Hello, everyone, and welcome to this introduction to this week's podcast.

Really, really, really interesting.

John Bacon, who lives in Ann Arbor, the author of 14 books, the most recent of which is about the Edmund Fitzgerald.

You know, the ship that was hauling taconite, that is iron ore pellets, from Duluth to Detroit, through the Great Lakes, through Lake Superior, and which sank mysteriously in a gigantic storm on November 10, 1975.

And he's just written a book for the 50th anniversary

of this extraordinary event in American history,

and he was utterly fascinating.

So nobody is to this day quite sure what happened,

but his view is that it actually did the 700 plus foot ship, the largest of the great steel freighters of that era, like the queen of Lake Superior, largest, most impressive, most luxurious, if you can call a ship that hauls,

you know, 26 tons of iron ore pellets, luxurious, but great amenities, and including for

celebrities, not celebrities, but prominent people in the industry are friends of the captain

or whatever who would come along and they had the

best accommodations within this steel pellet ship that were available at the time.

And it sank.

And so one theory is that there was mismanagement.

Another is that the ship had structural weaknesses that had been accumulating, but there's no sense that it was captain's error or captain's hubris.

And I said to him early on, would we be talking about this without Gordon Lightfoot's famous song on the Edward Fitzgerald. They said, absolutely not. You know, as these things go, there had been thousands of other

industrial commercial ships that had gone down in the Great Lakes, maybe up to 10,000.

Most of them are utterly unknown. A handful are, you handful are footnotes to history.

But this one is like the second most famous sinking after the Titanic for most Americans.

And it was a really extraordinary interview about something I did not know that much about.

You know, you have that sort of sense in your mind

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