Ep. 790: The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald

00:00:08
Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. Listening past, you can’t predict anything brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First Light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That’s f I R S T L I T E dot com.

00:00:43
Speaker 2: Guy, I got.

00:00:44
Speaker 1: I got two competing ways I want to start the show. One I just have to admit that I’m so excited I already wet my pants. There’s one like this is this is the one of This is one of the most exciting conversations for me because this is something that I like, I’ll just come out and say, here, we’re here to talk about the the Edmund Fitzgerald, which is like weird, like I was one year old, but when it happened, but it’s it’s sort of I don’t know, man has haunted and inspired my whole life being from that neck of the woods.

00:01:17
Speaker 2: Sure. Uh.

00:01:18
Speaker 1: The second opening I was gonna use is how I’ve never done this before, but I want to dedicate this episode drows fits poot mcgoot, my brother Danny. This one’s for you and everyone at the porthole in Sue Saint Marie Michigan side.

00:01:34
Speaker 2: Been there, You guys better notice there are two talents called Su Saint Marie right across the river from each other, because why wouldn’t you do that?

00:01:43
Speaker 1: Right?

00:01:44
Speaker 2: One’s us one’s Canada. Canada produces NHL Hall of Famers, the Esposito brothers, Tony and Phil, et cetera, et cetera. Gretzky played there for a while. Uh. The American side produces guys like us.

00:01:56
Speaker 1: When I went to one of the times I saw Uncle Gord was at at the hockey arena in Siue, Ontario.

00:02:02
Speaker 2: Oh wow, I’ve been to that where the Greyhounds play.

00:02:07
Speaker 1: He Uh, I’ll introduce you in a minute.

00:02:09
Speaker 2: Don’t worry, we’ll get to that.

00:02:13
Speaker 1: I tell the story every other episode. We’re sitting there and we’re watching Uncle Gordon. You know, I’m talking about Gordon Lightfoot and he’s doing his show. He’s got a lot of hits. People don’t realize how he hiss. Then yeah, they’re in the book, but then later in the app later and not the episode later in the concert. This will kind of date it because your book The Gales of November, The Untold Story of the Edmond Fitzgerald by John you Bacon. Should you want to find out what the U stands for? Good luck? Not ulysses.

00:02:49
Speaker 2: He’s very tight lift about it.

00:02:52
Speaker 1: Uh, at that the fiftieth we’re at the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking or the wreck of the Edmin Fitzgerald, and your book’s perfectly timed. I read you that you wrote a proposal for this book decades ago or something.

00:03:08
Speaker 2: I did twenty years ago, pitched it to my agent. He said no, So I got a new agent.

00:03:14
Speaker 1: As one does. You don’t get no answer you want, because I’m struggling with that professionally this morning.

00:03:23
Speaker 2: Just this very morning.

00:03:26
Speaker 1: Anyhow, at that time, I can’t remember what year it was. It would have been around ninety four, ninety five. Okay, you’re by twenty and I think and I remember, it gets quiet. Gord comes out. The lights are down, and Gord says, it’ll be He says something to the fact of like it’ll be twenty years this November, wow, or it’ll be blank in the place. Just I mean erupts oh, Yeah, no erupts. But that’s home turf.

00:04:01
Speaker 2: That’s very much home turf.

00:04:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you’re looking out you know, you’re looking out on white We used to fish in Whitefish Bay and like dude, and when we’re out there spearing spearing whiting or sorry, spearing whitefish, we’d always be talking about yeah, man, and telling people like, that’s where if you’re fishing in Whitefish Bay.

00:04:21
Speaker 2: Whitefish Bay Lakes Pier’s one hundred and sixty miles by three hundred and fifty miles. It’s as big as the state of Virginia. It’s bigger than Ireland. People don’t realize this unless you get up there. If you’re up there, of course, you can’t see across any of the Great Lakes. If you’ in the middle of Lake Superior, you can’t see either side. It’s not because of the mist of the fog. It’s because the curvature of the earth. It’s just too damn big. So there you go. So if you’re out there by the way, you know what you’re doing obviously. And sus Marie is where the Sioux Locks are. That’s the bottleneck of US industry. So all the iron ore, the copper I know you guys got it here in butte. The copper, the iron ore limestone all comes from the northern part of the Great Lakes, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Upper Peninsula. It’s got to go through this one spigot, this very tight widget at the sew locks.

00:05:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, because Lake Superior falls twenty three feet to Lake Huron or something.

00:05:09
Speaker 2: Well done, young man. This guy, this guy passes.

00:05:13
Speaker 1: Caught many a fish out of those falls.

00:05:14
Speaker 2: There you go, exactly, it’s a good place to catch him. Actually, so during World War two they built a new lock because I had to get all the iron and all the steel from up there down to build. It will run where the Ford Motor Company was. If you’ve seen fer Our versus Ford, that’s what it’s all about. They’re cranking out one B twenty four bomber an hour every hour for three years. During World War two. They build a new again, one B twenty four bomber which has one point five million parts. I looked it up. They’ve created out one per hour every hour for three years, NonStop. As Rosie the Riveter, all this.

00:05:49
Speaker 1: Stuff almost as fast as they were shooting down.

00:05:51
Speaker 2: Almost as fast, but not quite as fast. That’s how you win the war. Yeah, so FDR during World War two stations seven thousand soldiers where you were at the Seoux Locks. It was the most guarded position in North America during World War Two.

00:06:05
Speaker 1: Seriously, yes, because they’re worried about sabateurs.

00:06:08
Speaker 2: If they bomb that, there’s no steal for the planes, no steal for the planes and the tanks and the shells, we lose the war. And after your knew.

00:06:16
Speaker 1: That, but who, like, who were they thinking would have been like they didn’t mean like an aerial bombardment from enemy aircraft.

00:06:24
Speaker 2: We can get there, But I would.

00:06:25
Speaker 1: Picture like, like like I said, saboteurs, like someone plant explosives.

00:06:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess that’s possible to look, the eyds aren’t very good. Obviously they didn’t do it right.

00:06:33
Speaker 1: So they recognized that.

00:06:34
Speaker 2: It was like, but if it happens, it’s over.

00:06:37
Speaker 1: We’re gonna live sort of like the paraneum of the world.

00:06:39
Speaker 2: Man paranem See, these are the things I don’t get normally.

00:06:45
Speaker 3: That’s the name of the episode.

00:06:48
Speaker 4: That’s Yeah, I gotta stay in newsed for this when people I’ve done about thirty forty interviews, we’ve done CBS and everything else. Yeah, I gotta, I got, I gotta wide my strikes on here a little bit.

00:07:02
Speaker 5: We should just have a list of words when they’re used for the first time in here.

00:07:08
Speaker 1: I think istanbul probably is a good is another candidate. Here’s a word that has been used on this show. Hampton Sides. Hampton Side has been on the show a couple of times. Here’s what hampton Side says about the gales November. Here is a work of spectral beauty destined to be a classic. Readers of Sebastian Younger’s The Perfect Storm, he’s been on the show. Eric Larson’s Dead Wake, we should put that on our list of people get on the show. And Nathaniel Philbricks in the Heart of the Sea will love this deeply reported tale from our vast inland ocean. With John H. Bacon’s graceful and poignant retelling, the Saga of the Edmund Fitzgerald now takes its rightful place among the world’s greatest legends of shipwrecks and tapentuous, tempetuous, tempestuous.

00:08:00
Speaker 2: You got it?

00:08:01
Speaker 1: Who got it?

00:08:02
Speaker 2: You got it? Tempestuous sees.

00:08:08
Speaker 1: It’s from hands and Sides. There’s a bunch of good quotes on the back here, ken Burns, he’s been on the show. John U. Bacon has done it again. This is another riveting narrative that puts facts on a still memorizing legend. But this is more than getting the details right. Bacon has distilled the essence of the story and rendered a huge monument to those lost, to those lost, and a great gift to the rest of us. Ken Burns filmmaker, I’m excited to talk in I’ve read it. I’ll tell you what I did do is I looked at some of the pictures. It’s just heartbreaking to see the pictures of the guys. I had a weirdly in my life. I realized I’ve never looked at a picture of anyone that died on that boat.

00:08:49
Speaker 2: Stephen is exactly why I wrote the book. Wrote the boat book. I can’t get that word right. And people ask me what drovee me? I yes, I want to find out what happened, And that’s always part of the mystery here, of course, and we advanced certain theories and we’ve probably diminished other theories. But I’m not here to close that loop because you really can’t. There are no witnesses. All twenty nine men went down with the ship. Aunt Ruth, who’s the mother of Bruce Hudson, Ohio State student who takes a couple of summers to get in the lakes. He’s a twenty two year old deckhand who goes down with the ship and that’s her only child, which I can’t fathom. She had a great line, she said, only thirty, no, twenty nine men in God, and no one’s talking, so we’re all trying to guess. So what did drive me? And that’s what it was. Who were these twenty nine men all right? What were their jobs like? What were their lives like, over their families like at home? I interviewed half the families they talked for the first time this. I got six crewmen who’d been on the ship obviously before it went down, and those are not easy to find. There’s no list anywhere, and I got them all the talk and it’s just fascinating how it all works, and I learned the process. Here’s a fun fact for your listeners who would be into this. For sure, you talked to Great Lakes sailors by that know me of the guys with the sales. Of course, these are commercial shippers. Copper said, copper iron, all this stuff. They tell me consistently that sailing on the Great Lakes is more dangerous than sailing on the ocean, and that blew my mind. I grew up on the Great Lakes, so did you? How can that possibly be? And it’s a few reasons. One is saltwater, saltwater on the ocean on the Great Lakes. And by the way, do hand gestures work really well on radio?

00:10:21
Speaker 1: I bet some people it depends on how you’re listening.

00:10:24
Speaker 2: Well, if you’ve got the premium package, you’ll get this one. So on the Great Lakes you got these sharp, pointy waves at the top like mountain ranges basically on the On the ocean, the salt smashes those down, so the nice and smooth so right, yeah, you get smooth roller coasters, and they’re twice as far apart. It spreads them out. And on the ocean you get these storms from five hundred miles away, a thousand miles away, So by the time the waves get to you again, you have this general roller coaster. Still no fun, and you’ve seen perfect storm, but it’s manageable. On the Great Lakes, they’re sharp and pointing like mountain ranges, they’re twice as close to get. On the ocean, they’re ten to sixteen seconds apart. On the Great Lakes are four to eight seconds apart. What does that mean? That means you can have the bow of your ship in one thirty foot wave, nothing in the middle, and your stern in another thirty foot wave. These ships are seven hundred feet long, and in between you have twenty six thousand tons of iron. Oh that’s forty two hundred adult elephants. It’s enough steel, enough irons already to make seven thousand cars. What happens? It bends down, it SAgs. Then you go over the next wave, and it hogs, and it SAgs, and it hogs, SAgs and hugs. Bend a paper clip back and forth ten thousand times? Has how many waves you get in a day? What’s gonna happen? The paper clip’s gonna snap sooner or later. The Bradley nineteen fifty eight. I got a chapter on that. We have witnesses it actually snaps in half between two waves. Really, the morale not even six hundred feet Be sure that.

00:11:46
Speaker 1: The bow and stern would I just imagine that the bow and stern would cut in into the way. It would never have enough to lift it like a it does. These waves are lifts the center.

00:11:57
Speaker 2: These waves are don’t messing one with the waves, man. One of these waves is the same weight as two locomotive engines one wave. And these guys get these waves every four to eight seconds. And the night of this November tenth, nineteen seventy five, it’s a storm of a century. They got one hundred mile per hour winds. That’s hurricane force. At that point, the waves were thirty feet regularly, which is still pretty intense. This ship only has eleven feet out of the water, so thirty feet means you’re underwater twenty feet every time. This happens every four to eight seconds. That takes a toll. But then we now know from computer models that if you saw that many thirty footers, you saw ten forty footers, you saw three or four fifty footers, and you saw one or two sixty footers. And as one of the experts toll me, this ship ended up in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time, the only ship in that one hour area. Basically, so there’s part of your answer.

00:12:51
Speaker 1: We started out talking about sorry.

00:12:53
Speaker 2: Sorry about that tangent, but no.

00:12:54
Speaker 1: No, you do that all day long for Ick Care. We started out talking about Gordon Lightfoot as kind of like a touch point where many many people, like undeniably many people when they hear the Edmund Fitzgerald, they know what that means because.

00:13:10
Speaker 2: Of the song entirely, no question, do you You know?

00:13:15
Speaker 1: I’m always interested in this concept of like there’s like a there’s like an object, right, and then the object has a shadow, you know what I mean, Like if the object that’s good, Like the object is the sinking of the edm in Fitzgerald, and it’s like shadow is like that’s perfect Gordon life was the wreck of the Edmin Fitzgerald would like, in all honesty, would we be sitting here right now if it wasn’t for that song?

00:13:38
Speaker 2: I will say it from them from the mountaintops. Absolutely not.

00:13:41
Speaker 1: Really.

00:13:41
Speaker 2: From eighteen seventy five to nineteen seventy five, there are six thousand commercial shipwrecks on the Great Lakes. That’s one per week every week for a century. Oh man, really, thirty thousand men went down. That’s one a day every day for a century. And how many do we know? We know one, we know the em Memphis Geriald for exactly the reason.

00:13:59
Speaker 1: You see the sols the riff.

00:14:01
Speaker 2: Hey, by the way, you non Michigan. I don’t know what he’s talking about, but I do.

00:14:07
Speaker 1: Well, that was the first ship.

00:14:08
Speaker 2: That was the first ship.

00:14:09
Speaker 1: It was the first ship on the Great Lakes and the Eduond Fitzgerald’s the biggest ship to ever sink.

00:14:13
Speaker 2: That’s exactly right, and at the time the biggest ship period on the lakes. But yeah, without that, there’s no way. There’s six thousand we know one. Without the song, there is no book. It’s just that simple.

00:14:22
Speaker 1: Really, Yeah, what, uh can you explain? You kind of did a little bit, but can you explain that that? Uh? Well, first I got another thing to mention. You’re a sports writer.

00:14:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, so what am I doing here? Yeah?

00:14:35
Speaker 1: So, like you’ve written books on hockey football? Yeah, yeah, I had you. Is this your first like foray into kind of like deep history where you’re not able to meet the people involved?

00:14:47
Speaker 2: And it’s my second. The previous one was called the Great Halifax Explosion. Oh that’s right, from nineteen seventeen. Yeah, okay, I’m sorry, from twenty seventeens when the book came out nineteen seventeen. This ship called the Mountain Blanc World whe one is leaving Gravesend Bay, New York. That’s a pretty good name with six million pounds graves End, graves End. How about how prophetic? Right, It’s leaving Gravesend Bay, New York, basically New York with six million pounds of high explosives. That’s TNT, not gasoline like hauling, high explosive, hauling high exposive. High explosives don’t need oxygen to blow up. One good bump and it happens, and it’s in Halifax harboring. The way to World War One, to blow up Germans is the idea, I’m sure. And instead it bumps into another ship, a fire starts. Well, the guys in the Mountain Blank they know what the hell’s going to happen, so they get in the rowboats and get out of there. French crew. The ship slips at eight forty five in the morning, ghost ship slips perfectly into Pier six at the base of Halifax. The timing’s cruel because the kids are walking to school, everyone’s walking to work, and it’s burning, so they’re not gonna come down to watch the burning ship. They have no idea, what’s on it?

00:15:53
Speaker 1: And how long is this after everybody bailed off.

00:15:56
Speaker 2: About fifteen minutes. Oh okay, very fast, so pretty fast. Yeah, And then at nine zero four point thirty five we know exactly when because all clocks stopped. Two million high two million, two mile high Marsha mc cloud, the first in the world’s history. One fifth part of the atomic bomb blows half the city away of fifty four people. And Oppenheimer, of course, who built the A bomb. You see the movie oppenheimri talks about this. He’s when he did the math. The only model they head for Hiroshima was this. So this one fifth the power of the A bomb. But people in Boston sent two ships, two trains, one hundred doctors, three hundred nurses, and a million bucks, which back then is a lot of money. And they of the nine thousand wounded, they saved like ninety five percent, which it should not have happened with the medicine at the time. That’s what made the US and Canada allies. And I know this because my mom’s Canadian, So trust me, if you want a different version of the War of eighteen twelve, give a Canadian two beers and they’re gonna hear a whole different version of however all that went down. So I’m a hockey guy. I speak of experience here, except that was my first forest A long answer, Sorry, I was my first fey into that that allowed me to write this book. Without that book, the publishers never would have given me money for this book. God, so I prove I could get up.

00:17:08
Speaker 1: For the Oh man, I think if you sent hell whatever you got it published. I was gonna tell you how you would have got it published. Anyways, Explain that, Explain that, Explain the industry that the Edmun Fitzgerald was involved in.

00:17:21
Speaker 2: Great question. That’s another thing, dude. Again, I grew up in Annabra, Michigan, and not too far from Askegan. We go up to Travers City and so on. I’ve I’ve swam in all these lakes. I’ve sailed on two or three of them. I thought I knew them. I didn’t know anything. Ninety five percent of the stuff in that book I had no idea about it. And one thing is how incredibly important Great lakes shipping is. The French voyagers. Here’s your here’s your predecessors. Here in the Mediator podcast, these guys are badasses. I can say that in your show, and I can’t say that normally. So I’m taking advantage. Man Captain buzzkilled from my right over here, here’s my one chance. Finally, Uh, those voyagers had thirty forty foot news carved out of one tree. They got four hundred They got four hundred million beaver pelts in two centuries, almost made beaver extinct. But they’re wearing those hats in Europe, so they that’s billions of dollars of that. Then you got lumber. More money is made by lumber than the Gold Rush. You got grain. The Great Lakes supplies the world with food basically, and a lot of your food comes all the zero companies are based in Battle Creek, Michigan, in Minneapolis, Minnesota for a reason. But then you got, like I said, copper, which now you mine here limestones you need to make turn iron into steel and iron. It was it probably still is the biggest producer of iron in the United States. Here’s a fun fact for you. In nineteen so this is Silicon Valley before Silicon Valley. After World War Two, the Great Lake States. Five of the top seven were all around the Great Lakes. Only California and Texas were in that pile. Here’s a fun fat for you. Nineteen sixty census, what great lake city was bigger in Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, Nashville, and San Jose, California, Cleveland, Toledo, Toledo, ohiout was bigger than all those. This is how big it all was. So Detroit was the epicenter of all this stuff. And I grew up in the shadow of that one at that tail end of that. But this is what they did. Thirty seven of the top hundred companies were all based around Detroit. Tire makers, oil, oil companies, steel companies, car companies, GM’s number one, four, number three, Chryslers, number seven. That’s I mean. They had no competition after World War Two. So this place is humming. They’re making a lot of money. And these guys, the guys twenty nine guys in the ship, the old guys, they grew up in the Great Depression, they grew up in the World War Two. Why do you have? These jobs are hard, no question about it. But man, compared to being a miner or a farmer or a factory worker, you’d take it. Good union contracts. These guys are making good money. A deckhand and seventy five Bruce Hudson guy I mentioned, and he gets out of Ohio State.

00:20:02
Speaker 1: Is he the kid with no shirt on in the picture.

00:20:04
Speaker 2: He’s a badass. He’s one of yours. And he’s got the long the mutton chops the long hair. Rand It looks like Randall, he was. I like him. Already, there you go, I’ll show you. There you go, go to the picture section. You’ll know exactly what we’re talking about.

00:20:16
Speaker 6: That’s what I do anyway when I.

00:20:18
Speaker 2: Pick up a book, the perfect you’re my guy. So this guy leaves Ohio State to be a deckhan. That’s the lowest guy in the ship. Basically, he’s making, in today’s dollars, one hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year. Even back then, he’s making three times what a teacher makes four times, and he’s salting the money away except for one indulgence. He’s got a nineteen seventy two Dodge Challenger, badass muscle car. Beautiful Burgundy. We found the car. It’s still in mint condition. It’s still fantastic. Still is a sticker of Columbia Transportation, which least the emphys Yerald, I’m looking at it right now. There’s the sticker right there. No, shoot, that car. That was last year we took that photo.

00:20:55
Speaker 1: I look through these pictures of my ten year old this morning. Then I kind of choked up. We were listening to.

00:21:02
Speaker 2: The song We’ll get You Once you know the story. The song kills you. So he gets on the ship. He’s one of these guys and he’s making good money. He’s saving it pretty well. So he and his buddy Mark Thomas in that photo, they’re gonna when the season ends in three days. This was the last run of the season. Oh no, matter what happened, they’re gonna finish the season. That car is waiting for him on the dock in Toledo three days later. The captain mcsordy. I’ll get to him in a bit. He’s going to retire after this run, after thirty some years, forty years in the Great Lakes, promising his wife. All these guys. So they’re gonna get in that car and bomb across out west where you guys are to go to Colorado to get some Coors beer because in nineteen twenty five that was exotic and you gotta be old enough. Remember that one by the way.

00:21:44
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, he used to make all those all those movies. You got it, Like Burt Reynolds built his career on this story.

00:21:50
Speaker 6: That photo really is speaking to me.

00:21:53
Speaker 2: There we go.

00:21:53
Speaker 5: I think, Ohio, Man, if I did a couple of cycles on a GLP one I think would be you’ld be looking quite.

00:21:59
Speaker 2: So well, le man. One third of the crew comes from to luth one third from Toledo, one third from Cleveland. So a lot of Buckeys. This guy was a Buckey also. But then he finds out in September phone call back to the port bar in Silver Bay, Minnesota. Beautiful spot, the Silver Bay Municipal Bar. And I’ve been there, of course for hard hitting investigative journeys. Pas. All right, that’s all I’m doing here now. A guy who got on all the bars, Stephen and the bartender serve them. Steven Burns is still He was eighteen at the time. He’s sixty eight now he’s still there.

00:22:27
Speaker 1: You’re kidding me, dude.

00:22:28
Speaker 2: I got so lucky on research again and again and again. The guy at the President’s Lounge in Superior, Wisconsin, he’s still there. He served him the night before they left, so I’m getting all these guys. So Hudson finds out by payphone that his girlfriend in Toledo, who’s a waitress, Cindy Reynolds by Vacious Blind and all that. She says, surprise, I’m pregnant, And okay, you got that phone call. You’re not ready for that, so I’m not going to ask for personal experience here. Who’s gotten that phone call and who hasn’t, but you can imagine if you haven’t that you pause, Oh my gosh. He says the right stuff. He says, don’t worry. We’re gonna moving together and we’ll raise the child ourselves. And when she hears that, she goes, okay, go ahead and go on that trip because that’s November. The kids is that dud dull June. So now I think it’s going to marry this girl, of course. But these are the stories that happen before November tenth, nineteen seventy five. And you got to care about the guys before they get in the ship. That’s kind of my rule. So these are real guys, I mean, these are guys, these are your neighbors. They had plans, they had futures, and of course no one thinks this is gonna happen.

00:23:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, that iron ore would come out of the Iron Ranges, like in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, out of the the here on range.

00:23:40
Speaker 2: Exactly right, called the Iron Range. Bob Billen’s from there. He even talks about that in the book, from a players called the Iron Range. That’s where my feelings and my song has come from, he says. So Iron Range is the northern part of Minnesota, northern part of Wisconsin, and the up upper Peninsula of Michigan. Here’s a fun fact for you, a few football fans. The Wisconsin Badgers are called the Badgers, not because of the animal, because of the miners, because the winter they’d live in the caves and the winter and their nicknames were the Badgers. So those are miners they’re talking about.

00:24:06
Speaker 1: Actually.

00:24:07
Speaker 2: So yeah, hard life to say the least. But all that stuff goes to the louse Superior, Silver Bay, two harbors. You put on the ships and all the factories are Gary, Indiana.

00:24:17
Speaker 1: Chicago smelting it down there exactly.

00:24:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, they smelt it right on the dock. Man. It’s a very efficient process. These pellets called taconite should have brought some It’s a little rusty pebbles. Guy figured out how to do that, you know, fracking reinvigorated obviously drilling here in the United States. We’re out of the easy stuff, so we start fracking. All the easy iron ore is gone after World War Two. We used it up for World War two. So what do we do. We’re screwed. Well, this one professor at Minnesota figures out how to pelletize this iron ore. The scrap heap called taconite. You can actually use it if you process it and so on. We’ve been using taconite now for eighty years. That’s what we’re on. So this guy figures it out. Five hundred million pebbles of the stuff. Go on a ship. It’s dirty, its rusty, it’s heavy. I’ve been on. They tell you to wear a hat. I’ve been on two of these ships, by the way, Arthur Anderson, I was out with them that night, and I’ve been on the Wilfrid Sykes also out with them that night. And they give you a helmet, you know, and a stupid writer guy, right, okay, lamb lever with a soft hands. Here’s a helmet. Don’t do anything stupid. So you put the helmet on and you realize very quickly there are pellets of the stuff nailing your head right now as you walk to the ship because they’re loading. Oh so, and if a few spill, they don’t care, trust me, I from thirty or forty feet down from their shoots, it’ll crack your head open. So yeah, wear the damn helmet. That’s my advice.

00:25:34
Speaker 1: And like that was how much could you fit on that? Oh yeah, we’ll get you home. How much could they how much of that stuff? How much weight could they fit on the that ed Fitz.

00:25:44
Speaker 2: You’re not gonna believe it. It’s twenty six thousand long tons. So the British measurement was actually bigger than us tons. Why they do that, who knows, But it’s equivalent of forty two hundred adult elephants. Enough iron on that ship to build by itself seven thousand cars, and they make fifty runs a year, So one ship, the em Memphis Derald per year gives you enough iron to build three hundred and fifty thousand cars. And the course was eighteen years, enough iron to build six million cars. That’s one ship. That’s what the scale of all this is just mind blowing.

00:26:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that thing. I didn’t know that thing was making forty some trips per year.

00:26:19
Speaker 2: Fifty yeah, and I mean it’s NonStop. It’s nine months out of the year. And trust me, either loading or you’re sailing, or you’re unloading. I took a Skip Barber race card class years ago for the Trey Grand Prix. He said, you either put your foot on the gas, you’r foot of the brake. You do anything else, you’re losing. So you’re either going as fast as you can or as slow as you can. These guys same thing. If your ship gets into Zug Island Detroit, a nasty little spit of land, at three o’clock in the morning, they’re unloading, and then at seven o’clock in the morning they’re loading, and then then they’re sailing. And they don’t wait for anybody or anything. You’re constantly moving. And I was kind of wondering if shipping is as big. It was a great line from what you said. I this is dangerous. Why do it? William Sutton, the old gangster said someone once asked him why do you rob banks? And he said, because that’s where the money is. He’s got a point. Why if is this dangerous? Six thousand shipwrecks. Why do it? Because where the money is? Like I said, the trade was that big a deal. Then I also wonder, Okay, you know I live in Michigan. You live in Uskegan. Miskegan is one of the best natural ports on the Great Lakes, and that’s in the book several times. It’s a very important port. And that’s lumber. In the old days, the lumber from Muskegan built the first Chicago that burned down in eighteen seventy one. So that’s your town. As wonder, why have I never met these guys? I mean, I know factory workers, miners, farmers, et cetera. I don’t know any sailors because they’re only nine thousand of them, thirty guys per ship, three hundred ships in the heyday. It’s only nine thousand guys spread out over eight states. Right.

00:27:50
Speaker 1: And also they all passed through the porthole.

00:27:53
Speaker 2: They all pass through the portal. Yeah. And the second thing is, even though next to you, you still don’t meet him. They’re on a ship back. And then nine months out of the year, no vacations, no weddings, no graduations, no birthdays, no nothing. I talked to one of these guys, and he said, I’m a good family man, happily married. You know, forty some years. I got three great kids. I didn’t teach any of them how to ride a bike or throw a baseball or hunter fish. You’re not home and it’s heartbreaking. So it’s a hard life.

00:28:19
Speaker 1: He was just on the ships.

00:28:21
Speaker 2: Nine months out of the year. You’re home for three months. He said, there’s nothing better than coming home in January with a big old bonus check to pays for everything. These guys were paid. Well, there’s no question about that. These guys. You know, they weren’t even all high school graduates, but they were self educated. They’re very good at that. You have to pass all these tests, come on with a nice, big bonus check, and my kids run up to me and they give me a big hug. And I’m home for three months and my kids say, Daddy, you smell like a truck. And I say, no, Daddy, smells like a paycheck. That’s the life.

00:28:52
Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, when they launched that ship, there was like some weird stuff happened or seemed weird later seem weird even.

00:29:03
Speaker 2: At the time. Some of it seem weird.

00:29:04
Speaker 1: And by the way, yeah, talk about that. There’s kind of like three sort of I don’t know, man.

00:29:09
Speaker 6: When you say launched, you mean that night or when the.

00:29:12
Speaker 1: Ship ris like the gal the first photo, Edmund Fitzgerald’s wife goes a smack a bottle, champagne bottle, takes three hits to break it. A guy dies of a heart attack, right, and then they have like a North Korean esque launch a.

00:29:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s about right, by the way, you podcast listeners, mediator, podcast listeners. This man is Range Hampton. Size is a Yeale educated hotshot writer, one of my heroes. You’ve done your homework on this one as well, so you got it down. June twenty third, nineteen fifty eight, fifteen thousand people show up in Detroit to see this ship get launched. That’s more than that Detroit Tigers average the entire year. Now, okay, Tiger’s base, Well they sucked. Okay, I’ll grant you that simple point. But it was a huge deal. And people came in their Sunday best to see this NATA launch padded and she was up there at the bunting and all that and her Sunday Best three wax to break the champagne bottle. Sailors are notoriously superstitious, and they’re already getting the bad voodoo on that one, so that’s not good. Took about half an hour to get that ship into the water because guess what it weighs. The numbers in there, some ridiculous number of tons. Crazy. It’s the same height as the Detroit Renaissance Center, the tallest one. It’s seven and thirty feet twenty nine feet, but it’s no wider than the run from home plate to first base. It’s seventy five feet. It’s because of the locks. Because of the locks.

00:30:45
Speaker 1: Is it really that narrow?

00:30:46
Speaker 2: It’s these things are nuts, and no ships like this will built anywhere else in the world.

00:30:50
Speaker 1: And if you’re something is twenty five yards wide seventy five feet wide.

00:30:56
Speaker 2: It’s nothing. Your old ruler at school, that’s about the dimensions ten to one they know, I mean in the ocean, they make them shorter and fatter like you should basically like you would normally.

00:31:07
Speaker 1: Man, I gotta just tell you a little deal about that. When we used to hunt ducks right at like Sugar Island, Nivish Island, and the Saint Mary’s River, you have your ducks out, you have your decoys out eighteen inches of water. One of them sons of bitches that come by push first off. All of a sudden, your ducks are in thirty six inches of water. When that passes and the water comes in, your decoys are laying in the mud when it fills back in.

00:31:31
Speaker 2: And that’s just when those these big old ships are putting through.

00:31:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, your decoys are in the mud. And also they come.

00:31:37
Speaker 6: Back, come right back up.

00:31:39
Speaker 1: If you were a fix but I would never guess. That’s only seventy five feet wide.

00:31:43
Speaker 2: It’s crazy. They look like bigger than God, but they are.

00:31:46
Speaker 6: It’s seven hundred feet tall.

00:31:47
Speaker 2: You said, well, it’s seven nine feet long. Oh long long? Gotcha the Detroitment of Sound Center, if you know where that is. They got the four shorter buildings in the tall one. It’s the tallst building between Toronto and Chicago. It is seven hundred and thirty feet seventy three story story skyscraper. That’s the phrase I need Steven, thank you, But only seventy five feet wide. And again, if your shipbuilder, and these guys were great shipbuilders, you got three criteria. One, haul as much cargo as you can, because that’s how you make money. Two fit the damn thing through the SEU lots because they’re only seventy five feet wide. As that’s the limit right there.

00:32:23
Speaker 1: Like that sets the ship’s design.

00:32:24
Speaker 2: And that’s exactly what they did. They were one foot of one and no inches on the other. I mean this is maxed out. Uh. And then of course the third thing is handle rough seas well. If you’re a shipping company, what you can’t do all three? Guess which two you’re picking? Yeah, So these things are very porty designed for rough seas. Like I said, you can snap it between two waves. They roll back and forth, which is left and right? Hey, you’re you’re your podcast is awesome because your guys have been in boats all right, they’ve been out fishing and so on. When you’re facing waves, you think smashing the waves is you know, bad with a v hale. No, it’s not. It’s broadside that’ll screw you up all right in the stake in the trough, baby, exactly exactly, Brodie. It’s exactly what happens with these ships. Where do you not want to be in the trough? And that’s what’s gonna happen later on. So smashing the waves sucks. And one of the guys. I got one guy, Rick Barthouli. You guys would love this guy. He’s got looks a bit like my buddy randall over here. He’s got people, the good people, self educated guy, very smart dogs, life’s hot. Oh hell yeah. So he does not own a computer, he has not got the internet. All he has is a cell phone. He’s off the grid basically except for the cell phone. So give me a year to find this guy, another year to convince him to talk to me. He’s the last guy left, to my knowledge, of anybody on the Arthur Anderson that night, which is one hour behind the Fits taking the same route, and they’re the ones communicating back and forth. She’s as close as we can get to what’s it like to be on this thing? And he says, you know, you think you’re smashing this wave. Unless you’ve been on one of these ships, you have no idea what this is like. Every wave is a train wreck. It goes bang bang bang bang bang bang, as it kind of crunches down and then it stretches out again. Then it goes bang bang bang bang, bang bang bang, And that’s forty eight seconds twenty foot waves. You ain’t sleeping, there’s no way. And they got thirty and forty foot waves. So that’s how they designed them, and it’s ten by one. It’s crazy.

00:34:15
Speaker 3: Has that design changed since then?

00:34:17
Speaker 2: Not? No, no, because the SEU locks haven’t changed. And they’re finishing another one, the first one since nineteen sixty eight. They’re doing that one right now, and trust me, they’re going to get bigger. Now you’ve got thousand footers that are still seventy five foot wide.

00:34:29
Speaker 1: You’re kidding me.

00:34:30
Speaker 2: How nuts?

00:34:31
Speaker 6: How deep are they sitting in the water.

00:34:33
Speaker 2: That is a brilliant question. How do you are they supposed to sit? Or how deep do they sit?

00:34:37
Speaker 1: Loaded? Unloaded?

00:34:39
Speaker 2: So originally the plan was fourteen feet of what’s called freeboard. You guys know what that is. Again, dude, this is my first podcast, my first interview. I’ve done thirty or forty by.

00:34:48
Speaker 1: Now with big mariners.

00:34:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, people, Actually, what the hell I expired captain’s license. You’re as close as I get rand I’ll take your expired captain’s license. Yeah, you guys know what it’s all about. So freeboard is a distance between the water and the top of your deck and the US Coast Guard and others ABS have got regulations on this. When the ship was built nineteen fifty eight, it was allowed fourteen feet of freeboard and then therefore about twenty five feet below the water. Yeah, all these things you see those markers, that is the Plimsaw line. I got a chapped on it. You’re on the Plimsall line. A British politician from the eighteen forties, who Plimsall? Who made this line and ever ignored it except Lloyd’s of London. The insurance. You know where I’m going with this one. If you break that law, we’re not paying you a dime. So now all of a sudden, the equation ship shifted. In the old days, the guys in England in the eighteen fifties eighteen sixties, they would overload their ships, take out a ton of insurance, sink it almost intentionally with crew on board that didn’t care, and collect the money. So this changed all that. So this is how evil it was. So they were allowed fourteen feet, and then who knows why, in nineteen sixty nine, seventy one, and seventy three the regulations changed and allowed it to go bit by bit from fourteen feet above the water to only eleven feet above the water. In the engineer’s defense, they didn’t design it for that. And by the way, one inch of taconite, by the way, is tons one inch cheating the thing. One inch is millions of dollars of taconite. One inch is.

00:36:22
Speaker 3: That thing just a big tub in the bottomers that divided in a compartment.

00:36:26
Speaker 2: It’s divided into three main cargo holds, and I’ve heard stories about guys who fell into those. Back then you could drink on board and things like this, and drugs were prevalent. You could guys who fell in and died while trying to hose it down. So don’t drink it. Hose is my advice on that one. But yes, there’s three gigantic holes. It’s most of the seven hundred feet And I mean I’m standing there two feet away from these things and it’s only like two feet. I mean, I could easily fall in. So it’s one of those things with tell you don’t be an idiot. But yes, that’s a very good question. And they unloaded. Now they’ve got sellfonloaders, but back then they scooped it out. So yeah, so it’s a it’s a crazy setup, to say the least.

00:37:08
Speaker 1: Let’s jump that night a little bit. There, we’ve kind of established this run they’re making. Oh, I got it. Before we jump to that night. I got one more. What are they coming? Are they coming back empty?

00:37:18
Speaker 2: Yes? Every time?

00:37:20
Speaker 1: There’s nothing to bring up there nothing.

00:37:21
Speaker 2: To bring up. Well, here’s a fun fact for you. Trains are twice as efficient as trucks, and ships are three times more efficient than trains. So ships are six more efficient than trucks. It ain’t even close. So you carry so much on these ships you can afford to spend three days going to Toledo and come back in because it doesn’t matter anything. You can put out a ship, you put in a ship. It’s just far more efficient.

00:37:45
Speaker 1: Got it.

00:37:46
Speaker 2: So you’re right. And also when you’re coming back, you’re righting high. That’s when you fill the ballast tanks with water to give us some If you don’t fill with water, the screws, the propellers, which are thirty feet high, they won’t even touch the water. So you got it. Weigh it? Oh no, kid, Yeah, you’ll just grind it to death, all right, So so you got to do that. But when it’s right, well, I’m going to photo even land lubber me, I can tell you when the fits is loading when it’s not, and these guys can tell immediately.

00:38:11
Speaker 1: Got it.

00:38:12
Speaker 2: So you lose ten you know, five ten feet or something.

00:38:15
Speaker 1: So that night or I don’t know what time they take off, presumably they don’t take off at night, but they take it.

00:38:21
Speaker 2: They take them whenever they take off. Trust me, they.

00:38:23
Speaker 1: Take off knowing there’s like like what is their awareness of the weather, like what is the what is the forecast when they take off?

00:38:29
Speaker 2: Might be a genius exactly right. The two problems they had back.

00:38:32
Speaker 1: Then, that’s a stretch. But I know that.

00:38:34
Speaker 6: I actually like the positive vibes in the room right now.

00:38:38
Speaker 1: But I just know the wind.

00:38:39
Speaker 2: That’s rare.

00:38:40
Speaker 1: Now I know the wind and the wires made a tattletale. Soith fully loaded.

00:38:45
Speaker 3: He doesn’t pay any attention to the weather when we’re in Alaska.

00:38:51
Speaker 1: But now what the forecast is, I’ll say, let’s go have a look.

00:38:58
Speaker 2: You fit right in on this ship. So here’s what happens. And you guys, your listeners got to.

00:39:04
Speaker 1: Know the weather.

00:39:04
Speaker 2: You gotta wash the weather. And one of my guys, his dad was also a Great Lakes captain. He said when the weather came on, and I’m a kid in Cleveland. Everyone shut the hell up. And because that will determine if your dad and your dad is listening like this. I didn’t get that until I got in the ship. And the weather’s why you come home or why you don’t. Now in this case, the gales of November, it’s like the hurricane season in Florida. When is that in September? Because the water’s warm and the air is cool, the water wants to rise. When you boil water and you’re stove at home, it evaporates, it rises right because it wants to join the cold there and so on. It happens in November. On the Great Lakes, November is notoriously dangerous. November tenth is the most dangerous day on the Great Lakes.

00:39:44
Speaker 1: Really, Oh yeah, and they and it’s really worse than January.

00:39:48
Speaker 2: It’s worse than December. It’s worse than January because by then winter has arrived and the water and the air get along. They’re not in contrast. So it’s when they’re fighting. You get waves. So and on top of that, and you’re right about the forecast. So a few things happened. One it’s seventy degree and November ninth, the day they take off at two o’clock in the afternoon, it’s seventy degrees into Luth. Wow, and it ain’t supposed to be seven degrees into Luth. All right, you think that’s great news, it’s bad news for they learned doing this book and the experts. The longer winter takes to arrive, the nastier it shows up. It’s like water behind a dam, and the more water you get when that dam finally breaks, the worst it’s gonna be. So seventy degrees on Sunday is really bad news.

00:40:27
Speaker 1: Just too warm. Water is too warm.

00:40:29
Speaker 2: Water’s too warm, and the airs, the air switches. It’s gonna be It’s gonna happen fast and nasty. Isn’t that like this year everything’s been real hot up there. Yeah, basically, but exactly right, Krinn. And if it happens suddenly, these guys will know better.

00:40:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, the Great Lakes are big enough they’ll create their own weather.

00:40:46
Speaker 2: They actually do. And what the what these guys told me that you have far away storms and the ocean, as I said earlier, and the Great Lakes are called locally occurring storms, which means the damn thing right over your head. So you’re fishing in the morning and you’re, you know, rowing for your dear life. Two hours later, it happens very fast. So win is gonna come from alberta clipper from obviously Western Canada, across the Dakotas Minnesota, and that’s gonna run all the way across three hundred and fifty miles of fetch. And you guys know what fetches across Lake Superior. That’s nasty, cold, dry air. They knew, they expected that. Basically, they didn’t know how bad. They did not know about another storm. They should have. Some of the guys didn’t know about this in the weather forecasting business. A hot, wet air coming in from California, Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa straight up to the Green Lakes. These two storms are gonna meet right in front of Whitefish Bay, your old fishing spot. White Fish Bay is home Plate. That’s where you’re trying to get to. After two days getting across Lake Superior. Now you’ve got it’s like a catcher in front of home plate, blocking your way home. And this captain does not know that. So that’s tragic. And then what happens, So he does know is in for a storm. So he and Bernie Cooper, Arthur Anderson their buddies. But they’re still competing, of course, to get there first. And why to compete. If you beat a ship by a minute, you beat him by a couple hours, because you will get to the sua locks first, only one ship at a time. You will get to the dock first, you unload first. That’s four or five hours a minute is can be a half a day.

00:42:15
Speaker 1: Yep.

00:42:15
Speaker 2: So these guys are competitive dudes to say the least, but they still like but they still get along.

00:42:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, but they still come together. Is it just coincidence that they’re sailing together, No.

00:42:25
Speaker 2: It’s not. They’re talking to each other and early on around four or five o’clock on Sunday, they say, you know what, this thing’s pretty nasty. Let’s take the northern route. And normally he’d never do that. And mcsorty was the best captain on the Great Lakes captain when he’s thirty one years old. He’s the youngest captain of the Great Lakes. When he became a captain at thirty one. Now he’s sixty three. He’s been a captain more than half his life. He’s the most aggressive captain. He never turns around, he never takes the northern route, he never weighs anchor, He just goes, goes, goes. So the company likes that he’s the best in rough weather. They all say. Got a witness, Craig Sillivan, who’s on the ship in seventy two. He said, I saw that man park seven hundred and twenty nine feet of steel between two other freighters with three feet into your side and not touch a damn thing, like you’re parking your your parallel parking your Ford f one fifty. This man was the best, and he’s also beloved, which those guys were not back then. These guys would throw hot coffee at you, yell at cadets, and all the kinds of other stuff. They’re tyrants. Basically, this guy was so beloved his crew would follow him from ship to ship. So you have the best ship in the Great Lakes, the longest, the fastest, the most luxurious. How about that, the best food they had.

00:43:31
Speaker 1: They had air conditioning in their bunks.

00:43:32
Speaker 2: They had air conditioning in nineteen fifty eight. Homes didn’t have that.

00:43:37
Speaker 1: Those are like leather furniture and something leather.

00:43:39
Speaker 2: Furniture, two VIP quarters for the rich folks, the people who write the checks, the National Steel US steel Ford Motor Company to entertain those guys. Because you want the best captain of the Great Lakes, you want the best crew in the Great Lakes, and you want the most money. That’s how you get it. So it was not wasted money. So mccerley, here’s a more heartbreaking stuff. They’re supposed to end the season the week before tax on one more trip to get his bonus. Why his wife, Nellie is sick in Toledo. She’s got cancer. We think. I’m not tiredly sure about that, but I’ve got some witnesses on that. So she’s already in twenty four our care. She might be able to pull through. So this trip is for her healthcare. And he’s about to retire. So normally he’d never take the northern route, but he’s thinking, who the hell’s gonna fire me? Go ahead?

00:44:23
Speaker 3: What was the advantage of taking the northern route?

00:44:25
Speaker 2: Smart man Brody?

00:44:26
Speaker 1: Uh, good job.

00:44:28
Speaker 2: A few things. One, they normally go straight across Lake Superior south as you can. This is straight as land possible. By taking the northern route, you get the lee of the Canadian shore. And you guys know what lee is. There are twenty terms I’ve used tonight that I could not use last night. If you’re in a bookstore in the walk here in Minnesota, you better explain a lot of stuff. So this is Mike, this is my gang. So you get the lee of the Western Shore, the Northern Shore. You’re basically hugging Canada across Superior. Now a few catches to that, though. One is the safe, rational thing to do. So I’m not one of those ones that Dublin mcstorians say, screwed the holding up. That’s a rational move, but a few catches one one of the yours. You already know it’s pay me now or pay me later. So okay, the first two legs are quieter and softer, not as windy and so on. But that third leg’s gonna be hell because now you’re exposed. You have three hundred fifty feet three hundred fifty miles of fetch and now those waves are hitting you broadside. This is the you’re in your bathub and this is the drain, and go ahead, make some waves. What’s gonna happen at the end. It’s being nasty at that end. So and you’re gonna be hitting those broad side. That’s not what you want. All right, your last leg that’s gonna be about ten hours. That’s one problem. Second problem is it’s fourteen hours longer than the straight shot. All right, you just gave that Southern storm a fourteen hour head start to get to Whitefish Bay first. And I pose it in the book.

00:45:48
Speaker 1: This is the captain’s call completely like he’s going a unilateral that’s what’s happening.

00:45:53
Speaker 2: Not a democracy devotes one nothing in all decisions. You might consult, and he did, but it’s one nothing and you are therefore response for all decisions. Another guy out that night on the pikes, he said, this is too nasty. And this is one of the best captains in the Great Lakes, also probably the best at forecasting. And he says, we’re tucking in, we’re going to go into the bay, and his crew is warning him and ride it out. And his crew is warning him, sir, if you do, captain, you if you do that and there’s no storm, it can be your ass with Cleveland, with the company. So those the pros and cons you deal with. Now m Sworney only cares. This is his last trip. So anyway, so fourteen hours. Here’s the third problem. He does not know this route nearly as well. He takes the southern route fifty times a year, really, one hundred back and forth. He’s done that his entire career, forty years at least, he’s done this thousands of times. He knows all the islands, he knows all the stuff out there, and the currents and everything else. He does not know this. I had two guys on the ship that year and they said, we didn’t take it in the last year and a half, not once in the northern route. God, why does that matter? It’s Superior, it’s thirteen hundred feet deep, it’s gigantic. Not quite. It’s a little crappy pileo dirt called Caribo Island in the northeast corner of Lake Superior. Right when you take that final stretch down it’s one mile by three mile. It barely shows up on most maps. It’s called Carib Island. I have no idea.

00:47:13
Speaker 1: Why well, can I interject?

00:47:14
Speaker 2: Yeah? And by the way, it’s your show.

00:47:17
Speaker 1: Historically, here’s the crazy part. Like Isle Royal, yes, being a wolf Moose Island, Yes, historically was a Caribou Lynx Island.

00:47:28
Speaker 2: I did not know that. Yeah. Isle Royal is the nation’s biggest I’m sorry, it’s the nation’s only island national park and it’s ten times the size of Manhattan, but no one knows that.

00:47:39
Speaker 3: So there’s caribou up there, like after nineteen hundred.

00:47:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, in Maya in the modern like in like modern America. Yeah, during American history there was a caribouo Lynx Island.

00:47:52
Speaker 2: That was news to me. And by the way, it’s the first show also that I learned something.

00:47:56
Speaker 1: Oh, you can go there.

00:47:58
Speaker 5: You can hike up on a mountain on Isle Row and you can look at the biggest island in the biggest lake, on the biggest island in the biggest lake.

00:48:05
Speaker 2: That’s in the book. It’s a iroh is so big ten times it says Manhattan. It’s got a lake in the island with an island with a lake. Been there, There you go, Randall see it with my own eyes. There you go, And they use ira Oyl that’s part of the lee. They go just south of Ale Royal to get that protection. The word normally the.

00:48:24
Speaker 6: Worst boat right I’ve ever been on was getting to.

00:48:27
Speaker 2: Ale Royal on the on the Ranger three.

00:48:29
Speaker 6: From the from International Falls side.

00:48:31
Speaker 2: Oh god, that’s brutal.

00:48:33
Speaker 5: And and yeah, I’ve never been seasick before.

00:48:36
Speaker 1: I was seasick on that.

00:48:37
Speaker 2: All right, we’re getting pretty serious here. Here’s the thing they used to do. The guys on those ships who work in those ships. I talked to one of those guys. I had to cut the damn thing. But this will be fun for you guys. I remember denty Moore, Hunter Stu and all that stuff. I think one guy would start acting like he’s sick with five foot waves, five waves enough get these campers to sick. He had some denty more and he also go and spill the stuff, and it’s other buddy comes by and go, oh my god. He’d have a spoon and he started eating it. And that of course the campers, the poor campers that they see that they’re over the side.

00:49:12
Speaker 1: So okay, So yeah, Caribou Island, it’s quite all.

00:49:15
Speaker 2: Right because we needed that left and I will never get another chance of my life to tell that story. So so Caribou Island. It’s one mile by three mile. It’s called Caber Island. I have no idea. It’s in a swamp with Mosquitos. It’s nasty. The caribou left. If they’re around there, they swam across the Canada long ad. It’s no reason to go there. But in front of it, to the north, it’s six fathoms shoal. You guys know what a fathom is. My other folks usually don’t. It’s six feet. Six fathoms is therefore thirty six feet. If you’re drafting twenty nine feet on a good day, and this is not a good day, you have no reason to be anywhere near this nothing to gain. But it’s awesome as leading. It’s not six fathoms. In some places it’s eleven feet. That’s no deeper than your backyard pool. So you have no reason to be anywhere near this thing. Why would he come anywhere near it?

00:50:01
Speaker 1: Got it?

00:50:02
Speaker 2: The storm now is seventy mile per hour winds, thirty foot waves is pretty nasty. Not quite the worst he’s ever seen. But getting there, his long radars knocked out, his short radars knocked out by waves by waves, exactly right, thank you. And Whitefish Point and you’ve seen that lighthouse is the one lighthouse on the Great Lakes. Everyone’s dying to see that light. Of course, goes out that night. The radio beacon that signals the ships where you are also goes out. Why the storm, I mean seven.

00:50:29
Speaker 1: Storm knocked the lighthouse out.

00:50:30
Speaker 2: Well, Domino start falling your power out and just dumb luck in some cases. So there they are. So now you have truly sailing blind. All you have are what they call charts and we call maps. And it’s about as big as this table. It seems like four by five. They’re huge. And in these in the chart room because these organic drawers. One says Lake here on one says Lake Ontario. I mean you pull out six or seven per Lake. Now, if you’re old enough and you kids have no idea how I’m talking about, but Triple A used to gives them called a triptick, all right, and put all your maps on a trip, all in an order. So if I’m going from Michigan to Montana, I would know how to do it. And it works pretty well. That’s how these maps work. But if you skip ahead, you’re screwed because now nothing makes sense. So if he does not know where he is, Tom Wider a great hunter. Also, by the way, it’s also a sea captain in the Great Lakes. He said, it’s entirely possible he would have changed maps too soon. You’re in thirty foot waves. You’ve not slept in thirty six hours. You get what’s called motion fatigue. That is like being drunk after thirty six hours these waves, and you’ve not taken this route in years. If he shifted his map too soon, all right, to get whitefish ban in the map, because that’s where he wants to go. All right. The Cariber area is still there, but it now disappears because the scale has changed, so you might not be aware of anywhere near this. And the Anderson is convinced that they saw them on the radar go right over six fathom and shoal. If they did, it would explain why. Two hours later, he’s talking to Bernie Coop, that is the captain of the Memphis Gerald I McK sorely saying, my fence railings down, I’ve got two vent covers blown off by the waves, a few other problems, and in kind of in passing, I’ve got a list. All right, you guys know what that means. That’s my thirtieth term I don’t have to define to you guys, but tilting to the right to starboard all right, not that big a deal at first. Two hours later, it’s the first thing that he mentions. And these guys are very reluctant to admit anything is wrong with their ships for a few reasons. One, they’re in competition. You don’t put anything on the radio, you don’t have to. Second of all, the whole matra aspect. Man, we’ve all been on planes. We’re experiencing little turbulence here. People. Yeah, we’re going bounce up and down two undred feet. We’ll be okay here in just a few minutes. That’s what these guys are like. So for him to admit this much is very unusual. So now you’ve got a pretty serious list. What does that mean? It means either taking water from the bottom or the load has shifted, or possibly both. And if they bottomed out at six fathom the shoal, that could be the reason. Once you’ve starboard, all right, you can’t steer.

00:53:00
Speaker 1: And he had mentioned we hit.

00:53:02
Speaker 2: Here’s the bizarre part. And I could not believe this either, But I had ten experts tell me it’s true. You might not have known, And I thought that’s impossible.

00:53:10
Speaker 1: Something enough to put a hole through that thing a sandstone.

00:53:14
Speaker 2: It’s sandstone, for crying out loud. This is hard, hard stuff, and you got a hard hardship. How could you not know that? And I talked to experienced captains saying, the waves are so nasty, like I said, they’re a train wreck that you can’t tell the difference between the train wreck of a good wave and one guy the badger that runs from Muskegan.

00:53:31
Speaker 1: To uh exactly, man’s right.

00:53:34
Speaker 2: That’s right, will see is the captain of that ship?

00:53:37
Speaker 1: He said.

00:53:38
Speaker 2: I was leaving the breakwater one time, and the waves are so nasty. I thought I hit the breakwater. I had not, And I didn’t know this stuff worked like that. It does, so even a good captain cannot be aware. So whether tore hole or scraped it or whatever, we’re not quite sure. But anyway, now you’re listing. If you’re listing, you can’t steer properly. You’re much more in danger of capsizing when you’re going broadside and like a three leg an animal in the wild. And you guys know what those are like. All right, one good wave now can take you out. And when it reaches the point that they didn’t want to be in. As I said earlier, the worst place, the worst time, one hundred miles prior wins and up to sixty foot waves. And at some point the ship probably didn’t come back up. We don’t know, but that’s the best guest.

00:54:24
Speaker 1: The best guess right now is that it hit Did it hit something.

00:54:29
Speaker 2: That I think if you’re asking me, I know, like.

00:54:32
Speaker 1: I understanding that no one really knows, but like, where’s sort of the all right, let’s get let’s go sort of like academic consensus.

00:54:38
Speaker 2: There is none, but I can tell you this some new data in here. Dick Race, there’s a name for you. He’s the best diver in the Great Lakes. He died in two thousand and two when a seven forty seven went in, Like Michigan in the sixties. He’s the guy who found it when no one else could. The lakes are bigger than you think. He worked at the Chicago Police Department and he did his own work. He’s the best in the lake. Three guys who knew him well also the same thing. The company asked him to dive down six months later on six to five of them shoal, yeah, look for a strike, look for a strike, exactly right, Steven, and wherever that report is, by the way, I found the guy Peter grow was in charge of a thousand boxes bankers boxes of that company’s files when I went bankrupt in two thousand and four. He spent two years going through all these files. He found every box and went through them all except for three, the three involving the ed Memphis Gerald, and no one signed him out. There’s no trace. That’s where his report is. I’m almost sure of it, and I couldn’t find it. Dick Race reported on this, So his file is gone. We don’t know where it is. And I tried like a hell to find it. But he told three different guys in Chicago, Travers City, Muskegan the exact same thing. I saw the Fitzgerald’s paint on that bottom.

00:55:48
Speaker 1: I saw a rock.

00:55:49
Speaker 2: Nearby with scratches that no animal can make. That had to be from the ship. So is that proof?

00:55:56
Speaker 3: There wasn’t like when they found the there was like no like autopsy they could do on the wreckage.

00:56:03
Speaker 2: Yes and no. And it gets us closer to it, but it’s not definitive. Yeah. But anyway, So at seven o’clock when Bernie Cooper calls him and he’s the captain of the Anderson, and he says, how are you making out with your problems? He says an quote, we are holding our own And that is the ringing line from Captain MCSORTI. Those the last words from anybody on board. Whatever happened next one thing we say that people academically even agree on whatever happened was fast. And what’s our proof on that this guy is the best captain of the great Legs. If he had ten seconds to get out an SOS with coordinates, he sure as hell would have done it. This guy’s good, all right. The lifeboats were secured, the life jackets were where they left them. Only one guy we’ve seen in the bottom is wearing a life jacket. So whatever happened happened very fast. They say, when thirty five miles per hour down to the bottom, it might have cracked on top.

00:56:54
Speaker 1: If there’s a guy on the bottom wearing a life jacket, Yes, how com we didn’t float.

00:56:59
Speaker 2: Because he’s inside the inside the Uh, they’re all inside the ship, understood. Oh they are yep, somewhere in the pilot house and somewhere in the engine room and no one’s in the middle. So is that right? Yeah, we don’t want to be in the middle. Not that, not that it worked out well anyway.

00:57:14
Speaker 1: But how deep did it? How deep did it?

00:57:16
Speaker 2: Here’s the weird part, so kind of an academic question. Did it crack on the surface as other ships had or did it crack after it hit And a lot of people say it cracked on the surface, And again can’t prove it either way. But here’s a wild stat for you. It’s down five hundred and thirty feet deep. Now you better you know you can’t dive down there for the hell of it. You better know what you’re doing, special gear, you know, license people, submersibles, all that stuff. So it’s five hundred thirty feet down. But this ship is seven hundred and twenty nine feet long, So even if it hits the bout, you have two hundred feet out outside the water. Crazy, all right, So that would certainly have cracked it at that point put all the weight on it. So either one could have happened. And I can’t say.

00:57:57
Speaker 1: That’s yeah, I never thought of. It’s taller than it is deep.

00:58:01
Speaker 2: And it’s five hundred and thirty feet deep.

00:58:02
Speaker 1: How far are the two pieces apart?

00:58:05
Speaker 2: About a quarter mile about like that, and in between it’s like one third the bow upright, so you can see the Memphis Gerald on the side, one third the stern upside down. So we see in the book ed Memphiserald upside down, which is sad to see. In the middle is about a third and it’s just blown apart and the attack and it is still down there, so and and all twenty men as well. And the line from the song the chip Awad comes from a Newsweek story. But Gordon Lightfoot got the great lick the great Lake never gives up her dead. What that means is if.

00:58:37
Speaker 1: The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead.

00:58:40
Speaker 2: You think by now I’d be a nice pant on this stuff. But this guy’s got the lyrics exactly right. Thank you again, doctor, And he’s got it. He’s right. The leg it is said, never.

00:58:48
Speaker 1: Dead, honorary doctor.

00:58:49
Speaker 2: I call that a professional. Curtis, thank you. We need we need a light moments. That’s good too. Yeah. The author of the book, wud paid two thousand dollars for the rights. Didn’t get the lyric right, So thank you for that. Why is that because if you’ve drowned in Michigan, like Michigan like Eerie, almost anywhere you go in the United States, bacteria will eventually invade your body. And the bacteria do that. They are lighter than water, so your body starts floating up. So that’s why they float up within a week or two, usually in drownings. Fishermen included on the Great Lakes. I’m sorry. On Lake Superior. You’re so far down, it’s dark all day long, it’s pitch black, it’s so cold. Bacteria can’t live there. There’s a sterile down there. It is sterile. Bacteria do not live down there. Almost nothing lives down there. So bacteria never invade your body. So these bodies hate to get grim. They do not decompose in the normal way. They’re still largely recognizable.

00:59:41
Speaker 1: But what has been the argument, Why haven’t the families wanted to Why haven’t the families wanted to bring up the remains of their relatives.

00:59:54
Speaker 2: One of them did for a while until she found out her she’s an only child, also deb Shampa or two days go to Milwaukee. She’s a sixteen year old girl when her dad’s ship goes down, and they’re very close at first. She wanted to and his brother was in Vietnam. And here’s a little story he’s thirteen years old in the Great Depression when his dad dies suddenly. He’s the oldest of five kids. What do you do if you’re in rural If you’re in rural Wisconsin, at that point, you drop out of school and you start working. These guys are tough dudes. So he paid for his kid and your brothers to get through school. He joins the military, sense checks back. He was decorated himself, gets in a ship, makes good money, and gives the money back to his family. But he always promises his brother in Vietnam, if anything ever happens to you, I will go to Vietnam and I will bring you back. And he said that more than once. So when this ship goes down, his brother wants to do the same thing. I want to go down and bring you back. But deb Champeaux realize, a it’s very dangerous. They’ve made three drives, three dives down there no accidents, but it’s very dangerous to do that stuff. Two the other people are also on the ship, and she said in the Marines, you never leave your men. So that was the ethos of leaving the guys on the ship. So they all agree they’re not going to come up and they’re all basically entombed there.

01:01:03
Speaker 1: Essentially, they’re all accounted for that.

01:01:08
Speaker 2: I can’t say for sure, well I can, because by now something would have happened. All twenty nine men are on one side of the other. You would never be in the middle of that ship anyway.

01:01:16
Speaker 1: But I’m just conditions were such that no one could be No one would be on deck. It’d be like laughable deck.

01:01:23
Speaker 2: Exactly, and laughable is right, and no no fence railing even on top of.

01:01:27
Speaker 1: That, and so fast that no one ever attempted to like, no lifeboats ever washed ashore.

01:01:33
Speaker 2: The lifeboats dead, but only if they popped out on their way down.

01:01:37
Speaker 1: I see.

01:01:37
Speaker 2: And these things were destroyed.

01:01:38
Speaker 1: Okay, but no sign that someone had taken any kind of steps to do that.

01:01:42
Speaker 2: The one life jacket is the only time we have that anybody felt that, you know, doom was apparent. These guys usually didn’t wear life jackets. Some of these guys couldn’t swim. It seems crazy to me, but coast got ever tested for it. And Ransom Condy, there’s a name for you. The nickname was Handsome Ransom Condy. He told us daughter. All he does is prolonged the agony. So these guys and yeah, you have ten minutes in net water anyway.

01:02:06
Speaker 3: Kind of a fatal It’s like, God, why bother kind of thing?

01:02:09
Speaker 2: That’s what that was the that was the mindset.

01:02:11
Speaker 1: So it’s it’s it’s assumed that the men drown.

01:02:16
Speaker 2: Yes, I think proven basically, h so fast I answer your question. I don’t think anyone’s gone down there and counted the head count kind of the the dead.

01:02:27
Speaker 3: What was going on with the other captain?

01:02:30
Speaker 2: Uh, he was fighting for his life, of course, thirty forty footers, but he was not quite in as bad a place. He’s an hour behind.

01:02:36
Speaker 3: Did he also take he did take the northern.

01:02:39
Speaker 2: The northern route. Yeah, and he’s another aggressive guys. This is unusual, but his radars working, so they certainly avoided Careb Island. They got a map in there showing the two routes they took. Man, they took a wide swing around that whole thing. He told his wheelsman, we ain’t coming anywhere near this thing, right, I mean, I don’t want to see it. And with there’s no reason to.

01:03:01
Speaker 1: Coming near the six fathom shoal exactly.

01:03:03
Speaker 5: That’s that’s death without an SOS call. He realizes that something’s awry when assuming I mean he loses contact, he doesn’t get any response on the radio or I mean Bernie Cooper And at what point, at what point do they realize something’s happened.

01:03:21
Speaker 2: They come to it slowly because again he’s fighting for his life. Yeah, he’s an hour behind. So the worst of it lasts about an hour. And that’s where the Fitzgerald was. It’s still bad when he comes through thirty forty foot or whatever. But so he’s keeping unmonitored, but you only check it in every half an hour of an hour. But he loses them on the radar. That concerns him, but that’s possible, that can happen. Then he tells his guys the power might have gone out on the ship, which does happen. The electrical systems can pop out. But after an hour he realized this is not right, so he calls the coast Guard. And I hate to be critical of the coast Guard. These guys have saved thousands of lives, and I got many of them in the book. These guys risk their own lives, very very good. But the seue Locks Coast Guard station did not come through that night. They had two ships that did not go out.

01:04:07
Speaker 1: And the guy wouldn’t It wouldn’t have mattered.

01:04:10
Speaker 2: It wouldn’t have mattered, but you gotta be ready.

01:04:12
Speaker 1: But anyway, no, I understand the criticism. I’m saying, it wasn’t.

01:04:16
Speaker 2: No, it was im material. You’re dead right, Yeah, no, punt intend it’s sorry. But the captain Cooper of the Anderson calls the Sioux group in in the seue locks and talking to a petty officer branch. This guy’s young buck, and he asked Cooper to go from channel sixteen to channel twelve because channel sixteen is for emergencies. He’s reporting the memphistial being missing. Is there a greater emergency than that? I mean, what’s even close? This guy’s just not getting it, and Cooper’s trying to get through to them, Hey, I think the ship is missing. When they finally get the white Fish Bay at nine o’clock at night, he’s certain that it’s gone. There’s no reason why we wouldn’t pass him. It wouldn’t be in home.

01:04:57
Speaker 1: What time did the ship break apart?

01:04:58
Speaker 2: Seven o’clock ten somewhere in there, and that time of you’re dark. Oh yeah, absolutely, it’s been dark for a while at that point, it’s like four point thirty, you know that area. So the petty officer Branch testifies a few days later and asks to explain himself his various responses, and he says, I thought it was important, but at that time not urgent, and I can’t explain that answer. So it doesn’t Again, it didn’t matter as far as what happened on It’s still that’s a Cooper’s dealing with. When they get to Whitefish Bay, they’ve not even weighed anchor, and coastguard says, can you go back out and look for the Fitzgerald.

01:05:36
Speaker 1: So it says to who, Cooper of the Anderson want to take a iron ore freighter and go look for it? Yes?

01:05:42
Speaker 2: And you just got in like this, yeah, skin of your teeth. You’re happy to be alive, and so is the crew. It’s the worst home he’s ever seen his entire career. And they ask him before you even drop anchor to go back out, and you’re like, I said.

01:05:54
Speaker 1: To take a loaded freighter out six hundred.

01:05:57
Speaker 2: Feet some oh, I was actually longer at that point, seven hundred.

01:06:00
Speaker 1: What the hell is he supposed to do?

01:06:02
Speaker 2: It’s I just gave a shrug for the radio. It’s a fool’s mission. And they know damn well that you don’t lose seven hundred twenty nine feet of steal. It’s a fool’s mission. They know that. But and the Bradley in fifty eight and the Morrell in sixty six, great first person testimony we’ve got in the book from the guys. There are three guys in one raft and four guys another raft, and end up being two and one because the guys died on the raft and stayed on the raft. They didn’t have the energy to throw them over at that point, at these horrible wrecks, and they said, we’re freezing. We have no energy to even grab a rope by the time they get us. What kept us going? You know, we’re dying and so on. The only thing that kept us going was the thin thread of hope that’s somewhere out there is some guy in the coast Guard or somewhere else who’s willing to risk his life to save mine, because you can’t save my life any other way without risking yours. And Coastguard guys die doing this stuff, I mean, other guys die too many examples, of course, so coast Guard does that in a regular basis. That’s what these guys did. And I asked Rick Bartholey, who’s a twenty two year old guy in that ship. I said, what do you think at the time? He said, we knew it was a dumb idea, and we knew there could be two ships in the bottom before we’re done. And that’s exactly what Cooper tells the Coastguard. We could double the accident at this point, he said, but we didn’t think twice because we knew they would do it for us. And that is the Sailor’s Code. And the chapter called the Sailor’s Code. All the American ships went out, and all the ocean ships stayed in port because once again the Salty’s learned that the Great Lakes are scarier than the ocean. So those guys are heroes to me.

01:07:34
Speaker 1: When you say that the other the captain of the other ship, you kind of answered this, but it’s what come back on it. The cat you use the term of the captain dealership was fighting for his life, yes, like did he later describe describe it like that? I mean, did he feel like he was in a life death situation?

01:07:51
Speaker 2: I should have the thing. I got my pdf my computer. How about that for a non Fiserald response, I can find exact quote when the coastguard captain tells him to go out. He we have his quotes and what he said, where’s that damn thing? Is right there? I’ll get in a second. He said, do you know? Do you know what the conditions are like out there? And the guy doesn’t answer, and Cooper says, again, do you know what the conditions are like out there? And again he doesn’t answer, and I said, he didn’t answer, but we can. He had no idea because even on shore with twenty footers going over your building on shore, if you weren’t out there, you’d have no idea. And so Cooper knows this guy’s asking a lot and he has no idea what he’s asking for. But they didn’t. He didn’t even stop and think, I mean, you didn’t like it, but you gotta go. And these guys are different breed.

01:08:43
Speaker 6: How long were they out there?

01:08:44
Speaker 2: About fourteen hours? Because that’s all it takes to go to make a loop.

01:08:48
Speaker 1: And the scary loaded with all But that’s the thing that I keep, I know, I keep coming back, was like loaded with all that iron orange shit.

01:08:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can’t drop it first and go back out. That’s that’s part of your problem. I mean his history board.

01:08:58
Speaker 1: Do you’re gonna it’s crazy, do what like throw some ropes, like you’re gonna try to pull up along You’re gonna try to pull that thing up alongside a life raft.

01:09:09
Speaker 2: I guess, And they have in the past. They would try, but it would work. I mean, I don’t know.

01:09:15
Speaker 3: It also could be as much about like confirming and recovering bodies, and.

01:09:20
Speaker 1: Or you’d find it a drift. I guess.

01:09:22
Speaker 2: Yeah. And they found debris, they found the lifeboats. Those things were steel, not aluminum. Even Arthur Anderson’s lifeboat was destroyed by a wave, and Arthur described it, it’s like taking a pop can, stepping on it and taking a hacksaw through it. That’s what our lifeboat looked like. And again made of steel, not of aluminum. But the way they dreaded, they’re going back out in the seas and it’s still bad and you’re smashing into those waves. That’s not the scary part. The scary part is the turnaround, turnaround. You have to pick the right wave to turn around in to go into the trough.

01:09:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it takes fifteen minutes for those things.

01:09:56
Speaker 2: Around exactly fifteen minutes, take an hour. Yeah, these things they’re not that. They’re sixteen miles hours and they’re big and slow. So you got to And I talked to captains about this. It’s dark, you can’t pick the right wave. It’s too dark to see, like you’re saying earlier. So just making that turnaround. And Barthuli, who’s not an emotional guy, he said, trust me. When we got back into Whitefish Bay the second time, there’s a lot of guys who became very religious. Yes, who had they come to Jesus moment on your way back, so they knew how bad it was. So those guys were impressive. The ocean guys did not go out, as I said earlier. John Hayes had sailed in both twenty three years the Great Lakes and twelve on the Ocean. He said, the Great Lakes and the Ocean, it ain’t even close. And anybody who’s sailed both will tell you the same thing. The Salty’s always laughed at us until they got in the Great Lakes. Then they shut up pretty damn fast and started looking for safe harbor and that night a half dozen American Canadian ships went out and all the salteast stayed in bay. So that’s the difference.

01:11:00
Speaker 3: Has there anything comparable happened since then?

01:11:04
Speaker 2: Rody? Great question, And by the way, this is the best damn interview I’ve had to check. I ad my ignorance I had been my ignorance about the media to podcast. I’m not kidding you. I’m getting the best questions. That’s been very impressive. So six thousand shipwrecks between eighteen seventy five and nineteen seventy five. From November tenth, nineteen seventy five to the present, almost exactly fifty years, zero not one. So you go from six thousand in the century to zero for fifty years? And why is that? Just what you said Steven earlier? Forecasting is better. They’re also taking it more seriously. Communication. Don’t just know the information, tell the captain, and tell the captain on a regular basis what they’re in for today. So they had more technology back then. And one of my experts said, when do you fix anything when it’s broken? All right? Nine to eleven. We’re complacent. We got smart about certain things, but we could have done things then to be smarter. Of course, same thing here. But the biggest change I believe since then is simple common sense. The author photo there on the back is me at Whitefish Point. This is November eleventh of last year of twenty twenty four, the day after the anniversary. I spoke with the families the night before. I’m looking at about thirty to forty mile prior wins there. I don’t want too happy about ten foot waves every single ship that day. In my computer program on my phone shows this. Every single ship was anchored in Whitefish Bay. And I guarantee you in the old days, not one. And if you’re anchoring, you’re fired. You’re not going to make it or ridiculed at least, so way to day, way to day. The next day in the Lake Superior, after the ship went down it was glass. Oh you could have gone out one day later and made up all your time straight shot. So next part of the tragedy, I’ll added the tragedy. Eddie Bindon, forty seven years old, first assuch An engineer high in the pecking order, handles the engine been married twenty five years to the lovely Helen. Her photos in there in Cleveland area more or less. He about to celebrate the twenty fine Anniversary’s about to retire after this trip as well. He gets from Superior, Wisconsin to Duluth to the jewlier store because Spirit didn’t have one. Apparently, gets a very nice twenty five year diamond and anniversary ring, and for reasons only he knows, he does not pack it in his duffel bag. He’s gonna see her in three days. She’s gonna be there on the dock he lived two hours away. He gives it to a friend and tells his friend to mail this to my wife and gives the address.

01:13:34
Speaker 1: That is so wild, though, man.

01:13:36
Speaker 2: I cannot explain why he did that, what he thought any of this, But sure enough, a week later she gets a ring she wore the rest of her life and never remarried. But stories like that, those are the stories that no one’s got. So it makes some human beings. That’s that’s the most important thing. Man.

01:13:58
Speaker 1: Did you feel like when you when you started working on the book, did you feel it necessary to reach out to the family members?

01:14:04
Speaker 2: Oh? Essential, And it took me about six months to a year to get to them. I got lucky. The guy who is the director of The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Point. Bruce Lanne a true class act, former Army captain, square jot guy, all this good stuff. He’s a big o’house State fan. But he got his master’s agree at Eastern Mischian University in Ipsilanti. So he’s hearing me on the radio for years talking about this stuff and reading my football books, and so and so I already knew me. Thank god. He read the Halifax book and we got it along very well. He had the trust of the families. I did not. He was their gatekeeper. He keeps all the wackos and the grifters away from them. But we got along and he told them to trust me, and without that the book barren accounts, in my opinion, So they trusted me, and that one worked out very well. They love the book, and I’m grateful for that.

01:14:52
Speaker 1: When we say the like if I say the families, or if you hear the families, are there? Are there still twenty nine families? There’s some like semi cohesive units or are some of the families sort of dissolved and.

01:15:09
Speaker 2: Some have dissolved? Well, Eddie Bendon and his wife Helen no kids, I see, so there you are, which is why I feel very.

01:15:16
Speaker 1: Good about and she and she’s and she’s she’s deceased.

01:15:20
Speaker 2: Okay, I see she was forty seven at the time.

01:15:22
Speaker 1: So there’s no there’s no fa in that case. There’s no family spokes.

01:15:26
Speaker 2: Three or four of the cases, they’re not a deckhand who’s single. There you go. So in those cases they ring the bell twenty nine times every anniversary. My son once rang the bell. He’s he was eight at the time for Eddie Bendon and he wore a suit and tie, took it very seriously, practiced earlier in the day. We have pictures of him walking away Tyrian volunteers. Basically, so as through my son, I discovered Eddie Beindon, and then I found a guy, Patrick Devine, who talked to me late in the process. He was very reluctant deckhanded on the ship. Two months earlier. He was replaced by Bruce Hudson. He’s mad about it at the time. He was, Yeah, it took ten years to get over survivor’s guilt and all this. I mean, he’s in a bottle for a while. As he said, he loved Eddie Bindon. Eddie Bindon was his mentor and his boss and just a great guy. Knew his stuff and was very kind to him and protected him. So now Eddie Beindon, you know, we’ll know about Eddie Bindon now at least. So I got to eat another one. Bruce Hudson. I told you that his girlfriend’s pregnant. Ruth Hudson loses her only child, and I’ve got my wife. I’m a late starter. I got a ten year old kid. My wife has assured me I’ve got an only child. She was very clear on this. You’ve got to and you know who the gate came. Yeah, well there you go. Who decided that not you? Well to do that? Well, then no one decided that there are accents in their accents. We can talk about that another time, but anyway, uh.

01:16:50
Speaker 1: So, I just to clarify that was our best accident.

01:16:53
Speaker 2: There you go.

01:16:54
Speaker 1: Everyone said that genius is a genius moment, the third one, by.

01:16:57
Speaker 2: The way, the trailers we call him. Everyone always says that worth the price of missioned right there. But so Ruth Hudson, she finds out she’s four foot nine and her mo.

01:17:07
Speaker 1: On backup, This is not the girlfriend, this is his mom. Bruce Hudson’s mother, Ruth, thank you for the Claire. She has one child, one child, She had one child. Her niece saw her every day, Pam Winning in the same neighborhood. She’s been great to me and thanks for the clarification.

01:17:20
Speaker 2: So, Ruth Hudson, she’s four foot nine, but she tells you that she’s five foot five, and you believed her. Apparently she was a little spark plug, just full of energy and all this she the company called nobody. She finds out the next day driving to her job at the Bunny Bell Cosmetic factory in Cleveland. On the radio, that’s yeah, this is this is brutal, this is cruel.

01:17:41
Speaker 1: This is before the time of like contacting next of kin before you announced.

01:17:45
Speaker 2: No, it was not. You should have proded them immediately. This is ninety seventy five. The company did not do what it’s supposed to do. So Dennis Anderson channel ten and du Luth WTL number channel eleven and Toledo. That’s how these people find out and neighbors fight out. They knocking your ten o’clock at night and tell you that your dad’s ship is gone. Just brutal. So she finds out like that, and she thinks I’ve lost my family. This is you know, we’re a coupled with one child. She finds out six months later that she’s gonna be a grandmother.

01:18:15
Speaker 1: Six months later. The person ever thought to make the connection.

01:18:19
Speaker 2: No, the seventeen year old girl at the time, twenty year old guys seventy year old girl wish back then was not that uncommon. She didn’t tell her parents that she was pregnant. She just starts showing into like month eight. That’s when she calls Ruth Hudson. And that’s a tough phone call. And Ruth at first thought, you know why you’re telling me, She goes, I’m not asking for anything. I think you should know that you can be a grandmother. And she has Heather, and Ruth and Heather are very close. They went shopping together and so on. Heather has four kids and the oldest is Austin now twenty five, who looks just like Bruce Hudson apparently. And yes, Aunt Ruth played favorites. She lost her son and she gains a grandson who looks just like him. It’s pretty amazing. So wow, I know these stories go on like this. I got to tell you one more that.

01:19:04
Speaker 1: Yes, it’s like just to sure you’re right, like putting the names to it, you know what I mean, Like you never think that you’d run into a dude who’s like, no, I lost my father on the Edmund Fitzgerald. It’s just like it’s just like they’re chimes, they’re church bell chimes.

01:19:20
Speaker 2: It’s a song. It’s a song. We don’t know anything else. I didn’t know a single name.

01:19:25
Speaker 1: Church belt chime till it rained twenty nine times.

01:19:27
Speaker 2: That’s right, And now they were got thirty times for all the other accidents as well, and sort of the families. But yeah, I mentioned earlier, maybe I didn’t the last words, of course, mcsorty. I did mention that we are holding our own. So Heidi Wilhelm is a twelve year old girl at the time. She’s the youngest of seven kids, and all seven kids depend on one guy on the ship. And because the mom’s raising seven kids, she’s working her weight off. Two next door neighbor knocks in the door says, your dad’s ship is gone. So mor mom’s on the phone trying to get anyone to answer. No one does at the company, and they never called Wow, what do you do? And the insurance companies didn’t pay in many cases because it’s an act of God. You got some social security.

01:20:07
Speaker 1: In most cases, it’s like inherent vice or something else.

01:20:10
Speaker 2: Exactly hair advice. There you go, you’re legal to Resultso paying off the day and the company paid the minimum that they had to, basically maybe a year’s salary. Well what does that get you with seven kids? So and she said, what do you do? You do what we always do in the Midwest. You suck it up. You know, we’re gonna we’re all gonna get jobs. We’re all gonna start working. They pulled through. They joined the military. They often went to the then very cheap state schools and not so cheap anymore. They raised kids. They often did a combination. Heightis now sixty two. She’s got a daughter, Sarah. She went to the Air Force or daughter Sarah’s also in the Air Force. And Sarah was born on the twenty third anniversary of the sky November tenth, nineteen ninety eight. The grandfather she would never meet, obviously in a really great guy ball accounts. When she turns twenty one, this is six years ago on number tenth in nineteen ninety or sorry, twenty nineteen, she gets a tattoo, and we’re hanging out at wife. It’s point a table kind of like this, but you’re a black table in the crews quarters for where these people stay when they’re in town. We’re having some beers, we’re telling some stories. This is where I got to know these people, and this is where I get choked up. And at this point, Heidi says, Sarah’s got a tattoo. Sarah showed you on your tattoo. And she pulls up her left sleeve and her hoodie and it says, we are holding our own oh man, And that’s what these people do. M and has gotten me too, So yeah, that’s how Well, that’s incredible. That’s what these people were. And I guess one of the points is they were heroes before the ship went down. You’re steel, your food, all this stuff. It’s these guys.

01:21:52
Speaker 1: So sat that’s incredible. So is it. I was telling my little boy this. Then I realized maybe it didn’t happen, but I think it did. They lifted the bell from the ship, they did, and that’s in the museum. And then they took another bell and engraved it with the names and put it back and then one like Gordon Lightfoot died, did they put his name on the bell.

01:22:14
Speaker 2: They didn’t put his name on the bell, but they did at Mariner’s Church, Okay, they added it there. They rang the bell for him when he died. And that’s no small trick. By the way, any special welding tools. You got an underwater welder who knows what he’s doing. That bell is heavy, it’s it’s brass. Yeah, so bring that up five hundred and thirty feet. The family was there the next boat over when they brought the bell up as an emotional moment.

01:22:37
Speaker 1: Fourth, Yeah, I’ve seen that stuff from that.

01:22:39
Speaker 2: And they put other bell down there.

01:22:41
Speaker 1: And there’s no like from what you know, there’s been like like you didn’t experience any kind of concerted pushback from families not wanting you to tell this story and investigate individuals or were some people unhappy not with me?

01:23:01
Speaker 2: And so far knock on wood is for mic or whatever you get. No, I think it’s a bamboo. I involve the families, and I also do something that most journalists don’t. If I’m talking to Brody or Steven, I said, we’re gonna talk freely. I’ll send you your quotes you’ll fix them as we need to. Uh, you have you have a right, I believe to be quoted accurately, and that way you build trust. Certainly it takes longer, but you always get more than you think that way. Once it is where you’re going, people will usually own their opinions. It’s beening misquoted that I fear I get misquoted. You get misquoted. I’m sure of it.

01:23:37
Speaker 1: Dude. It’s to the point where like it’s painful to it’s painful to participate in anything with journalists. It’s and I got friends that just that don’t.

01:23:47
Speaker 2: I can’t blame you in many cases I’m a journalist. Why because they’re twenty five year old kids who I mean budget cuts.

01:23:53
Speaker 1: Because they already know, Like, dude, they already know what they want you to say.

01:23:57
Speaker 2: That’s the that’s the crap I hate.

01:23:58
Speaker 1: Like they need the quote they need and then they call you for the thing and you say, you know what, there’s so much more to it. Let me explain. They don’t want that, and then you’re like, you know, here’s the thing you want, but you really need to understand, and then it’s just the thing they want.

01:24:14
Speaker 2: I’ve seen it in hockey locker rooms and football locker rooms exactly. Asked the guy the same question three or four times, and I hate that kind of journalism. One of my bosses once asked me, I was doing a story in the Potawata me try basketball team at Escanaba, Michigan. They played away games in Beaver Island and Macin Island because the casinos they get a little plane. So that’s pretty cool. And my guy asked me. My editor said, what’s your angle? I said, I got no idea. I haven’t met anybody, I’ve not seen the place. I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. I got a lot of questions, all right, I have no idea. So you go. And that’s what you guys did here in this interview. You go where the interview goes. Don’t just have your questions and force it. You get crappy interviews. You want a conversation. It’s exactly what you guys are doing here. And yes, so I get nervous about that. So with these guys, I mean, we talked ten, fifteen, twenty times and to make sure that any scene involving them was accurate. And it’s also scary how many things I’m talking to you. I’m writing it down things I got wrong or maybe they said them wrong, but I probably got it wrong. I mean, you cover yourself that way. If some jackass in California says your book sucks on Amazon, I’m not happy about it, but it’s gonna happen. Already has we’re getting four point seven. But there’s joye of jackass in California. You know that guy exactly who knows more about the book than I do. So all right, pale whatever, and didn’t sign his name naturally, he’s pretty tough until he’s time to sign your name. But whatever, keyboard collage as we call them. But but what I can have is somebody who’s in the book telling me I got it wrong in writed a book on your podcast.

01:25:44
Speaker 1: All right.

01:25:44
Speaker 2: You know what I can have happened is Krin says you got it wrong. You say I got it wrong, then I got it wrong. So I’ve never in fourteen books had anyone say misquoted, out of context, inaccurate, any of that. So these the people, I’m not trying to panner to them and writing the book. I mean, there’s still tough things book, no question about it. But it’s accurate and it’s fair, and those people, I mean, they trusted me, and I appreciate it without them as not a book.

01:26:10
Speaker 6: Did they feel like.

01:26:13
Speaker 5: They I mean, I assume that their feelings over time changed, you know, throughout the writing process, but did they feel like they’d never had a voice before. I mean, I that’s really good because it is. It is one of these things where it’s a line and a song to most people, right, And I imagine it’s tough to open up about tragedy. But at the same time, like this story hasn’t been there, their story hasn’t been told, and so there’s there’s sort of a tension there between.

01:26:46
Speaker 2: That’s well said and good insight. Six crew members we’ve never been talked to before. We’ve been in the shit beforehand. Half the families I got to the twenty nine fourteen I have some voice in here, and they did kind of say that that we’ve been holding us back because we’re afraid you’ll get screwed up this. I mean, I interview you know, rich, famous athletes and coaches. They get quitted all the time. They don’t care all that much, and it’s irritating to you and me a little bit, But so what I’ll get over it. This is their one chance, you know, this is these are people who are not rich, not famous, and this is the one chance to tell their dad story in many cases. So yes, there was, and the Grifters have come and gone. Bruce Lyn again is my key there? And now we got to know them. I’ve known for three and a half years now. So now when I see them in Milwaukee or Grand Rapids, Michigan or whatever, I get big hugs and they’re crying and all this. So that’s how that one works.

01:27:37
Speaker 3: So you you mentioned like we wouldn’t be sitting here were it not for the song. Yes, And later on you mentioned there’s like some local news coverage. What was like the national awareness of this thing when it happened.

01:27:52
Speaker 2: That surprised me actually, and uh, there’s far more than I thought.

01:27:59
Speaker 1: Oh okay, here was a national news story.

01:28:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I wasn’t sure about that one. I when when you pitch a book proposal to New York. By the way, I spent six months on this one. That’s unusually long. Usual about two months, you write about fifty pages, you sent it out there. You’re kind of like a geologist telling show oil I swear to God there’s oil in my land. I swear to God, just give me some money.

01:28:17
Speaker 6: Now, I’m going to show him what the time said about.

01:28:19
Speaker 2: It, exactly right, exactly So then they call your bluff and say, you know what, here’s some money, take some tame, go find the oil. And you go, oh crap, they’re better be oiled down that And I kept on getting lucky more luck. I’m working out it not recently, obviously, shame on, maybe not en off hockey these days, but I’m working out about about a year and a half ago or so. And a buddy of mine, Larry Lage, who does associated press for the State of Michigan, covers all sports. We’ve been friends forever, and he says, you know, Harry Atkins wrote the first story on the Mphis Gerald. Harry Atkins had his job doing sports before him thirty years ap sports writer. I’ve been sitting next to Harry in the damn press box for decades. I had no idea. Usually he goes up that night with the crazy photographer. They get a plane in the wind, they do Walla and he does a wonderful job. And he still had a copy. He’s still alive. He’s eighty four, he’s still sharp. Gave me an original copy computer print out of that thing from seventy five and without a cell phone, without internet.

01:29:16
Speaker 1: That I picked up on the wires and sixty.

01:29:18
Speaker 2: Five hundred newspapers around the world, including La Where Life it was that day or the next day whatever. He gets that Newsweek magazine picks it up two weeks later. He needed a beautiful job. His name is Jim Gaines. He went to the University of Michigan. We got mutual friends in common. He’s still alive, he’s still sharp, lucky as hell, and his story was so good that five or six lines in the song are from his article, which I lay out in the two article two articles, two chapters, third or Now and the Rolling Stone. Let’s do the damn song. We might as well do it now. He got asked about the song people obviously, so. Gordon Lefett is an experienced sailor. He did the port heuron to sal to Macinaw Race. I’ve done that right. This is like three days. It’s brutal. You think it’s oh, let’s go sailing. Nah, it’s freezing your cold. It’s miserable. But he’s a really good sailor, and he’s serious about it. On November tenth, nineteen seventy five, Monday night, he is working on a song in his attic in Toronto, and it’s an Irish Sea shanty, the earliest song he can remember when he’s three and a half years old. And he’s obviously changing it, but he’s working on this. He goes down to get some coffee. It’s ten o’clock at night and the wind is howling in Toronto also and he said he had the explicit thought it must be hell on superior to night. He was connected at that moment. I mean he knew that these guys are going through. That’s where the spirit comes from. He starts working on the song, doesn’t play for anybody. It’s too self conscious. The reason I was a lot of ways to screw this up. Remember Body Heat. By the way, if not seeing this movie, people go see it. It’s like forty years old now. Launched Kathleen Turner and Mickey Rourke and William Hurt and at some point William Hurt’s character, a lawyer, wants to blow up his girlfriend’s husband. Bad idea and one of his repeat fellon bombers. Basically just teach him how to do it. And finally Mickey Yorke says, hey, man, do you have any FN idea? I can probably swear in your thing, can’t I Just there you go, you have any FN idea? What the hell you’re doing? Because if you’re a genius, you can think of fifty ways to can go wrong, and you ain’t n fing genius. You can think of twenty five. And that’s how I felt about the book. There are there are fifty ways to screw this up, and I might be able to think of twenty five. So and that’s not how he felt. And I knew exactly how.

01:31:26
Speaker 1: He made one. He made one mistake. He oh, he made a couple mistakes. There’s some ad there’s some like assumptions about what the cook said, and he says, and he couldn’t do Toledo, right, good, Toledo left fully loaded for Cleveland because he doesn’t. Yeah, couldn’t make Toledo.

01:31:44
Speaker 2: That was ar tisic license on that one. But everything else, I mean, twenty six thousand tons, all this stuff.

01:31:49
Speaker 1: The ship was the prior to the American side. I didn’t know that was actually I didn’t know that that was actually a nickname for the Edmunds.

01:31:54
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and these guys, the guys I talked to the sailors. He said, this guy nailed it. Family that he nailed.

01:32:00
Speaker 1: It in his description of the lakes, like because I grew up on Lake Michigan. Lake Michigan steams like young.

01:32:04
Speaker 2: Man’s dreams, the islands sportsman, and they are that’s where you learn how to fish, right, I mean in Miskegan Bay and all that.

01:32:13
Speaker 6: So what was the family’s reception to the song?

01:32:20
Speaker 2: Well before that? So he’s gonna record his new album in March of seventy six, about five months later, and they got eleven songs lined up, not this one. That’s when he’s convinced he’s not ready. He’s not played for anybody. So but each day after they do their songs, he’s screwing around with this and his guitar. They’re a tight band. After three and a f days, they got five days rented in the studio, three and f days, they’re done. And that’s how tight they are. He says, Okay, you know, gentlemen, good job, let’s go. They’re literally packing up their guitars and their instruments, and then the producer on the piegis on the PA says, why don’t you try that song you’ve been screwing around with? And he says it’s not ready. It’s not ready, it’s not ready. And he says, look, dude, I’m charging you for five days whether you play a damn thing or not. So I’m here now, the band is here, why not give it a shot. So he gets talked into it, and he finally says okay. So he says he asks him to turn the lights down, and he’s quiet for like a minute. The drummer, Barry Keen still alive, and so is the bass player, God bless him both. He’s there. He says, what do you want me to do? He’s never heard the song. He says, when I want you to come in, I’ll give you a nod. Okay, So he’s going a minute and thirty on the song. That’s where songs end in seventy five seventy six, and Barry thinks that, okay, you’ve forgotten all about me. Nope. At one thirty four, he leans over, he looks over and gives him a nod. That’s when he comes in with a thunder and lightning, you know that part, and he just makes it up in the spot and then you just keep going. After six and a half minutes, which is three times longer than a normal song, they finished and they go, that wasn’t half bad. But he’s a perfectionist. Life it is, So let’s try it again, not as good, Try it again, not as three more times, four more times. That afternoon. They come back the next day for this one song, not as good, not as good, not as good, all day long, and finally they picked the song You Hear in the Radio. It’s not a first take. The song You Hear in the Radio is the first time the band ever played it. And as Barry Keen, he.

01:34:13
Speaker 1: Never hit that emotion again.

01:34:15
Speaker 2: Man, that’s you guys are brilliant. That’s exactly it. Barry Keen. He’s been on fed albums for all kinds of.

01:34:20
Speaker 1: Can you ever hear the Dandy Warhol’s cover it?

01:34:23
Speaker 2: Oh yes I have? And Billy Strings by the way, Billy Strings got a new version up from Traverse City, Michigan. It does a brilliant job.

01:34:29
Speaker 1: He does. Yeah, the Dandy Warhol’s kind of phoned it in a little bit. Yeah, they’re big drug takers.

01:34:36
Speaker 2: Agus say about that his throwing stick. So is Gordon Lightfoot.

01:34:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, he had a little problem.

01:34:41
Speaker 2: He got clean around nineteen eighty or eighty one, so that’s.

01:34:44
Speaker 1: When the Dandy Warhols were getting born.

01:34:46
Speaker 2: There you go, but uh, probably true too, we’re around that. So Barry Keane tells me, look, man, first takes happen once in a blue moon. First first me ever played it. He goes, never ever, ever, ever, said I’m willing to bet never in the history of rock and roll recording. And I asked him why and exactly where you’re going Steven, He said, this is not a song. You think your way through this song. You either feel it or you don’t. If you feel it, the technical stuff doesn’t matter, you feel it. That’s the spirit they got to hear. So song comes out. They’re on the Midnight Special, the old Friday Night concert Show. You’re allowed to play six songs, and they don’t pick this one because they think there’s no wa in hell that’s gonna work. And this song ends up being number two in nineteen seventy six, behind Rod Stewart’s Tonight’s to Night with his hot girlfriend ritt Eklan cooing in the background. That’s the seventies man that’s the me generation. This song is the opposite.

01:35:37
Speaker 1: He’s got a couple, he’s got a couple good cuts, though, Man, there’s no question reason to believe.

01:35:42
Speaker 2: And then when you get the mandolin and all that, that’s good stuff. But the point is this, yeah, exactly, Yeah, it’s not that that one. That’s the mandolin, I guess like that. But anyway, uh, but the families, they played at all the reunions, they played for the grand kids whove never met the grandfather.

01:36:03
Speaker 1: Oh they yeah, wow.

01:36:04
Speaker 2: And Cindy Reynolds, the mother of Bruce Hudson’s child, she said, to this day it comes on the radio, I pull off and I cry. Really and that’s that’s your best review right there. And life became great. Friends of the families. He’s a hero in this book. He’s given money for scholarships in Traverse City with the Great Lakes May Time.

01:36:23
Speaker 1: I saw him play in Travers City once there.

01:36:25
Speaker 2: You go scholarships in his name the Marytime Academy. Ruth Hudson is on her deathbed on November ninth, twenty fifteen. November nine, yes, this is the day before the fortieth anniversary, and Gordon Leiffett goes to white fish point, not to play, just to pay his respects to these handful of families. That’s what I mean. Way out of the way obviously. And he asked Pam, where’s aunt Ruth, And she’s on her deathbed, give me a phone, And that picture’s in the book of him in the kitchen on the phone talking to Ruth hu Hudson und her deathbed, and she said, I promised Bruce I would be in heaven with him for the fortith Anniversary’s been a lot too long. And that was her last phone call. And she gets off the phone and tells her tells the mom she’s the child, and she said, I was talking to Gordon because that’s how close they were. So he’s a hero in this book.

01:37:14
Speaker 1: Man, I got to just hit you with something totally unrelated but a little bit kind of similar, you know. And Neil Young’s Old Man, the Pedal Steel.

01:37:21
Speaker 2: It’s in the book, was because David Cowboy Rice Weiss was on a date with another Cindy and they’re playing Neil Young’s one of his albums and that song is on it. Oh old Man.

01:37:33
Speaker 1: So they had a dude come in, They had a studio guy come in to do the pedal steel on Old Man, which is great. Well, he just was warming up and they had some tracks to him warming up and that’s what they plugged into the tune. And my understanding, I could be wrong. My understanding, they don’t know who the hell it was. Wow, I don’t know if that’s true, but.

01:37:50
Speaker 2: Trust me, the stars are about the seventies in rock and roll. Yeah, it was true.

01:37:55
Speaker 1: What are you gonna write next? You know?

01:37:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don’t know yet. There’s a few good options out there.

01:38:00
Speaker 1: Come work for me and Randall were in need of.

01:38:03
Speaker 2: We’re in need of a writer.

01:38:06
Speaker 1: History.

01:38:07
Speaker 2: Careful what you wish.

01:38:08
Speaker 6: For project, as long as you maintained the compliments, you know.

01:38:15
Speaker 2: Hey, they’re an easily profit trust me. Look, you know very quick when people know what they’re talking about when they don’t. When you do these things, and it’s like when people call it you have you ever heard my podcast or not? You can tell pretty quickly. So you guys, man, I never had an interview like this. Twenty terms not defined at this table that I have to explain everything normally.

01:38:35
Speaker 1: But what kind of book are you going to do next? Sports?

01:38:38
Speaker 2: No, not sports? Probably do there are for your other Midwestern disasters. Sadly, then I know about that. I’ll probably dive back into those. This one. We’re dealing with movie rights. Now we’ll talk about that.

01:38:48
Speaker 1: Sure, Man, how I was going to ask you that, but that I didn’t ask I get too jealous.

01:38:52
Speaker 2: Well there you go. Don’t don’t get jealous yet, trust me, and.

01:38:55
Speaker 1: Plus text me when I should get jealous, I’ll let you know. Just text me a Jay.

01:39:00
Speaker 2: That awesome means, dude, Jay, sit with that for a little while. As they said in Casablanca, Humphy vog, that’s gonna be the start of a great franchise. Classic ending scene.

01:39:19
Speaker 1: So a Midwest disaster, because but you don’t want to wind up that. They’re like, you know, the great Midwestern disaster writer.

01:39:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, you want to be that guy, right, Oh, no, Bacon’s coming. That’s something bad you don’t want Exactly.

01:39:33
Speaker 1: I don’t want to wind up one of his books.

01:39:35
Speaker 2: So that’s a possibility, the Great Halifax explosion. Talking to Hollywood about that for a possible five part TV series. Previous book let them lead about coaching my old high school hockey team in ann Arbor and we’re Huron river Rats. I’m not making that up. For some reason, we’re the only high school in America name their team the river Rats. Go figure on that one. That’s a good one. So but uh, worst than in America. Coach by the worst player in school history. Yours truly, I stild record for the most games and here on uniform eighty six. I played all three years, played every game with the fewest goals zero and I played forward.

01:40:12
Speaker 1: So you’re gonna do You’re gonna do a book like How I Did It?

01:40:14
Speaker 2: No, did that book? It’s in this fifth Praying, but we’re in a third draft with Disney.

01:40:19
Speaker 6: Plus it’s another Midwestern disaster story.

01:40:21
Speaker 2: And Miskegan’s in it. Miskegan makes an appearance. So yes, so doing all that stuff first, they don’t get back to a book.

01:40:27
Speaker 1: So like disasters like the Edmond Fitzgerald or your hockey worse my hockey career.

01:40:33
Speaker 2: It’s actually it’s a family record. Actually hold out with my brother here is also on the team. He also failed to score. I’m gonna throw his ass under the bus right now. He likes to point out that he played goalie, but hey, we all got problems, you know, so he didn’t score goal either.

01:40:48
Speaker 5: Well, if you have any if you have any saying the casting for this and they’re looking for a Bruce Hudson type.

01:40:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, you’re thinking, let me know, Randall’s the guy. Yeah, you can see how buff Bruce.

01:41:00
Speaker 1: By the way, Randall, instead of sending me one letter, send him to and it’s no hot dogs and you’ll know to get ready.

01:41:09
Speaker 2: H twelve months good news and bad news. Good news as you got the parts.

01:41:16
Speaker 1: Well, let me remind you of grow the hair out the more Randall. There’s there’s more to it than the hair.

01:41:25
Speaker 2: But I don’t mean to make a light of Bruce Hudson, obviously, but Pam did say she’s about four or five years younger than Bruce, her cousin, and she saw him every day. She said, whenever Bruce came over, all her little twel year old girlfriends all came over.

01:41:37
Speaker 1: To So listen. I’m very I’m very comfortable and with.

01:41:43
Speaker 2: Your sexuality, I landed very comfortable.

01:41:47
Speaker 1: Bruce is a striking man.

01:41:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, striking.

01:41:50
Speaker 1: He’s a striking man. Like that him. The photo of the guys at the wedding, it’s heartbreaking.

01:42:00
Speaker 2: Their human games.

01:42:00
Speaker 1: Never seen the pictures. Man, I don’t like. I don’t get it. Well, I do get it. But I mean it’s just like it’s like anything you just put and you’re like, shit, man, he’s like guys, like it looks like pictures of like just people from around when I was growing.

01:42:13
Speaker 5: I was gonna say, my parents were born on either end of nineteen fifty by a couple of years, and this just looks like every photo that they have from their wedding, wedding that they went to that’s.

01:42:25
Speaker 2: Exactly, and then their old Kodak photos little Granny.

01:42:29
Speaker 1: It was back in that era. Those weddings would have been when you would take those little mints and cocktail peanuts and time up in a spawn sack. Yeah, and had a dollar dance.

01:42:38
Speaker 2: There’s a classic for you.

01:42:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, was a photo of uh, some.

01:42:42
Speaker 2: Of these guys at a wedding by the second Batch photos. And yeah, the guy’s best man went down with the ship. That’s what happened. So as far as Hollywood goes, don’t be too jealous yet. So the guy I’m writing the hockey story with Jim Bernstein, he did Mighty Ducks, he did Renaissance Man’s Mothers, and I’ve done about I don’t know, seven or eight trips out of Hoighwood for various books. These Hollywood meetings have you had? Have you had Howard meetings yet?

01:43:06
Speaker 1: Let’s let’s have another podcast discussion about this. Sometimes but you’re not better. But anyway, it’s like the first early on it would be that here’s people that aren’t they’re kind of like they’re come in and mind you for what’s going on in your neck of a woods.

01:43:23
Speaker 2: They want your knowledge without paying.

01:43:25
Speaker 1: It because they’re like they’re not out and about and they’re like, so, what kind of things are you in? And you’ll be like, oh, you know about this, you know about that, you know about this, you know about that, And then later you learned this to shut up.

01:43:34
Speaker 2: Right, you just fuked over with the store. Basically, So these meetings in Hollywood a KOBOOKI theater, So they that probably.

01:43:43
Speaker 6: Has not been used in this Maybe.

01:43:47
Speaker 1: I don’t know what it meant.

01:43:48
Speaker 2: It means it’s kabook. It’s all been rehearsed. It’s like you think you’re doing a pitch, but you’re really not. So they always meetings at ten o’clock. Are it’s going to be as ten oh five maybe ten to ten. How late the make you wait? As one indicator who shows up. Martin campbellsh up from one of my meetings. He’s the director of Casino Royale and Zoro. Okay, that’s a big boy meeting or the intern, right. And the quality of the water they give you, if they get the fancy, you know, the best ballatle stuff, that’s one thing. If the interests given you a side from a cup of tapwater, you’re just practicing. What about the middle ground, We gave you a nice glass. You’re not Hollywood. I’m in Montana. I am in Bozeman, Montana. So Burnston told me. They said they liked it, they hated it. They say they loved it. They liked it if they actually paid you, they loved it. There’s not one out of Hollywood, one out of love in Hollywood. And the check clears. If you guys say let’s do lunch, we eat this actual food as just bs in Hollywood, that’s how you say goodbye.

01:44:43
Speaker 1: I believe that this. I don’t even want to say the name, but I have to because he’s such a controversial character. The Congress. He said a shift a senator or Congressman California, Adam Schiff.

01:44:54
Speaker 2: He’s a senator now from California, I believe he was a screenwriter. Do you know that I did not know that he had written some screenplays.

01:45:00
Speaker 1: I think that it was Shift.

01:45:01
Speaker 2: I’m sure shocking up, back up, I’ve written some screenplay. Don’t make me a damn screenwriter? Was?

01:45:07
Speaker 1: I know it was Shift? Adam Schiff had a quote from his old days. He said, he said, there are two answers in Hollywood. Yes, and here’s a check.

01:45:21
Speaker 2: How about this.

01:45:22
Speaker 1: I keep getting you and you get to the meaning. They go, No, we love it.

01:45:30
Speaker 2: This is great exactly.

01:45:31
Speaker 1: Oh, we’re gonna get a hold of you know, we’ll call you. Yeah, this is the last we’re gonna end the podcast. I might to give this last bit of advice. This is a career advice for people. If you get into this world, this business, books and all that, and you do these and you do Hollywood meetings, here’s how you end them. Well, let me preface this. Last night, my Boddy had to call my boy had to call my body to ask a favor. I said to him, I’m gonna give you a pointer. I want you to ask the favor. I don’t want you to push for an answer. I want you to then say, give it some thought and text me, and I said, that’s how I want you to end the call. Okay, you’re not after an answer, give it some thought and text me when you have a Hollywood meeting. End it by saying, thanks for the time. Here’s what I’d like you to do. Get with your guys, think about it, and just give me a shout and just that’s it.

01:46:26
Speaker 2: You know what.

01:46:27
Speaker 1: That’s it I’m because and saves them going like, oh, it’s fantastic, we’re so excited.

01:46:32
Speaker 2: Do you know what I mean? Perhaps you’ve seen that before I did.

01:46:44
Speaker 1: And just leave it. Leave it you think about it, Get with your guys.

01:46:49
Speaker 5: Just let me not say I’m gonna end my next performance review here.

01:46:52
Speaker 1: I think.

01:46:55
Speaker 2: This is how I think I’ve done. You think about that. I’ll tell you what when you’re ready. You know that’s right next year, the year after that.

01:47:05
Speaker 1: Don’t rush yourself and then you hang up and it just never happened.

01:47:08
Speaker 2: Look, and that way, you’ve maintained your own dignity at least. Yeah, I’ll tell you what. I’m all in twenty. My way.

01:47:17
Speaker 1: Your way is like sign this sign.

01:47:22
Speaker 2: Oh we love it, we love it.

01:47:23
Speaker 1: Now you don’t, all right, ladies and gentlemen, The Gails of November, The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John you Bacon, New York Times best selling author. Dude, that that was a lot of fun. I’m glad you came. It’s such a dude, I can’t wait to read it. I’m in a little streak where I’m talking to writers. I haven’t read the damn bookship. I’m a little behind on them.

01:47:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know you’re talking about that’s all I care about it. That’s big and like I.

01:47:51
Speaker 1: Said earlier, people don’t think about that.

01:47:53
Speaker 2: You don’t have to read my book. You gotta buy it.

01:47:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, by that of course, but it’s about.

01:47:59
Speaker 2: The family, is uh No. This has, when I swear to God, probably the best interview I’ve done so far.

01:48:05
Speaker 1: You know, when you feel the book, it feels good.

01:48:06
Speaker 2: Man, it’s a heavy book.

01:48:08
Speaker 1: It’s like it feels too much.

01:48:09
Speaker 5: Much like Hampton Side blurbed your book, you should blurb this podcast.

01:48:15
Speaker 2: I mean, I’d be happy to give you a shock in the good endorsement for my guy doesn’t hunt or fish.

01:48:22
Speaker 1: No, you just feel it.

01:48:23
Speaker 2: I don’t know how they’re talking about normally, but when I’m on there were great. Everyone says I got to do it, and they’re right. This has been fantastic.

01:48:32
Speaker 1: When you get another, uh, you know, whatever you do for your next book, just make just check them me and make sure it fits.

01:48:38
Speaker 2: YEA. We wedge a lot of.

01:48:42
Speaker 1: Even if I’m interested, Like if you do a book about the mob or something, I’d be like, that’s cool. But I can’t wedge it in. Right, But this has got like bad weather ships.

01:48:49
Speaker 2: Bad weather ships, sailors, all that good stuff, badge lee see free board things. I did not explain broadside waves. I mean I can get ten don’t even this.

01:49:00
Speaker 1: I don’t need to wedge it. And I can put this book in like this.

01:49:02
Speaker 6: That’s how it feels, right Sideway seventy five ft wy.

01:49:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s right. And it’s John Youbacon dot com at the website book tours on there all that stuff.

01:49:10
Speaker 1: Oh, I got one last tip for you. When you talk to you know what they should have done. They should have made this book the proportions so it’s like a big tall skin.

01:49:21
Speaker 5: I’ve heard that’s the next that’s next book publishing two and a half inches.

01:49:27
Speaker 1: Big tall book. Man.

01:49:31
Speaker 2: Well, let me explain.

01:49:33
Speaker 1: They shipping the gun. They shipping the gun box.

01:49:35
Speaker 2: That’s right. Take that book into a bathtub. No, no follow me here, turn that thing around.

01:49:43
Speaker 1: John you Bacon, Thanks again, man.

01:49:45
Speaker 2: Thank you for real pleasure. Truly