Gordon Lightfoot and "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"

Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, 1938-2023.

The Great Lakes freighter Edmund Fitzgerald, launched in 1958, sank in a storm on November 10, 1975.

Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian singer/songwriter, died on May 1st at the age of 84. As a Minnesotan who has traveled to the North Shore of Lake Superior pretty much every year since I’ve been a kid, Gordon Lightfoot’s song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” has been ingrained in my memory for a long time. I was obsessed with shipwrecks when I was a boy, and I owned several books about the shipwrecks of Lake Superior and the Great Lakes. Okay, full disclosure: I might still be obsessed with shipwrecks.  

For anyone obsessed with Great Lakes shipwrecks, the Edmund Fitzgerald is one of the most famous, as the 729-foot-long freighter is the largest ship to ever sink in the Great Lakes. To offer a quick summary of the Edmund Fitzgerald’s sinking, the cargo freighter was making her last run of the shipping season when she was caught in a terrible storm on November 10, 1975. Buffeted by gale-force winds topping 50 miles an hour, and waves between 20-25 feet high, the Fitzgerald had lost her radar, and the nearby freighter Arthur M. Anderson was giving the ship navigational guidance. Suddenly, the Fitzgerald disappeared from the radar screen of the Anderson around 7:20 PM, without sending a distress signal. All 29 men aboard the Fitzgerald were lost.  

After the sinking, a short article appeared in Newsweek magazine, titled “The Cruelest Month.” This article provided the genesis for Gordon Lightfoot’s song. Relistening to “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” since Lightfoot’s passing, I’m struck by what a fantastic song it is. In 7 verses of 8 lines each, Lightfoot paints an enduring and emotional portrait of the ship’s final journey. I can’t remember the first time I heard the song, or the first time I heard about the shipwreck, but to me as a kid, they were synonymous. Gordon Lightfoot. He’s the guy who wrote “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The biggest ship to sink in the Great Lakes, and the most recent Great Lakes shipping tragedy. The gales of November. My dad would often call Lake Superior “the big lake they call Gitche Gumee,” quoting the song. And the song had a special resonance, since I knew the lake he was singing about, even if I haven’t been close to the spot where the Fitzgerald was lost. And let me tell you, there’s still a lot of Edmund Fitzgerald-themed chotchkes you can buy in stores on Minnesota’s North Shore.  

Lightfoot took very little poetic license with the facts. Wikipedia has quibbles that the ship wasn’t actually headed to Cleveland but was dropping off its cargo of taconite ore at Zug Island, near Detroit, before heading to Cleveland to dry dock for the winter. Well, I think “they left fully loaded for Cleveland” is a better line than “they left for Zug Island, which is near Detroit-but it isn’t a natural island, it was created when a canal was dredged-to fully discharge her cargo of taconite ore pellets, ultimately heading for Cleveland to dry dock for the winter.” Also, Cleveland is a place that people have heard of, whereas Zug Island is not. 

The fourth verse of the song is where Lightfoot used poetic license to imagine the cook coming on deck to first say “Fellas, it’s too rough to feed ya,” and then “Fellas, it’s been good to know ya.” Obviously, no one knows what, if anything, the cook of the Edmund Fitzgerald said, but these two lines have always struck me as part of the emotional core of the song, as the difference between the two lines becomes “Wow, this is a really rough storm” to “Oh, we’re not making it out of this storm.”  

The captain didn’t really say “the good ship and crew was in peril,” as Lightfoot sang, although radio transmissions from earlier in the day had mentioned the ship taking on water. But no distress call was ever made: the last radio transmission from the Edmund Fitzgerald to the Arthur M. Anderson occurred at 7:10 PM and concluded with Captain McSorley telling the Anderson: “We are holding our own.” 

Lightfoot eventually changed the lyric “a main hatchway caved in” in live performances, in part because the lyric apparently caused people to think that the crew was somehow to blame for the tragedy because the deckhands hadn’t secured the hatch covers correctly. Documentaries have subsequently proven that the hatch covers were secured correctly, so Lightfoot changed the lyric to “At 7PM it grew dark, it was then that he said, ‘Fellas, it’s been good to know ya.’” Lightfoot said in a 2010 interview with the Toronto Sun, “The whole verse was really conjecture from start to finish anyway. It’s the only verse in the whole song where I give myself complete poetic license.”  

There are several different theories as to what caused the Edmund Fitzgerald to sink, from rogue waves to an accidental grounding. I’ve read two books about the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by acclaimed Great Lakes ship researcher Frederick Stonehouse, and The Night the Fitz Went Down, by Hugh E. Bishop. Both books will give you more details about the ship’s fateful voyage.  

Each year on November 10th, the Split Rock Lighthouse in Two Harbors, Minnesota, illuminates the light in honor of the men who died on the Edmund Fitzgerald. The Mariners’ Church of Detroit, immortalized in the song as “the maritime sailors’ cathedral,” used to ring the church’s bell 29 times, once for each life lost on the Fitzgerald. (Since 2006, the church holds a memorial service honoring all those who have died on the Great Lakes.) After Lightfoot’s passing, the lighthouse and the church continued these traditions to honor Gordon Lightfoot. The church’s bell rang 29 times, and then a 30th time for the man whose song lyrics immortalized the ship and her crew. I can think of no more worthy tribute.  

Vida Blue 1949-2023

Vida Blue, 1949-2023.

Vida Blue spent almost his entire career pitching for Bay Area teams.

My signed 1983 Topps Vida Blue card. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Vida Blue had one of the best baseball names ever. I was just starting to become a baseball fan in 1986-87, at the very end of Blue’s career. He was one of those players that I was drawn to because of his cool name, like Buddy Bell. Back in those pre-internet days, baseball cards were one of the only ways that I knew anything about baseball players, so I’d become a fan of someone just based on their name. My baseball card collection included many players who I found in the commons bin who had cool names, like Enos Cabell, Kurt Bevacqua, and Mike Lum. And Vida Blue is a really fantastic name. I mean, his last name is a color, how cool is that? And it helped that Blue’s final baseball card appearances were in the iconic 1987 sets, which was my favorite year of baseball cards.  

Vida Blue died on Saturday, May 6th, at the age of 73. The cause was complications from cancer, the Oakland A’s said. Blue played a key role in the Oakland A’s dynasty of the 1970’s, as the team won 3 World Series in a row from 1972-74.

As I grew older, I learned about Vida Blue’s fantastic 1971 season, when he won the AL Cy Young and MVP awards. Blue is still the answer to a great trivia question: who is the last switch-hitter to win the AL MVP award? In 2017 Vida Blue was at a card show in the Twin Cities. I brought my son Miles along; he would turn 3 a couple of weeks after this card show, but he was already a big baseball fan. We met a lot of great players like Bob Gibson, Tim Raines, Amos Otis, Rod Carew. And Vida Blue, who was one of the nicest baseball players I’ve met. I told Vida that he was one of my favorite baseball players from the 1970’s, and he said, “Thanks for being a fan.” He shook my hand twice and gave Miles many fist bumps. About an hour later, as Miles and I were just about to leave the card show for the day, Vida was walking by and called out “Go team Blue, Mark!” I had to turn around to see if Vida was talking to someone else, but he was calling out to me. I was very impressed that he remembered my name an hour later. So that’s my encounter with Vida Blue, and he was just as cool as I had hoped he would be. He was just a really nice, positive person in my brief interaction with him, and I’ll always appreciate that.  

In November of 2021, I wrote a couple of long articles about Vida Blue: “A Baseball Career Overview” and “Vida Blue: 110 Baseball Cards.” I don’t want to sound too self-congratulating, but my article “A Baseball Career Overview” is more in-depth than many of the obituaries I’ve read of Vida Blue today. Because Vida Blue’s first full season in the major leagues was 1971, which was also his greatest season in the major leagues, much of the writing about him focuses on how Blue “never lived up to the promise” he showed that year.  

As I attempted to show in my article, Vida Blue’s 1971 season was not merely a very good season, it was an historic season that very few pitchers in the last 50 years have come close to approaching. In 1971, Blue finished the season with a 24-8 record, a 1.82 ERA, and 301 strikeouts. I looked at all of the other pitchers to strike out 300 batters in a season since 1971 to see if any of them also won 24 games during the same season. Oddly enough, Mickey Lolich achieved the same feat in 1971, as he won 25 games and struck out 308 batters. (It was Lolich’s bad luck to have his finest season the same year that Vida Blue captured the nation’s attention.) Since 1971, only two pitchers have matched Lolich and Blue’s feat. Like Blue and Lolich, these two pitchers were also left-handers.  

Steve Carlton in 1972: 27 wins, 310 strikeouts, and a 1.97 ERA. Won the pitching Triple Crown. (Leading the league in wins, strikeouts, and ERA.) 

Randy Johnson in 2002: 24 wins, 334 strikeouts, and a 2.32 ERA. Won the pitching Triple Crown.  

And that’s it. As starting pitchers throw fewer and fewer innings, it seems unlikely that anyone will join Blue, Lolich, Carlton, and Johnson in this illustrious group.  

And Vida Blue still had other fine seasons: he won 20 games in 1973 and 22 games in 1975. He also won 18 games in 1976 and 1978. He was hardly a one-season flash in the pan.  

Of course, many of the obituaries of Vida Blue focused on his jail term and baseball suspension for cocaine use and possession. But few of them noted that Blue worked his way back into baseball, making the roster of the San Francisco Giants in 1985 after being suspended for the 1984 season. Blue wasn’t overpowering during his second tenure with the Giants in 1985 and 1986, going 18-18 with a 3.87 ERA, but the fact that he returned at all was a victory. And during those two years, Blue got his 2,000th strikeout and his 200th win, significant milestones in any pitcher’s career.  

Should Vida Blue be in the Baseball Hall of Fame? I don’t know, but he definitely deserves more consideration than he has received. It’s past time for Vida Blue to be considered on an Era Committee ballot and have his baseball peers decide if he’s worthy to be enshrined. As I wrote in 2021, I think a Black pitcher who had a fine career and also struggled with drug addiction during his career might find a more sympathetic audience now than Blue did in 1992 when he debuted on the Hall of Fame ballot. There’s also less emphasis on pitcher wins than there was in 1992, when Blue was overshadowed by the stunning group of 300-game winning pitchers he was competing with on the ballot. Blue’s career win total of 209 seems more impressive now, as well it should. And, as I never tire of reminding people, Vida Blue had a better career winning percentage than Don Drysdale.  

One of my favorite Vida Blue cards that I own is a signed 1983 Topps card. It shows Vida with the Royals, the team he spent the least amount of time with during his career. The card shows Blue wearing the powder blue road uniforms the Royals sported throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s. So, you have Vida Blue wearing powder blue, Royal blue even, and the icing on the cake is that the card is signed by Vida using a blue sharpie. It’s just perfect. 

Vida Blue was a player who will live on in the hearts and minds of baseball fans, and I’ll end this tribute with the same quote I ended my 2021 article with: In a 2017 interview with The Sporting News, Blue had this to say about the Hall of Fame: “I think if I could get in there, it would be a great honor. But until then, I’ll just bide my time and continue to be Vida Blue.”