The ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a Lake Superior gale on Nov. 10, 1975. All 29 crew members perished. (image from Minnesota Historical Society)
Lake Superior took Amy Kalmon’s father from her 25 years ago today. It took Cheryl Rozman’s, too. Kalmon was 15, Rozman was 28.
A teenager, a young mother. Two daughters, two separate lives. One lake, one shipwreck — 25 years of grief and healing, of setbacks and steps forward.
On Nov. 10, 1975, the laker Edmund Fitzgerald sunk in a ferocious gale 17 miles northwest of Whitefish Point. The remains of the 29 crewmen, including nine from the Northland, are entombed in the broken ship 530 feet below the surface.
Kalmon and Rozman are among the daughters and sons, the wives, the brothers, sisters, fathers and mothers of the Fitzgerald crew. They are bound by tragedy.
“We’ve all got the same thing in common. We have a bond,” said Cheryl Rozman, whose father, Ransom Cundy, lived in Superior with his second wife., Doreen, at the time of his death.
News shatters routines
Rozman remembers sending her kids off to school the morning after the sketchy news accounts, turning on the television and getting confirmation: The Fitz was missing, her father was dead. “That whole day, I was pretty much a zombie,” she says.
Kalmon also remembers being up, watching television. Her brother, Bruce, also recalls being there, she says. The news of the Fitzgerald came on. They woke up their mother. The next morning, despite getting confirmation of the sinking, they all went to school, where Kalmon’s mother also worked.
“I remember being in geography class and feeling like I had this bubble around me,” Kalmon says. “I couldn’t focus beyond six inches in front of me.”
Soon, the outpouring of grief and condolences from church and community came. Kalmon remembers the warm hugs of her extended family at memorial services.
Later, family members who sued the Fitzgerald’s operator, the Columbia Transportation division of Oglebay Norton, received private, out-of-court settlements.
Touching the lake
The years, the decades, have passed but the pain has lingered. And family members have adopted different ways of coping.
Some have simply tried to forget and move on — a difficult prospect, for sure, when Great Lakes gift shops and art galleries are full of Fitzgerald memorabilia, when Gordon Lightfoot’s song still pops up on the radio when the media won’t let an anniversary pass without notice. Then there have been the dives to the wrecks — some handled with sensitivity, but one with titillating video of a crewman’s unidentifiable corpse. The numerous books. The talk of feature-length movies.
Some have chosen to move away from Lake Superior and drop out of sight. Others have faced it and the tragedy directly.
Kalmon hasn’t taken part in most of the memorial services or commemorations. When she misses her father, she touches the lake.
“I’ll go down and dip my hand in the water and feel better,” says Kalmon, an artist who lives in Ashland. “It’s mattered a lot to me that I live near the lake. Not because that’s his grave, but because he loved the lake. He loved to fish, and he loved being on that ship.”
Kalmon did attend a ceremony in which the Fitzgerald’s bell, retrieved in a joint U.S.-Canadian dive in 1995, was dedicated at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Point.
The idea was to create a tangible memorial to the crew. That’s something Kalmon says she hasn’t needed.
“To me, the lake is pretty much my dad’s tombstone,” Kalmon said. “It seemed like some family members really needed it to go to. I feel really close to my dad when I’m at the lake.”
Pictures connect
Kalmon also feels a connection to her father through photography. He gave her her first camera when he was aboard the ship and used to send her money to help with film expenses. Thumbing through old family photographs he took, she’s impressed with his artistic eye.
Now, she uses photography and mixed media to create for its own sake, but also to transform her sorrow into healing. Over the years, as Fitzgerald news developments provoked strong, even visceral reactions, she created photographs, collages and other works. She used reverse images, pen and ink, copies and transparencies of old letters and artifacts — her dad’s guitar pick and old pipe, barbed wire, news clippings. Some works are stark, others crisp yet haunting. All are deep.
Rozman, living in Gwinn, Mich., took a while to warm up to the lake again.
“In the beginning, I didn’t even want to see it. But gradually, as the months and years went on, I was able to go back to it with no ill feelings,” she says.
For the most part, the years since the sinking have been relatively quiet. “I grew to accept my dad’s death. I remembered him on the 10th every year in my own way. Nothing public, just close family and friends,” Rozman said.
Disturbing the dead, and the living
She was aware of diving expeditions, even suggestions by some that the crewmen’s bodies could be brought up and buried. “I never did want my dad’s body brought up. I felt that he died the way he probably would have wanted because he sailed on the boats for nearly 30 years,” she said.
Rozman also felt comforted by the annual memorial services at Mariner’s Church in Detroit (dubbed the “Maritime Sailor’s Cathedral” in Gordon Lightfoot’s song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”).
For the most part, she was at peace — until 1994, when Mount Morris, Mich., businessman and explorer Fred Shannon dove the Fitzgerald wreck and trumpeted video footage of a crewman’s partially decomposed body near the ship’s hulk.
Shannon described the body as clad in blue denim coveralls and otherwise unrecognizable. But he also said the crewman was wearing a life jacket, a fact buttressing his argument that the ship didn’t sink as rapidly as some theories suggest.
It spurred Rozman to action. “I’ve got two pictures of my dad where he’s wearing blue jean coveralls and it upset me to think it could possibly be him,” she said. “I know he’s not the only one who wore those, but right away I thought about my dad. I felt it very disturbing that somebody would take pictures of a dead body and then bring it to the public without any feeling toward the family members,” she said.
Rozman lent her voice to an effort to ban the photography of human remains in Lake Michigan.
In 1999, Rozman, along with 200 other mourners and officials, boarded the Coast Guard cutter Mackinaw to consecrate the Fitzgerald wreck site in Canadian territory just off Whitefish Point. It featured a ritual similar to graveside services after a funeral.
Closure for some
Rev. Richard Ingalls of Mariner’s Church, who led the ritual, said it provided an unexpected closure for some family members.
Besides its healing effect, it also sent a statement to the wider world — anyone who tampers with the Fitz wreck is doing the moral equivalent of disturbing a grave.
Now, along with Ruth Hudson, mother of Fitzgerald deck hand Bruce Hudson, Rozman has taken up the cause of having the site legally declared a grave site.
That may be a difficult task.
Since the wreck is widely thought to lie in Canadian waters, that government would have control. And Jim McPeak, communications officer for Canada’s Ministry of Citizenship, Culture and Recreation, says there aren’t many legislative controls on sport divers.
“It’s an archaeological site,” McPeak said. “They’re supposed to ask for a permit from the ministry. Otherwise they can’t dive on that site.”
In granting the permit, he said, the government would consider “the moral point of view of people wanting to dive to treat it as a grave site.”
Any proposed dive also must have a “legitimate archaeological reason” for diving, he said. But as far as a legal declaration, “there’s nothing on the horizon.”
Pleas for decency
Ingalls, who will lead the 25th annual memorial Mass at 11 a.m. Sunday at Mariner’s Church, pleads for decency to prevail, despite the lack of a legal barrier. “This is a grave site to these dear people,” he says.
Ingalls attests to the fact that the emotional impact of the Fitzgerald has gone beyond that of other tragic accidents, other losses of life and other shipwrecks.
“It somehow gripped the hearts of people who have lived with death otherwise,” Ingalls said. Over the years, he has spoken with those who attend the memorial service, even though they have no connection to the lakes or the Fitz crew. “I have people say `I don’t know why this has gripped me so much.’ “
Kalmon says she’ll take the day off work today. “I’ll read my dad’s letters, look at family photos, cry a bit, count my blessings, go for a walk or a bike ride,” she says. “I sent all of my siblings `I love you’ cards and arranged to have some flowers delivered to my mom at work.”
Rather than be remembered for the way he died, Kalmon wishes her father — and the rest of the Fitzgerald’s crew — could be remembered for the people they were.
“This is how I remember him,” she says, holding up a faded snapshot of her father, clad in a red-and-black plaid wool shirt, pipe in mouth, proudly displaying a nice-sized lake trout.
He loved the lake. He loved to fish. He was a good singer, someone who liked to cook, a talented amateur photographer. He wasn’t perfect. No one is. But he was her father — and “Grandpa Allen” to grandchildren he never got to meet.
“I miss my dad,” Kalmon says. “But until you lose someone, you don’t realize that you don’t just lose that person. You lose what could have been.”
