This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories.

And on this day in history, in 1975, the Edmund Fitzgerald sank. Most of us, by the way,

know about this wreck because of the Gordon Lightfoot, hit single, the wreck of the Edmund

Fitzgerald. But this story is more than a mere song. Today we're joined by Rick Mixter, who knows

this story firsthand. He's been down to the wreck. Here's our own

Monty Montgomery with his story. When we think of the word lake, we often think of a calm,

placid, and small body of water, but the Great Lakes are anything but that.

People underestimate them. You know, literally, they think they're ponds. They think that they're, you know, they're much smaller than the ocean.

And the truth is that the Great Lakes span over a thousand miles. You know, Lake Superior is immense.

And unfortunately, it has these jagged shoals that, unlike the ocean, it's confined.

So these shoals bounce waves back and forth and these confused waves on the Great Lakes

tend to really mess with ships and make it very difficult to navigate in a storm.

And the results of these confused seas have often been deadly.

There's a huge argument on how many shipwrecks are on the Great Lakes because it's really hard to judge. Most of the time we would put it to, you know, insurance settlements. Let's look

at Lloyd's of London or other places that paid out, but we don't

know if they were recovered. If you said on the bottom, most people would probably throw out a number

between 6,000 and 10,000 shipwrecks that are still on the bottom. But out of all these shipwrecks,

there's one that has been etched into the collective consciousness of the people of the Great Lakes,

the Edmund Fitzgerald.

And there's a reason for that.

Fitzgerald is famous for two words, Gordon Lightfoot.

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