Family members of crew who perished when the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald sank 50 years ago in Lake Superior were among hundreds gathered at Mariners’ Church of Detroit on Sunday, Nov. 9, to commemorate the shipwreck immortalized in a Gordon Lightfoot song.
The standing-room only crowd spilled beyond the pews of the church overlooking the Detroit River and into an entryway. A bell rang out 29 times in honor of each of those lost — an annual tradition inadvertently started by the church’s late rector, who attracted the attention of puzzled reporters when he rang an approximately 45-minute death knell the morning after the Nov. 10, 1975, wreck of the lake freighter.
John O’Brien, 67, rang the bell once on Sunday for his father, Eugene O’Brien — a wheelsman on the ship from Toledo. O’Brien flew to the ceremony from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with his three adult daughters and an 18-month-old granddaughter.
“It’s emotional,” he told the Free Press. “I never had the closure.”
O’Brien’s father had been a sailor for more than 30 years by the time he got the job steering the Fitzgerald – a coveted gig due to the ship’s modernity, size, and esteemed captain, O’Brien said.
His father “knew the risk of being on the water, but it’s what he chose, it’s what he liked, he was very popular on the boat … it’s just what he was good at,” O’Brien said.
O’Brien grew up visiting his father on the Fitzgerald when it would dock near Toledo. He recalled him as an avid, virtually impossible-to-beat card player who earned the nickname “the Great Lakes gambler.”
When the ship sank in 1975, the younger O’Brien was 17 and away from home for his first semester of college.
“A police officer knocked on my door and I remember thinking — what have I done?,” O’Brien said. “He told me to call my mother … She said, ‘You need to come home, your father’s boat went missing.’
“It was kind of shocking, it takes a while to absorb all that … you’re hoping he’s going to show up one day … as you figure it out better, you know more information – nobody’s showing up, but that’s what you’re hoping for.”
In Detroit, then Mariners’ Church pastor Richard Ingalls got news of the wreck from Bob Lee, then curator at the Dossin Great Lakes Museum on Belle Isle, according to Ingalls’ daughter, Bette Wisniowiecki.
Lee had a ship-to-shore radio and had been hearing calls of trouble from the Fitzgerald and another ship battling a Lake Superior storm the evening of Nov. 10. Ingalls had been on the phone with Lee throughout the night until finally Lee called back to report the ship was gone.
The next morning, around 6 a.m., Wisniowiecki said her father woke up and instinctively got dressed and headed to the church to ring the bell 29 times.
“It’s what he had to do,” she said. “He knew he needed to do something, and that he could do.”
After the ringing, Ingalls went into the church nave to pray, Wisniowiecki said. By the time he looked up, more than a dozen reporters had gathered to ask about the lengthy bell knell. A wire service reporter among them disseminated news of the bell-ringing beyond Michigan, Wisniowiecki said, and an annual tradition was born.
Wisniowiecki, of Grosse Pointe, now carries on her father’s legacy as a bell ringer commemorating the Edmund Fitzgerald.
“I think it’s wonderful, because the families, they didn’t know anything, and they still really don’t – it’s all conjecture,” she said. “And I think it’s lovely that you remember these men and their sacrifice, their families — and it seems to resonate with the community. It kind of does something to soothe your soul to be here.”
Sally Searle, 67, of Algonac, also rang a bell — for Frederick J. Beetcher, of Superior, Wis., who was a porter on the ship.
Like Wisniowiecki, Searle was picking up the tradition of her father, who came to Mariners’ Church each year as a Fitzgerald bell ringer until he died in 2005. Searle said her father took pride in the role and was buried in the suit he rang the bell in.
Sunday was Searle’s first bell-ringing.
“I felt my dad’s presence,” she said. “I was truly honored — it was something else.”
O’Brien, for his part, said he wished his card-playing father could see him now — as the successful owner of what he said are 26 businesses.
“From the time I was three, four, five years old — we were doing math, doing multiplication,” he said. “I’m a numbers guy now. If a business makes sense to buy, I buy it, if it doesn’t, I don’t.”
The crowd packed the church Sunday despite the city’s first snow of the season and near-freezing temperatures.
“This is a world of storms,” the Rev. Todd A. Meyer said in his sermon. “It’s very fitting that it’s snowing outside and that a ship got stuck in the mud not a thousand feet from here this weekend.
“This does not mean that God is not in control,” he added. “It simply means that God, who created this world, has not fully redeemed it yet.”
Violet Ikonomova is a reporter at the Detroit Free Press. Contact her at vikonomova@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: 50 years on, families of Fitzgerald crew find solace in Detroit bell-ringing tribute
Reporting by Violet Ikonomova, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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