"Superior, they said, never gives up her dead..."
As you prepare for Veteran's Day (and I hope folks are doing that), spare a thought for another group of people who lost their lives just doing their jobs. Thirty years ago tonight, 29 men died when the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior, en route to Detroit.
If all you know about the event is the Gordon Lightfoot song (which I remember being played every year on this date on one of the Cleveland radio stations), I highly recommend reading Pat Kight's essay about covering the storm that night for the local papers in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Among other things, she points out that the myth of journalistic objectivity is just that - a myth. And that's probably just as well, sometimes.
"All that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters."
posted by Alison @ 8:06 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
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At 2:14 PM,
tommyspoon held forth...
- Thanks for the links, Al. As I read this I thought about the notion that all tragedies are local. That GL song was the only touchstone I had for this disaster, otherwise this event had zero meaning for me. While the AirFlorida crash in the early 1980s means so much more to me (doubly so since my Dad was almost a casualty).