LANSING, MICHIGAN– Associated Press reporter Harry Atkins was away on Lake Superior on Nov. 10, 1975, “when the November storms came early.” But his news coverage the day after the shipwreck is notorious Edmund Fitzgerald It helped shape its legacy.
Atkins, now 86, was a news reporter in Detroit when he was sent to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to write about Fitzgerald. The cargo ship was transporting iron ore from Wisconsin to Zug Island in Detroit when it encountered a terrifying storm. All 29 men on board died, and the exact cause of the wreck remains a mystery.
The Fitzgerald was the last major shipwreck on the Great Lakes, thanks to technological improvements in the years following the disaster. The wreck has also become the most famous in the area thanks to Gordon Lightfoot’s creepy folk song Which kept him in public memory.
Lightfoot wrote the poem to Fitzgerald after the reading Atkins story About the wreck and a November 24, 1975 article in Newsweek. The song was released less than a year after the disaster in August 1976.
Family members and marine lovers will gather Monday to honor the 50th anniversary of the wreck. Ahead of the anniversary, Atkins recounted what he saw on that fateful day in a recent interview with the Associated Press, his former employer.
Atkins, who now resides in Savannah, Georgia, said he was working at the AP broadcast bureau in Detroit when the bureau heard something was wrong. A resident of Whitefish Bay whom Atkins described as an “old hermit” would listen to radio communications from ships on the water and call radio stations to relay what he heard.
“He found out that Fitzgerald was not doing well,” Atkins said.
The last message heard from the Fitzgerald was sent to the Arthur Anderson, a nearby ship. “We’re holding our own,” Captain Fitzgerald said.
Atkins said he wrote a quick story about how the ship got into trouble and then headed out at night to Sault Ste. Marie, about 347 miles (559 kilometers) north of Detroit. He set up shop in Sault Ste. Mary’s Evening News, the newspaper that carried the message from the radio eavesdropper to Detroit.
“I got out the Yellow Pages and started looking for a plane,” Atkins said.
Atkins said he found a retired Navy pilot with a four-seat plane “with wings above the cockpit instead of below” to fly with a photographer over nearby Whitefish Bay. When they reached the Canadian side of the lake, Atkins said he could see two cargo ships, two Coast Guard boats and another ship pointing at each other “like a Chrysler star.”
“So we had to locate the Fitzgerald right there in the middle of where all those boats were pointing,” Atkins said.
Atkins said he saw from the sky a lifeboat and a jacket. But no bodies of the crew were ever recovered.
To this day, the Fitzgerald remains under 535 feet (165 m) of water, about 17 miles (27 km) northwest of Whitefish Point, Michigan. The wreck is protected as a cemetery under Canadian law.
Once on the floor, Atkins called his teammates in Detroit to relay his draft, which made the news. “Rescuers searched the cold waters of Lake Superior on Tuesday for the 29-member crew of the sunken crude tanker Edmund Fitzgerald, but found only an oil slick, lifeboats and empty life jackets,” he wrote in the first paragraph of his story.
Atkins became a longtime sports journalist for the Associated Press in Michigan. He heard Lightfoot’s song from time to time.
“It’s a haunting song,” Atkins said, his voice full of emotion. “I feel suffocated every time.”
But he didn’t realize how bad the disaster was until 25 years later, when he saw news coverage of the anniversary for the first time.
“I think 29 guys were alive yesterday and dead today,” Atkins said. “I cared a lot about what I was writing.”