I finished Michael Schumacher's Mighty Fitz: The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and it was a solid overview of the famous tragedy. Schumacher presents the theories of the ship's last hours without favoring one explanation over others, and like many disasters, it seems that a number of misfortunes combined on the fateful night of November 10, 1975. A sense of mystery remains, despite multiple dives to the wreck (which is now a protected gravesite, 530 feet below the waves of Lake Superior).
I came away from it with a renewed appreciation of the National Museum of the Great Lakes collection, and I was particularly struck by the story of one Fitzgerald crew member's son, who was a college student when police knocked on his door, insisting that he call his mother. The young man then had to find a phone, because he didn't have a phone in his apartment. In 1975 a working class teenager could afford college tuition, but not a phone line (those were the days of leasing phones and the Bell monopoly).
