consider these figures against the fact that the Edmund Fitzgerald had only 11 feet of freeboard, or the distance between the surface of the water and your deck.

“Does anyone know where the love of God goes/When the waves turn the minutes to hours?” Lightfoot sings.

Day reiterates Lightfoot's sentiment this way.

“The Edmund Fitzgerald encountered this storm at the peak of its life cycle. In terms of its maximum ferocity, the most rapid intensification happened right along the ship's path,” Day said. “They were in the exact wrong place, at the exact wrong time because it's when this storm decided to reach its peak intensity.”

Could It Happen Today?

In 1975, weather reports were designed using a limited number of inputs, like wind and temperature barometers stationed at airports and military bases, along with low resolution satellite photos. These data points were combined to construct predictive weather maps.

A big risk for ships like the Edmund Fitzgerald was the lag in weather reporting.

“Back then, the weather service would put out a written statement, but from the time they wrote something on paper and delivered it or sent it or communicated on phone, weather can change rapidly. By the time you got the weather briefing, it might be 12 or 24 hours old,” said Day. 

“It's not that the weather forecast in that day and age was bad. They knew a storm was coming. They knew it could be a bad storm, but there were no tools then that could anticipate the specific ferocity or the potential for rapid intensification,” Day said. 

“In the last 50 years, the changes in technology have just been huge. Even if they’d only just had our communication technology, there is a high likelihood that they would have never left port.”

Three years after the wreck, the U.S. Coast Guard published its investigation, concluding that damaged hatches allowed water to enter the cargo hold, leading to a slow loss of buoyancy.

Some local shipping groups contested this theory and instead argued the ship was punctured by hull damage in shallow water near Caribou Island several hours before sinking. 

The Song That Almost Wasn’t

Fifty years later, the wreck feels nearly as mysterious as it always has. And it’s a mystery that will remain on the minds of Westerners, so long as Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” continues to be heard.

And to think that it almost wasn’t recorded at all. 

Lightfoot wrote the song in secret and planned not to make it public because he worried it’d be seen as exploiting a tragedy. 

However, in 1976, after his band finished recording all the planned songs for the album "Summertime Dream," the producer prodded Lightfoot for one more.

“The band is all packing up their instruments, and the producer says to Lightfoot, 'Hey, man, you already paid and you’ve got day-and-a half of studio time left. I'm going to charge you either way. I'm here. The band is here. Why not give that song a shot?'” said Bacon, relaying what he learned from Lightfoot's drummer, Barry Keane. 

He agrees. The band sets up, although no one but Lightfoot knows what’s about to be played. 

“Barry Keane asked, 'What do you want me to do? He’d never heard the song before.' And Lightfoot told him, 'I'll nod for you when I want you to come in.' But after a minute and a half, he still hasn’t nodded him in, so Keane thinks the song’s about to end because that’s how long most songs are back then.” Bacon said, explaining how what followed became a decisive moment in folk rock history.

“Finally, at 1:34, Lightfoot leans into Keane and gives him the nod. He starts coming in with that thunderous, storm-like drum solo, and you can't imagine the song without it,” he said.

They tried a few more takes that day, but they weren’t as good. They tried a few more the following day, and those also missed the mark. 

“The song that everyone hears on the radio to this day, 50 years later, it’s not just the first take: It's the first time the band ever played the song together. Barry Keane has been on 500 albums and he said it’s never happened before or since. It’s that rare,” said Bacon, who followed up to ask Keane how something so rare can happen.

“Keane told me, ‘This is not a song that you think your way through. You had to feel it, and we felt our way through,’” he said.

It was No. 2 in the nation that year and continues to vouchsafe the legacy of the Edmund Fitzgerald. =

 “They might have split up, or they might have capsized/They may have broke deep and took water. And all that remains is the faces and the names/Of the wives and the sons and the daughters,” Lightfoot sings.

Zakary Sonntag can be reached at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com.