The Edmund Fitzgerald

… went down off Whitefish Bay, Lake Superior, 33 years ago today.

The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald
©1976 by Gordon Lightfoot and Moose Music, Ltd.

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
of the big lake they called “Gitche Gumee.”
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
when the skies of November turn gloomy.
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty,
that good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
when the “Gales of November” came early.

The ship was the pride of the American side
coming back from some mill in Wisconsin.
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
with a crew and good captain well seasoned,
concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
when they left fully loaded for Cleveland.
And later that night when the ship’s bell rang,
could it be the north wind they’d been feelin’?

The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
and a wave broke over the railing.
And ev’ry man knew, as the captain did too
’twas the witch of November come stealin’.
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
when the Gales of November came slashin’.
When afternoon came it was freezin’ rain
in the face of a hurricane west wind.

When suppertime came the old cook came on deck sayin’.
“Fellas, it’s too rough t’feed ya.”
At seven P.M. a main hatchway caved in; he said,
“Fellas, it’s bin good t’know ya!”
The captain wired in he had water comin’ in
and the good ship and crew was in peril.
And later that night when ‘is lights went outta sight
came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Does any one know where the love of God goes
when the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searchers all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay
if they’d put fifteen more miles behind ‘er.
They might have split up or they might have capsized;
they may have broke deep and took water.
And all that remains is the faces and the names
of the wives and the sons and the daughters.

Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
in the rooms of her ice-water mansion.
Old Michigan steams like a young man’s dreams;
the islands and bays are for sportsmen.
And farther below Lake Ontario
takes in what Lake Erie can send her,
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
with the Gales of November remembered.

In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed,
in the “Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral.”
The church bell chimed ’til it rang twenty-nine times
for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
of the big lake they call “Gitche Gumee.”
“Superior,” they said, “never gives up her dead
when the gales of November come early!”

The ship was thirty-nine feet tall, seventy-five feet wide, and 729 feet long.

Lightfoot’s lyrics had one error — the load was bound for Detroit, not Cleveland.

There were waves as high as 30 feet that night; so high they were picked up on radar.

The Edmund Fitzgerald was only 17 miles from safe haven (Whitefish Point).

The captain and a crew of 28 were lost.

Semper Fi

Today is the 233rd anniversary of the founding of the United States Marine Corps.

A colleague — a Marine — at the U.S. Department of State brought in a large birthday cake every November 10th. Before we could have cake we all had to sing “The Marine Hymn.” A lot of us would have honored the marines even without the cake.

Legacies

Roger Angell reminds us of the way we were. Read the whole three paragraphs, but here’s the nub:

I found him again in an old reunion report, and filled in the blank: Lucien Victor Alexis, Jr., of New Orleans. In our junior year, he’d been briefly in the news, when the Navy lacrosse coach refused to allow his team to take the field at Annapolis, because of Lucien’s presence as a player on the visiting Harvard team. Lucien was black—the only black player on the team, just as he was the only black member of our class. The Harvard lacrosse coach refused to withdraw him, but was overruled on the scene by the Harvard athletic director, William J. (Bill) Bingham. Alexis was sent back to Cambridge on a train; Harvard played and lost, 12–0. There was a subsequent campus protest at Harvard, a petition was signed (I can’t remember if I signed it), and soon afterward the Harvard Athletic Association announced that Harvard would never again withdraw a player for reasons of race. Harvard’s president, James B. Conant, had been away in Europe at the time of the lacrosse incident, but when he came back he apologized to the commanding admiral at Annapolis for the breach of cordial relations that Harvard had occasioned by bringing Lucien Alexis along.

November 9th

Cardinals hall-of-fame pitcher Bob Gibson is 73.

Over 17 seasons with the Cardinals, Bob Gibson won 20 games five times and established himself as the very definition of intimidation, competitiveness, and dignity. One of the best athletes to ever play the game, the ex-Harlem Globetrotter posted a 1.12 ERA in 1968, the lowest figure since 1914, and was named the National League Cy Young Award winner and Most Valuable Player. Known as a premier big-game pitcher, Gibson posted World Series records of seven consecutive wins and 17 strikeouts in a game, and was named World Series MVP in 1964 and 1967.

National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

Mary Travers, Mary of Peter, Paul & Mary, is 72.

The Incredible Hulk, Lou Ferrigno, is 56.

Carl Sagan was born on this date in 1934. He died in 1996.

Gail Borden, the inventor of condensed milk, was born on this date in 1801. His timing was perfect. He patented the milk just before the civil war when it’s use as part of the field ration made it a success. Borden was also instrumental in requiring dairy farmers to maintain clean facilities if they wanted to sell their milk to his company — Eagle Brand.

The first of seven African-Americans to be nominated for a best actress Oscar, Dorothy Dandridge was born on this date in 1922. She was nominated for Carmen Jones in 1955.

And 70 years ago the Holocaust began:

Today is the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when Hitler ordered a series of supposedly spontaneous attacks on Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues. The idea was to make the attacks look random, and then accuse the Jews of inciting the violence. In all, more than 1,000 synagogues were burned or destroyed. Rioters looted about 7,500 Jewish businesses and vandalized Jewish hospitals, homes, schools, and cemeteries. The event was used to justify barring Jews from schools and most public places, and forcing them to adhere to new curfews. In the days following, thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps. The event was called Kristallnacht, which means, “Night of Broken Glass.” It’s generally considered the official beginning of the Holocaust. Before that night, the Nazis had killed people secretly and individually. After Kristallnacht, the Nazis felt free to persecute the Jews openly, because they knew no one would stop them.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

Double take line of the day

[F]ormer Bear Stearns chief risk officer Michael Alix has landed a job in the office of the Federal Reserve charged with assessing the safety and soundness of domestic banking institutions.

We suppose that Alix at least has plenty of experience with unsound banking institutions. He was the chief risk officer of Bear Stearns from 2006 until 2008. So, basically, he was the guy on the mast charged with yelling “iceberg” just before the titantic introduced its bow to a floating hunk of ice. …

Clusterstock

Thanks to Bob Ormond for the pointer.

It’s the Housing Bubble, Not the ***** Credit Crunch!

The bursting of the housing bubble damaged both consumer confidence and the card house of the credit markets. These in turn led to the bursting of the stock bubble, which has led to even more loss of consumer confidence.

This excerpted from a posting by Dean Baker — Beat the Press:

The news media almost completely missed the housing bubble. They relied almost entirely on sources who either had an interest in not calling or attention to an $8 trillion housing bubble or somehow were unable to see it. As a result they did not warn the public that their house prices were likely to plunge in future years.

Having dismally failed in their jobs to inform the public, reporters are still relying almost exclusively on sources that completely missed the housing bubble. As a result, they are still badly misinforming the public, first and foremost by attributing the economic downturn to a credit crunch.

This is truly incredible. Homeowners have lost more than $5 trillion in housing wealth. There is a very well established wealth effect whereby $1 of housing wealth is estimated as leading to 5 to 6 cents of annual consumption. This implies that the loss of wealth to date would cause consumption to fall by $250 billion to $300 billion annually (1.7 percent to 2.0 percent of GDP). If you add in the loss of around $6 trillion in stock wealth, with an estimated wealth effect of 3-4 cents on the dollar, then you get an additional decline of $180 billion to $240 billion in annual consumption (1.2 percent to 1.6 percent of GDP).

These are huge falls in consumption that would lead to a very serious recession, like the one we are seeing. This would be predicted even if all our banks were fully solvent and in top flight financial shape.

I wonder if they insulted each other’s mamas

I mentioned that I was reading David Hackett Fischer’s Champlain’s Dream. I found this passage interesting. It describes the scene in the hours before a battle in 1609 between Champlain’s Indian allies and the Mohawk. They were on the shores of the lake Champlain had named for himself just days before.

“We were on the water,” he wrote, “within bow-shot of their barricades.” Songs and cries pierced the night. The Mohawk shouted insults at their enemies. “Our side was not lacking in repartee,” Champlain recalled, “telling them that they would see feats of weaponry that they had never known before, and a great deal of other talk as is usual at the siege of a city.”

In other words, trash talking has been around for a while.

[It’s interesting to learn from Fischer that according to Champlain’s reports, woodland Indians at that time entered battle pretty much as Europeans did — mass, coordinated movements, armored warriors (albeit wooden armor). It was, he says, firearms that caused the Eastern Indians to adopt the type of warfare historians (and novelists) associate with them, the hit-and-run, hiding in the woods, kind of warfare.]

The Obama states

Obama’s three best states (percentage of vote) were:

Hawaii (71.8%)
Vermont (66.8%)
Rhode Island (63.1%)

Seven other states and the District of Columbia gave Obama more than 60% of their vote. They were:

D.C. (92.9%)
New York (62.1%)
Massachusetts (62.0%)
Illinois (61.7%)
Delaware (61.3%)
California (61.1%)
Maryland (60.9%)
Connecticut (60.2%)

Of the 15 states with the most people, all but Texas (#2) and Georgia (#9) went for Obama. Interestingly enough, the other 13 most populous states have exactly half of all electoral votes.

The McCain states

McCain’s three best states (percentage of vote) were:

Oklahoma (65.6%)
Wyoming (65.2%)
Utah (62.9%)

Two of Utah’s 29 counties went for Obama. Two of Wyoming’s 23 counties went for Obama.

None of Oklahoma’s 77 counties went for Obama.

Alaska (61.5%), Idaho (61.5%) and Alabama (60.4%) were the only other states that gave McCain more than 60% of their vote.

November 6th

Mike Nichols is 77 today. Nichols has been nominated for four best director Oscars, winning for “The Graduate.”

Sally Field is 62. Field has won two best actress Oscars (because the Academy really likes her); one for “Norma Rae” and the other for “Places in the Heart.”

Glenn Frey of The Eagles is 60.

Blues singer Rory Block is 59. So is jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval.

California’s first lady, Maria Shriver, is 53.

Ethan Hawke is 38. Hawke has been nominated for two Oscars, one for supporting actor, “Training Day,” and one for co-writing, “Before Sunset.”

Thandie Newton is 36. Miss Newton’s mother is Zimbawbean, her father English.

New Yorker founder Harold Ross was born in Aspen, Colorado, on November 6, 1892.

Walter “Big Train” Johnson was born 121 years ago today. Johnson was one of the first five players elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame — along with Cobb, Ruth, Mathewson and Wagner.

There were no sophisticated measuring devices in the early 1900s, but Walter Johnson’s fastball was considered to be in a class by itself. Using a sweeping sidearm delivery, the Big Train fanned 3,508 over a brilliant 21-year career with the Washington Senators, and his 110 shutouts are more than any pitcher. Despite hurling for losing teams most of his career, he won 417 games – second only to Cy Young on the all-time list – and enjoyed 10 successive seasons of 20 or more victories.

National Baseball Hall of Fame

James Naismith was born on this date in 1861. He’s the guy that created basketball and for whom the basketball hall-of-fame is named — and basketball’s most prestigious trophies. Dr. James Naismith’s 13 Original Rules of Basketball.

John Philip Sousa was born on November 6, 1854.

Sousa said a march ‘should make a man with a wooden leg step out’, and his surely did. However, he was no mere maker of marches, but an exceptionally inventive composer of over two hundred works, including symphonic poems, suites, songs and operettas created for both orchestra and for band. John Philip Sousa personified the innocent energy of turn-of-the-century America and he represented America across the globe. His American tours first brought classical music to hundreds of towns.

Naxos.com

Abraham Lincoln was elected president on this date in 1860.

Best line of the day, so far

Mr. King ended his Hawaii speech by quoting a prayer from a preacher who had once been a slave, and it’s an apt description of the idea of America today: “Lord, we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be, but, thank God, we ain’t what we was.”

Martin Luther King Jr. in 1959 quoted by Nicholas Kristof.