News 8 is producing a series of stories that will be published in the days leading up to Nov. 10, the 50th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. It will culminate with a WOOD TV+ special called: “The Fitz: 50 Years Later.” That will air at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Monday.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — More than 500 shipwrecks are believed to lay on the floor of Lake Superior, but none of their stories gripped the American consciousness like the tale of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
All 29 men on board were lost when the seemingly indestructible freighter sunk without an SOS call in a brutal November storm on Nov. 10, 1975. The shock, along with Gordon Lightfoot’s haunting lyrics in his song about the wreck, cemented its legacy as one of the Great Lakes’ biggest tragedies.
The mystery of the Edmund Fitzgerald: The freighter’s fateful night
Each year on Nov. 10, family members and well-wishers gather to honor the crew of the Fitz with a bell ceremony, rung with the doomed freighter’s actual bell. It is one of just a handful of the ship’s remnants to be pulled from the lake and the only one salvaged from the lakebed wreckage itself…