REMEMBRANCE DAY.
Wait a minute. You’ve got it wrong. It’s not until tomorrow moron!!
What the hell is the matter with you??
Get with the program!!
In my defence, those of us born or living in the Great Lakes basin, November 10th, 1975 will always be remembered for the loss of the Edmund Fitzgerald……..“when the Witch of November came stealing!” This year marking the 50th anniversary of the tragedy, makes it all the more poignant.
Working one summer back in the 60s for an Algoma Corp furnace in my hometown, I recall being despatched to the bottoms of their iron boats along with bulldozers as part of a crew to clean up the last dregs of the cargo from the Minnesota iron range up in Duluth. Back when the “Rust Belt” was all shiny and new before China and Korea would lay it low.
Mark Steyn’s blog today has an excellent article on Gordon Lightfoot’s almost instantaneous genesis of his surprisingly enduring and haunting hit, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.“ So the “Big Fitz” gets a song for the ages and the Titanic gets….nothing. Odd that!
So universal is its fame, that as I sit here typing, the Monday Night Football announcer on ABC covering this week’s clash from a cold and blustery Great Lakes steel town, Green Bay, Wisconsin, quotes several passages of Lightfoot’s poetry with absolutely no need of interpretration or attribution. Such is the song’s penetration into the public mindset.
Poetry and football, …….who’da thunk it??!!
Check it out here:
https://www.steynonline.com/15706/the-wreck-of-the-edmund-fitzgerald
I have personal memories of Gordon back in his early days as a local hero in the coffee houses on the Yorkville edge of the University of Toronto campus. Long before he would become an international star, we shared the same retail bank across from UofT’s Varsity Stadium on Bloor Street. We’d often stand patiently in the same queue. Too timid to make a direct approach, I would admire the frills of his trademark leather jacket in silence. It wasn’t until I got to the solitary teller that I’d be filled in on his comings and goings. “Gordie’s going to New York, did you know?” or “Gordie’s going to LA.” Funny how we all wanted a piece of him even then. So much for client confidentiality!!
Gordon’s classic is all the more poignant for me as less than a year later I would be involved in a North Atlantic tragedy that would claim 13 lives of a 15 man crew on the merchant vessel Gabriella which foundered on the night of October 26, 1976 off Newfoundland’s infamous Cape Race (of Titanic fame!).
“Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes into hours?”
