PARADISE, MICHIGAN — Whitefish Point, also known as the Shipwreck Coast around the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and as the Graveyard of the Great Lakes to the sailors who must sneak past it to enter Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, and to summertime tourists as the closest thrust of land to the tomb of the legendary shipping freighter Edmund Fitzgerald, pokes out of Michigan’s coast like a witch’s nose.
Or maybe a raven’s beak.
Either way, it’s a mean cape, beautiful and harsh.
The Edmund Fitzgerald broke apart off this violent stretch of coastline 50 years ago this week. On Monday, at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Point, as if to remind you of just how unsympathetic this stretch of Lake Superior coastline has been for hundreds of years, at the end of the memorials for the 29 crew members who sank with the Fitzgerald on Nov. 10, 1975, before family and friends of that crew, a ship’s bell rang 29 times. But the gales of November came early.
Each chime, each one rung by someone close to a crew member, carried big and loud.
And was quickly met by the wind.
Whitefish Point, on unincorporated land in Chippewa County near Paradise, is in the part of northern Michigan so remote that every residential home looks more like a forest compound; if you live this far north, you are actively avoiding people. Every tree that hasn’t been stripped by the wind here resembles different stages of Christmas tree, and many of the American flags here have long since gone transparent. The weather is so bad here so often that the Shipwreck Museum informed its guests, before they came for the memorial, not to be surprised if the museum needs backup generators.
The ceremony was one of a number of memorials to mark the occasion; the Mariners’ Church of Detroit also held a service on Monday and rang a replica bell.
According to John U. Bacon, an Ann Arbor-based historian who wrote the new bestselling history, “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” the most recent computer models of Nov. 10, 1975, suggest the ship sank in waves reaching upwards of 60-feet tall and winds that raced at close to 100 mph. The exact cause — popped hatches, too much freight, a deep scrape on a sandbar, a combination of disasters all at once — has never been completely agreed upon. But this part of the lake is known for dense fog, snow squalls, clouds of forest fire smoke. The ship’s radar was out; when the crew looked to the lighthouse at Whitefish Point, that was dark, too.
The Whitefish Point Light Station, along with the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, is on the southeastern shore of Lake Superior in Michigan. A memorial service for those who died in the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald was held there on Nov. 10, 2025. (Christopher Borrelli/Chicago Tribune)
It’s a drama so well known, repeated so often at Whitefish Point, details sound like liturgy, and just as imposing. The night before he arrived to ring the bell for his friend Thomas Bentsen, an oiler on the Edmund Fitzgerald, Tim Carlin, from the Toledo suburbs, woke at three o’clock in the morning in his hotel room, worried he’d screw up. Darrell Walton rang the bell for his uncle Ralph G. Walton, another oiler on the ship, but he found himself choking up, and thinking that he was done with 50 years of funerals — “I’ve been living with the history and pain of that night for exactly 50 years.”
Five of the six Riippa siblings, who lost their brother Paul, a deckhand, flew in.
David, the youngest, was 17 in 1975. “I remember hearing of the boat sinking on the news. I think Harry Reasoner said it, and I knew that Paul crewed on the Fitzgerald.”
Stephanie Slayback of Wapella, Illinois, Paul’s niece, listened. “And I remember my mother getting the news, falling to the floor right there and praying that he’d be found.”
David Riippa shook his head.
“And I remember,” he added, “finding a Coast Guard captain and saying, maybe Paul found a closed room in the ship. … Maybe he’s still waiting? The guy said, ‘No chance.’”
Out in the dunes at Whitefish Point there’s an old handmade memorial to five crew members, including Paul Riippa. It’s fenced in by three long pieces of the sun-bleached driftwood that litters the beach here, most of it tossed on land by storms and stranded. There’s a marker for Bentsen, who was out on the water avoiding a dissolving family. There’s a marker for Bruce Hudson, whose new 1974 Dodge Charger waited for him at a dock in Toledo, and whose girlfriend was a senior in high school and pregnant. The daughter he never met came to Whitefish Point for the bell ringing.
A handmade memorial to five crew members who died in the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald includes markers for Ransom E. Cundy, from left, Bruce Hudson and Mark A. Thomas, Thomas Bentsen and Paul Riippa, on Nov. 10, 2025. The memorial sits on the grounds of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum and Whitefish Point Light Station in Paradise, Michigan. (Christopher Borrelli/Chicago Tribune)
Down the beach, seated in the cold sand, his back against a log, was Todd Strother of Madison, Wisconsin, in duck boots and ski pants. He stared at Lake Superior, thinking of what the crew must have felt when the storm hit, but also thinking about the legend of the Edmund Fitzgerald, “how it kind of has an aura of classic mythology now, and 100 years from now, will anyone still be relaying the details?”
If that happens, a lot of the credit needs to go to Gordon Lightfoot, of course, the Canadian singer-songwriter whose hit single, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” is like the holy prayer of a liturgy here, supplying a lot of what visitors know of the sinking. A popular bumpersticker in the parking lot read: “Stop honking. I’m crying to ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ by Gordon Lightfoot.” Hundreds of ships have sunk off Whitefish Point but it’s not insignificant that the most famous one is preserved in a Top 40 hit. As Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan, noted at the ceremony: The ship has now “passed into lore.” Children cradled their model Fitzgeralds. Parents bundled into Fitzgerald hoodies. A 12-year-old girl wore ice-fishing pants and a Fitzgerald T-shirt.
Some visitors said they wished to be here, this day in particular, just to touch the same waters 50 years later. Shannon Henige recalled, even as a child, being drawn to the TV every Nov. 10, at any mention of the ship. She slept in her car at Whitefish Point the night before, to be early for the memorials. Kate Lynnes, who was in college in the western part of the Upper Peninsula in 1975, shook her head at the memory: “You know, I never witnessed, before or since, a more pissed-off lake.”
The Shipwreck Coast here is the home to more than 200 ships, a third of all known shipwrecks in Lake Superior, many just beneath its waters. Freighters — lugging mountains of iron ore pulled from western Michigan and neighboring ports of Duluth, Minnesota, and Superior, Wisconsin (from where the Fitzgerald set sail on Nov. 9, 1975) — change course here, heading south into the Soo Locks, which offers Lake Huron and Lake Erie and ports in Toledo, Detroit and Cleveland, or Lake Michigan and ports in Green Bay, Milwaukee and Chicago. Ships are also hit broadside here by waves barreling from the west. Along the relatively shallow shoreline, there are so many ships that some see masts jutting out of the water on placid days. While remembrances went on at the Shipwreck Museum, a few hundred feet away, a large weathered wooden rudder with rusted metal bits languished in the surf, origin unclear. The steamer Comet lost 10 here. The John B. Cowle lost 14. The SS Superior City, the largest ship on the Great Lakes when it was built in 1898, lost 29. The Edmund Fitzgerald, the largest when it first sailed in 1958, was 729 feet long, and now sleeps in two large chunks about 17 miles from Whitefish Point, 530 feet down.
Just as the ceremony in Whitefish Point rang a bell to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, so did the Mariners’ Church of Detroit on the same day, Nov. 10, 2025. (Paul Sancya/AP)
A visitor takes a photo of a memorial after the annual Great Lakes service to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald at the Mariners’ Church of Detroit on Nov. 10, 2025. (Paul Sancya/AP)
Jim Beland, chief engineer on the freighter John D. Leitch, rang the bell for George J. Holl, the Fitzgerald’s chief engineer. He travels past Shipwreck Coast routinely. “We put (the Fitzgerald) out of our minds, to be frank. We just don’t really want to think about it.”
Friends rang the bell, their faces contorted in grief.
Hands trembled lightly.
Tears froze on cheeks.
Since being salvaged from the Fitzgerald in 1995, the bell has been rung every year on Nov. 10, though never to this much attention or with this many survivors attending. Nov. 10 is the only day the bell is ever taken out of its case. It was rung 29 times on Monday night, plus once more for all the sailors who have died in Lake Superior, then again for Gordon Lightfoot, who died in 2023. Outside, Whitefish Point Light Station, the oldest on Lake Superior, offered only occasional direction. Otherwise, it’s pretty dark here and the weather couldn’t care less. Snow circled. Freezing rain spat. White caps curled, crashed, curled, crashed. After family and friends of the crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald filtered out of the small museum into the bitter cold, a woman broke away and fished around for a cigarette in her purse. The wind off of Whitefish Point picked up and died, and picked up and died, and every time she flicked at the lighter, another gust smothered the flame. She smiled to herself, sighed and put her hands into her pockets and turned to the lake.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com