This is not only gonna be the last run of the season, it turned out, and I was able to prove that. But the last run of Ernest Maceraire, the captain's career. He was about to retire before the end of this over the start of the season, he said to his wife, Neli, also sixty three in Toledo, Ohio, I promise you it's it's my last year. And five other guys made the same promise to their wives. Gonna be better husbands, better grandparents than they were parents. There's their chance. There's a payback they got for this very hard lifestyle is twenty or thirty years, being home, basically. And they're supposed to stop the week before, but they didn't. They added one more trip because McSortney needed the bonus to pay for his wife's medical care. She was probably with cancer. She was in twenty four hour care at that point, and she did live another twenty some years. But that was that was for her, so it makes it all the more heartbreaking. He was gonna retire. Guy guy named Eddie Bindon, forty seven years old. He was about to retire. His wife, Helen, in the Cleveland area. She'd be waiting at the dock just like, McSorthey's family's gonna be waiting at the dock. Pretty incredible. And then he the day before they leave, he goes to Duluth, Minnesota to buy his wife a two carat diamond ring for the twenty fifth anniversary. And instead of packing that in his double bag bob like you normally would, you're gonna see her in three days in Toledo. I mean, she's gonna be right there. He gives it to a friend of his in Duluth and with a love note wrapped around him and says, please send this to my wife. And only Eddie Binnen knows why he did that. Why would you do that? But sure enough, of course, the ship goes down, and three days later, she gets this ring in the mail. She wears it the rest of her life, and she never remarried. So these are the kind of stories that I kept on uncovering as I got to know these people better and better.

Hey. It's Bob, and I'm taking the growth mixtape on the road in a series of live podcast episodes. Imagine a podcast tailored specifically for your company recorded in front of a live audience that would be released as its own episode. These are thoughtful, emotional conversations that help teams who have lost their spark rediscover their curiosity and creativity so they can love work again. Sure. You could do a typical keynote or panel discussion, or you could give your team something they'll never forget. Book me at your next event at bob mathers dot c a. Now back to the show. Well, I wanna come back to a couple more of those stories later, John. There's a a few things that were kind of nightmare fuel as you go through, the account of what happened and the size of the storm. And so maybe if we could take us back there, what is it about the Great Lakes or even Lake Superior in particular that makes the storms and this storm just so incredibly powerful, because and you mentioned it earlier, all these books about, like, what happened, who's to blame. Right? We need somebody to hang this on. And, of course, it's like a plane crash, any number of things. There's no one thing that, is to blame. But just the unique characteristics of the storm and the lake in itself just make it like, you just paint a picture of what the the what the what the crew is up against.

Well, I appreciate that. And, listeners, be be known that Bob does his homework, man, because you clearly read it and read it very carefully. I was shocked by a lot of things when I did my research here. One, I know how big the Great Lakes were, but I didn't really know how big they were. Lake Superior is bigger than Ireland. That got my attention. And, of course, the five combined are bigger than all of New England in the United States plus the state of New York. That's how big this is, but Canadians probably know that. But I was also stunned to learn from experienced veteran commercial sailors. By that, I don't mean wind sailors, but the guys with the cargo. That the guys that sailed on the Atlantic versus the Great Lakes told me consistently and emphatically that the Great Lakes are more dangerous than the Atlantic. And I I had to hear it ten times and and read more before I actually believed it, but it's true. And the reason is saltwater is one reason. It takes our sharp pointy waves on the Great Lakes freshwater. On the ocean, the salt weighs down that point, kinda sands it off, and spreads out the, the waves as well. Furthermore, more importantly, you've got, the storms on the on the oceans are five hundred miles, a thousand miles away. So by the time the waves actually get to you, they're like smooth roller coasters, still dangerous, and still make you sick, of course, but not nearly as dangerous as the ones in the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes are produced by what's called locally occurring storms. And I asked one of my experts, what does that mean? He said, it's right over your damn head. And if you've been on Lake Ontario, of course, in Toronto, you can be fishing that morning, and by lunchtime, you're all looking for a shelter. It can get nasty fast. And that's the Great Lakes. So with these waves, you can have your bow stuck in a thirty foot wave. And then seven hundred feet later, that's how long these things are. You can have your stern stuck in another thirty foot wave with nothing supporting that ship in between. So it's gonna sag. Why is it gonna sag? Because it's carrying twenty six thousand tons of iron ore. Twenty six thousand tons of iron ore is the same as four thousand two hundred adult elephants. A crazy amount. The scale of all this is just mind blowing. They carried enough taconite, which is iron ore, on each run on the Emma Fitzgerald to build seven thousand cars per run, and they do this every five days. So that's how the big three automakers were cranking them out during this time. So what happens is, therefore, the ship sags in the middle when it's not supported between two waves. Then it does what's called hogging over the next wave, which is kinda the opposite, draping itself over that wave. Then it sags, then it hogs, then it sags, then it hogs. This happens ten thousand times a day during a storm. Take a paperclip. Bend it back and forth ten thousand times. What's gonna happen? Alright. That's what happens to these ships oftentimes. It does not happen on the ocean. It happens on the Great Lakes. So that's how you got six thousand shipwrecks, thirty thousand crew lost. That's one per day every day for a century. It's crazy numbers. So I already have a scary situation. It's always at its worst in November, the gales of November. Why? Because the water's warm and the air is cold, It's like hurricane season in Florida in September. The water wants to come up. Like, boiling water bubbles and steams away in your kitchen. Same phenomenon. The warm stuff wants to go where the cold stuff is. So that's a problem. On top of that, how about this one, Bob? The longer winter it takes to arrive, the nastier it shows up. And we all know about that here in the Great Lakes. So when it's seventy degrees in Duluth on Sunday, November ninth, that is not good news. It's like water behind a dam. The more water you have behind a dam, the worse it's gonna be when it finally breaks. The longer winter comes, the nasty it's gonna be, and you get two storms coming in. One is the Alberta Clipper from, of course, Alberta. I think you know where that is. Bringing cold dry winds, they're used to that. That's pretty common. One they were not used to is called the panhandle hooker, a term I did not have when I wrote the book. It's not what you think. It's from, it hooks around the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas and comes on up with hot wet winds. Alright. And that contrast is gonna be bad. These two storms collide right in front of Whitefish Bay like a catcher guarding home plate. Whitefish Bay, by the way, is the drain of the bathtub that is Lake Superior. So you start in Duluth, and you end up in Whitefish Bay, and that's where all the trouble is, of course. And this storm is gonna block you from getting there. So all this is happening at once. It's the storm of the century. By the time, the ship gets down to where it needs to be, to get to Whitefish Bay, seventeen miles away from safety on a three hundred and, about a four hundred mile trip, basically. That's how close they were. As one of my experts said, the Edmund Fitzgerald and only the Edmund Fitzgerald, because the next ship was about an hour behind fifteen miles north, was in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time. Hundred mile per hour winds, that's hurricane force anywhere in the world, sixty foot waves, and this thing only has eleven feet out of the water. So do that every four to eight seconds and you see the problem.

Yeah. Sixty foot waves. And you mentioned that eleven foot freeboard. So that's the distance when this thing is fully loaded, the distance between the water and the top of the deck. And these waves are I think you call it green water. Right? They're not just splashing over the ship. They're, like, swallowing the ship.

That's man, Bob, damn it. That's a good line. And if I had that line a year ago, I would've said swallowing the ship. It's what happens. The splashy waves, okay. Those are scary. Those are bad, but they're used to that. Green waves. Green water, that means you are basically underwater. And the light of the ship lights that water up, of course, makes it green. That is scary stuff. That means you're underwater. So you're underwater twenty, thirty feet every forty eight seconds. These things are these things are very well designed, and they it comes back up. It comes back up. It comes back up. But after some point around seven ten PM on November tenth, it did not come up. We know that.

So I wanted to ask you about that. That's a great segue. You've done all this research. I know you've read all those books behind you about the who done it. So the ship goes down right around seven ten or seven fifteen in the evening. So what's your best guess about what was happening at seven zero five?

That's a great question. Of course, like I said, the book here behind me, but we did advance the conversation in many ways here. One is that, the I'm gonna go first with John Tanner. John Tanner, one of my experts, he said that, when a big ship goes down, it is rarely one thing as you alluded to earlier, Bob. It's a a series of forces that combine nature, how the ship was built, other stuff. It all combined to send the ship down is really one thing. In this case, this was the storm of the century. We know that. There's one thing. Two, the ship was built, swapping out rivets for welds. It was considered innovative at the time. Welds are cheaper. They're faster to make. They're also lighter, one point two million pounds lighter. And what that allows you to do, therefore, is load one point two million more pound pounds of taconite, iron ore, each time you make a run. Well, that's fifty runs per year. That's sixty million extra pounds of taconite you're taking right there times every year you're out there, of course. So that is a huge profit you get by making a lighter, but welds are not as strong as rivets. It makes it far more flexible, far more bendy, which can be good to a point like a skyscraper in the wind, but you can bend too much. When you bend too much, you crack. So that's one aspect there. That night, as they're going down on the far end, his long radar is out, his short radar is out, the, lighthouse at Whitefish Point, the light is out. The radio beacon from that lighthouse is also out. That is a signal that goes out to captains to tell you where you are and where you're trying to go. So he's truly sailing blind. At that point, he might have gone over a little patch called Six Fathoms Shoal. It's attached to an island called Caribou Island. It's in Canada. I don't know why they call it Caribou Island. It's a nasty little swamp of flies and nastiness. Even the caribou have long left, Bob. They they swam across to Batchawana Bay or somewhere in Canada, but they're gone. But Six Fathom Shoal is right in front of it as you go down. I fathom is six feet. Six Fathoms, therefore, is thirty six feet. So you don't wanna be anywhere near this in a lake that's a thousand foot deep. So and in some places, it's only eleven feet deep and and just crazy. So he might have gone over that. If he did, because he didn't know where he was, basically, and they bottomed out, that would explain why they're taking in water. It would explain why they develop what's called a starboard list. That means you are leaning permanently to the right, and that gets worse over time, which means you can't steer nearly as well. It's much harder to steer. You're more vulnerable to getting pinned down by wave or even capsizing. You're like a three legged animal in the wild. You are now at the mercy of waves you don't control. So all this starts, starts adding up, by the way. And by the way, one more fun fact for you. The map they're using, they call them charts. We call them maps. The chart they're using is from a nineteen seventy three US geological survey, it says, on the map. Okay. Great. Then you look more closely, and it says, this is derived from the Canadian map. So you look at the Canadian map because it's their water, and it says nineteen, you know, nineteen seventy three geological survey. This data is derived from a survey from nineteen nineteen. So the data they had was fifty five years old, and it turns out Six Fathom Shoal had moved about a mile. So he had a lot of problems going in. If he hit then, that would probably explain all the problems they have afterwards. And we do know at seven ten, right around there, he's talking to, Bernie Cooper, the captain of the Arthur Andersen. And they are now talking about the various problems they're both having. And Bernie asked him, well, how are you making out with the problems with with your problems? And McSorney says, and I quote, we are holding our own. And those are the last words we know of from the MFS Gerald. And shortly thereafter, it went out of sight, off the radar, almost certainly sank at that time. We don't know exactly why, although I've got my theory certainly. But we do know that, when the end happened, it probably happened incredibly fast because McSorority, considered the greatest captain on the Great Lakes out of three hundred. He did not get out in SOS. The lifeboats were still secure. Only one crew we know of was wearing a life jacket. They did not think they're gonna go down at that moment. So that gives the families some solace that it was quick and fast at the end.

There, yeah, there is some comfort in in knowing that maybe these guys, I mean, you have to be a little bit crazy to do this for a living. So you have to be an optimist. You never really believe that a ship like the Edmund Fitzgerald is gonna get is gonna sink no matter how badly you're getting the shit kicked out of you for, you know, twelve or fifteen hours. So we take some comfort in thinking, yeah, maybe these guys didn't know what was happening. But then you talk about the winches and the cables and the fact that they might the ship might have been actually cracking in half during this. Can you talk a little bit about because that is nightmare fuel that you that these guys would actually know what was happening in the parallel that they were in.

That is undeniably true. And, again, you read it very carefully. A lot of more untold part. One, as far as the ship hitting in the six fathom shoal, a guy named Dick Race, the, all time best they said diving investigator on the Great Lakes, was hired by the company, although in order to quietly go out there a few months later, March of seventy six, to investigate the six fathom shoal and to see if there's any evidence of hitting. And he wrote a report. The report went to Cleveland where the company is based. And a guy I know, Peter Groh, a guy I met in this process. His job when the company went bankrupt in two thousand and four was to go through hundreds of bankers boxes, maybe thousands, of all their other ships. They had a lot of ships and a lot of documents, of course. And they found everything, pay scales, you know, crew and everything else on all the ships, except for three boxes, all on the Emma Fitzgerald. None of them signed out by anybody and all disappeared. I'm willing to bet this report is in that file somewhere. But anyway so that was in the report. I can't say because I've not seen it, and I've tried very hard to find it. But he did tell four people I know, experts now in this book, the same thing. And that is that I found the MF zero's red paint on the bottom of six fathom show, which is as close as we can get to proof. Is it a hundred percent? I can't call it that. But, boy, it's highly suggestive. I'll say that. Likewise, on the bottom, they've done a few dives before it was declared a gravesite in ninety five. And they found, at one point, there's a hundred and twenty feet of one inch thick steel cable pulled out, spooled out from one of the winches, one of the winches, winches. Sorry. And, and what does that mean? It's like, I I have no idea what that means. I'm not a sailor. Talking to Tom Weider, a captain of the Great Lakes, he said, these winches do not let out this cable by accident. And I've I've played around with these things in other ships, and he's right. There's there's, you know, lock, stock, and barrel. It does not roll for anything unless you intentionally unleash it. So somebody did that intentionally. Why would you have a hundred and twenty feet of cable out in that situation and you already on top of it? These deadheads, these, look like little, fire hydrants, basically, throughout the ship. They're for tying up when you're on the dock. You could take that cable and tie up the two halves of the ship and to keep it from splitting. That's what happened to the Bradley in nineteen fifty eight, the Morrell in nineteen sixty six. Like I said earlier, these ships can crack in half, and we have witnesses on this. So they might have been trying to tie the ship together when it was already cracking. And in fact, there's a recording of Ernest McSorority yelling at guys, don't let nobody on the deck. This guy's not a yellower or screamer. Why is anybody on the deck in thirty foot waves with ice and rain and the fence railings are off? This is extremely dangerous. In one wave, and you're gone, basically. That could be why. So that does suggest that these guys knew the ship was cracking beforehand, didn't think it was going to. And like you said, you hit another crucial point, confirmation bias. These guys have always made it, and therefore, you think you can't not make it. Until you're in a car accident, you never think you're gonna be in a car accident. You just can't believe that's gonna happen. So that's what these guys were dealing with. They they always made it, and therefore, we're gonna make it this time too.

Yeah. That just that image of crewmen being out in those conditions and the possibility of trying to put these cables and hold this ship together while it's cracking in half in fifty, sixty foot waves. Like, I wonder that's one of the that's one of the images that that is sort of burned into my brain. I'm wondering if you've got images that haunt you either with conversations or just as you put together the pieces of this puzzle?

The image I've got is the one of the the families almost all had nightmares about this after the fact. Mhmm. One, Deb Champeau. Her dad was Buck Champeau, one of the engineers on the ship, very good at what he did. She's the only child, definitely daddy's girl. She's a sixteen year old girl at the time. She'd always have nightmares of her dad in the water with his hand above the water looking for her, trying to find her, and she could not help him. Another one was Tom Walton. His uncle, Grant, Walton was on the ship. His dad had been in the ship before. He had been in the ship before as a porter, a sailing family. He always had nightmares. His, uncle must have been in the engine room at the time. It was his shift, four to eight. So if you're in that area and now you're going down, these are tight quarters usually. You're going down, the lights are out, and it's filling with frigid water very quickly, and you're gonna hit the bottom at thirty five miles per hour. He said I had nightmares about that for years because that almost certainly is how his life ended, basically. So those are the ones that stay with me, frankly, and what that must have been like. And you already mentioned one, the third one. If they were on deck, it would have been the guys I got to know the best, Bruce Hudson, Mark Thomas, his buddy. These guys are gonna go on a road trip in Bruce Hudson's Hot Shot, burgundy red, same color as the ship, really. Nineteen seventy two Dodge Challenger. This is the muscle car era. That that car is waiting for them in Toledo two days later. And they got money, man. These jobs paid quite well, like, three or four times what a teacher got paid even back then. They're gonna go for a month, to Colorado to get some Coors beer because back then, Bob, that was exotic. Now we know it is watered down Kool Aid, but anyway and got it. It's it's not Canadian beer, man. We know that. You know, go to LA, come back along Route sixty six. They had the whole thing planned out. Those would be the guys who'd be on deck, and that must have been utterly terrifying. The fence railing is down, might not help you anyway. So if you slip, you're going right across, and there's no saving you, at that point. Also, by the way, even if you had on a life jacket, you got about ten or fifteen minutes in those waters before, you die anyway, hypothermia and whatnot. So that those three images right there stay with me.

Yes. And one of the others that, really stuck with me too is because you take us back to the Monday night and these families, these husbands or sorry, these families and daughters and, wives and girlfriends.

Wives and sons and daughters. Yeah. There you go. Said.

The they're watching Monday night football. Right? Tell me about how they're finding out about the ship.

It's kinda funny about that. It's just a thing for CNN about the decade of sports in the seventies and what a big deal Monday night football was. It started in nineteen seventy, considered an oddity. Back then, you can only watch day games on Sunday pretty much. But, Monday night football took off, of course. It was such a big deal that every single person I talked to about Monday, November tenth nineteen seventy five was watching the Monday night football game as the Chiefs and the Cowboys, I think. They're watching this game, and that was the families at home in Duluth, in Mogwah, Wisconsin, in Toledo, Ohio, in Cleveland. The coastguards in Duluth, the coast the coasties were all there. They're one day off. They got in the day before. They had a day to themselves to eat pizza and drink beer and watch this game. Everybody was watching this game. And then this is where the company there aren't too many villains in the story, but the company is not a hero. They did not when the families started hearing this on channel ten from Dennis Anderson out of Duluth, channel eleven in Toledo, Ohio, they they got it on TV. Your neighbor will be watching TV and knock on the door and tell you that your dad's ship had just gone down. Imagine that. I mean, you're a twelve year old girl. Holy mackerel. This is crazy. So they all started calling the company, and the company did not answer a single call that night. They did not return any calls. They didn't call anybody themselves. So these people find out from TV. Ruth Hudson, she's one of my favorite people in the story. She passed away ten years ago. She was four foot nine, and she told you she was five foot five, and you believed her apparently. She's a little spark plug in Cleveland. Her only child, Bruce Hudson, is the dead cat I mentioned earlier with the muscle car and so on. She finds out while she's driving to her job at Bonnie Bell Cosmetics in Cleveland the next day on the radio that her son's ship is gone. Imagine that. I mean, that's just so cruel. So that's when they find out, but it's Monday Night Football that they all had in common. What was convenient about that for me as a writer is wherever they were in the country, they're all watching Monday Night Football. It's like the one thing that kinda connected all scenes at once. So that for me was a good device to use. But, yes. It was just horrible how they found out.

Yeah. That just imagine everybody sitting around the TV watching the Cowboys and Chiefs, you know, and maybe seeing that little ticker along the bottom of the screen or something. It was. Yeah. The Edmund Fitzgerald is missing. And it's and there's probably some disbelief again. There's gotta be some confirmation bias of these families too. It's like, oh, well, that's I mean, sure it's missing. It's radar is out. It's it's lost radio contact. I'm sure it'll be fine. Right? And slowly over the coming hours and and weeks or coming days, it becomes, you know, obvious what happened. Now just one last question that I not a last question, but one thing on this. Man, when I read that the Arthur Andersen, who was, as you said, just accompanying the ship, the Edmund Fitzgerald, and it gets to the safety of Whitefish Bay, and it turns around and goes back into this nightmare, just speaks to kind of the courage. And it was almost like it's not really a decision. Like, this is what sailors do. And they went back into the storm. This one that they probably just barely survived themselves and the courage that took to try to find, you know, in one in a million chance that they would find a survivor out there.

Exactly right. And, yes, you've honed in exactly the right themes. I am very reluctant to always to to ever criticize the coast guard. I know the Canadian has the Canadian version as well. For well more than a century, these guys have risked their own lives repeatedly, heroic rescues, the Bradley and Morrell. In both cases, they were they saved these a a few survivors each time. But that night, they were not ready. The two ships they had, search ships, were both, in dock and were not prepared to go out, so that was not great. As a result, when the Arthur Andersen, the last one to have contact with the Amethyst Gerald and it's a similar ship. It's seven hundred feet. It's carrying iron ore to Gary, Indiana to US Steel. It is not a search and rescue ship. It's a it's an iron ore carrier. The coast guard asked them to go back out in thirty foot waves, forty foot waves to find a ship by then you know is gone. You don't, this captain's not stupid. That ship's not missing. It's gone. You might find one or two guys in a raft clinging for dear life as happened with both Bradley and the Morrell. Thirty six hours out there in Lake Superior freezing. And when the coast guard finally sent them a rope in those cases, they were too weak to even grab the rope. That's how bad it was. But, these guys went back out, and Rick Bartholdi was on that ship, a guy I got to. And he said, they didn't tell us. They didn't have they they didn't ask for our permission. We just felt the ship turning around. We'd not even laid anchor at that point. You feel the ship turning around, and we know what we're doing. We know it's a bad idea. We know that not only is the Fitzgerald on the bottom, we might soon be on the bottom with us in it. He said, but we didn't hesitate because the sailors code. I said, what's that? You don't have to go. He said, we have to go out. We don't have to come back. You have to go do this because they would do it for us. And we talked to the guys in the raft who survived in fifty eight and sixty six. What kept you alive during that horrible night? And they said the idea that somewhere, somewhere, somehow, it'd be a coast guard guy or a guy in another ship willing to risk his own life to save mine, because you can't save my life without risking yours. And that's what kept them going, and that's why these guys went out. The slim chance of finding somebody in a raft perhaps, and they didn't. All twenty nine men are with the ship at the bottom five hundred and thirty feet down. But that, I was trying to find heroes, and there are heroes. Gordon Lightfoot's a hero. Those guys going back out and the William Clay Ford, the name for the grandson of Henry Ford. That ship went back out. Wilford Sykes and have been on two of these ships, that went back out. The Canadian ships went out, by the way, consistently. It's the salties that didn't go out, the ocean going ships, the, the European captains who always made fun of the Great Lakes until they're on them. Those guys did not go out. So the Canadians went out. The Americans went out. The, the European salties did not go out. And it's gotta be said also when I wrote the great Halifax explosion, Of course, this horrible disaster happens in Halifax, but strangers help strangers. And they came in from Moncton. They came in from New Brunswick, Toronto, Montreal, you name it, to help help help Boston too. And I think the reader needs that because after this horrible thing happens, you need to kinda rebound. In this case, I was wondering how do I twenty nine men go down, and that's it. There's no there's no rescuing. But then I thought, you know what? It's still heroic to go out in that situation and maybe even more heroic because you know it's a fool's mission, and you still did it anyway. So that to me is heroic even though it produced nothing but debris, basically. It's, it was still very noble for those guys to go out, and the Canadians did not hesitate.

Yeah. That was chilling. Yeah. That sailor's code, that is just a level of, you know, bravery and courage. It's just it's hard to fathom.

I don't know if I'd have it. Okay. I gotta be honest. I mean

I just I picture myself being in that ship. And, yeah, the sailors code and everything. But like you said, they're you're in this ship. You just barely survive. You're like, holy shit. We're actually gonna make it. And then you feel the ship. You kind of you feel it turning around. And if you're all looking at each other going, you know what's happening, you're like, okay. I guess,

you know. You know what? That's exactly it. You got into Wayfair Bay, and for everybody in that ship, that was the greatest storm of your life and the greatest storm you'd ever see. And you got home. You're there. You're you're you're safe. You're gonna make it. It's still nasty out there, but you're you're gonna be okay. And now we gotta we just we just saved our lives. Now we gotta put our lives back on the table and throw the dice again. For again, for a mission that's not gonna produce probably any survivors. So you you got it exactly right.

So maybe one last question on this, John, is, you know, you've written books about, like you said, football and hockey, other disasters. Do you ever think about what lessons we can take away from this that, you know, common themes that you've hit on from the from the from the rink, from the hockey field, even the boardroom and the leadership kind of books you've written about?

Well, back to the other books. I should have took this up for your readers. That's Peter Mihavic, by the way, scoring his famous, short handed goal in nineteen seventy two, game two in Toronto against the Soviets for the, Summit Series naturally. Painted by Mary Steele Geer, by the way, a friend of mine in Toronto who's a great painter. But, anyway, so the these other books, it always boils down to leadership. In this case, McSrawdie was a great leader, great captain. The guys liked him so much. He was not a tyrant like so many captains at that time. Kinda like hockey coaches or bosses. Fifty years ago, Bob, you could get away with a lot of things you cannot get away with now. And the other captains would throw hot coffee on you and, all kinds of crazy stuff. He would not do any of that. So they followed him from ship to ship to ship as he was promoted. And they loved him so much, respected him so much. I wonder if they were not willing to push back on certain ideas. They're going full blast when they're going full speed on the way down the down the last leg. On the Anderson, they're supposed to go full speed, but he was not nearly as beloved, Bernie Cooper, by the engine crew. And they slowed the ship down against his wishes, risking their own jobs. So they had found out you could be put up on charges even for openly defying a captain's orders, but they did. And as Rick Barthuli said, that might have saved our life. It probably did, because when you're going too fast on top of everything else, that can be an issue. So leadership matters, and being too beloved can be a problem, actually. You have to have a situation where people can push back. Harry Sindon in the nineteen seventy two summit series, he had assistant coaches who could say, Ferguson, John Ferguson, the all Montreal Canadian great, I don't agree with this, and he'd listen. And you have to have that in leadership positions, especially during a crisis.

Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. I hadn't even thought of that. I'm gonna be reflecting on that, John. I just want in closing I mean, I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed this. When I when I first read the book, I had I had folded over the corners of the pages where I came across something. I'm like, oh, I wanna ask John about that. And so when I went back in preparation for this interview, I had forty two pages marked, which was which is probably six hours of questions. I will

get that done. More than ten percent. Yeah.

They're paid exactly. But I and and so I we've hit on we've hit on so many of the, the things that I wanna talk about. And I think we've I'd like to think we've given some a voice to so many of the crewmen that were on that ship. And, obviously, I really encourage people to get the book. I you know, the the song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot, I you know, you can see the guitars behind me. I've played that around campfires as long as I can remember. And it's but it's kind so hundreds of times. And it's kind of fallen out of my usual rotation until I sort of been immersing myself back into this world. And so I picked up my guitar last week, and I'm like, oh, yeah. I haven't I had to look at the lyrics because like you said, it's got, like, eight verses or something, and I and I had to go through it. But I for the first time ever, every time I got to the line and later that night when its lights went out of sight came the wreck of the Evans Fitzgerald. I couldn't get through it without, like, tearing up. And that's the first time in hundreds of times playing the song that it's been that emotional, and it's because of because your book has just brought to life the stories of the people that were on that ship and all their families. And, god, I just I just don't know how to thank you for that.

Well, I appreciate that, and thank you. That's what's kind of the goal really is to make them humans. Not just that's a number, but each individual, you know them now. You know that they had they're they had bright futures ahead of them. Whether you're gonna retire with your wife and your grandkids and so on or you're gonna go on this cool trip. The one story I can't resist telling here at the end, Bruce Hudson, the guy going for the road trip, he finds out in September that his girlfriend, Cindy Reynolds, is pregnant, and he's gotta think fast naturally. He finds out on a payphone at one of the sailor bars in Minnesota. And he says, okay. Don't worry about it. We're gonna move in together. We'll raise a child ourselves. You know, I've got good money. We'll be okay. So she was obviously deeply relieved to hear that. And then she says, you know what? Go on your road trip anyway. It's only November. It only takes a month. The the baby's not due until June, so go ahead. So at that point, he thinks she's the right girl. Yeah. Then, of course, the ship goes down, and Ruth Hudson has lost her only child on it. I cannot imagine the the void that creates, of course, the incredible grief. And then she finds out six months later, Cindy Reynolds, whom she knew, the girlfriend, guess what? You're gonna be a grandmother. And so she's a grandmother that spring, Heather. I've met Heather, who's now, of course, just one year shy of fifty. We know that from the math. Heather has four children, and the oldest of the four children, Austin, looks just like Bruce Hudson. And as aunt Ruth, told, told her, niece, Pam Wittig, she said, I love all four of the same, of course, but I do play favorites in Austin's hit. And there you go. So these stories, I mean, there is a there's a resurrection aspect to it, I guess. And they do live on thanks to, Gordon Levitt's song. They're not forgotten. And this last year certainly proved that. And the last thing I'll leave you with is, Heidi Wilhelm was twelve when it happened. She lost her father. She's six of seven kids. The company paid out as little as they could. In this case, one year salary, basically, which you have seven kids. Are you kidding me? But, anyway, but they they grinded their way through. They became very close to other families that whom they didn't know at all beforehand because they all live in different places, Duluth, Toledo, Cleveland, and so on. They came very close, and she said these people at this table this is three years ago at Wythege Point, where Gordon Lightfoot visited many times, by the way. That's how good a guy he was. She said, these people are not like family. They are family. Who else would know what I've been through, what it's like to be in this very odd situation? And then she says my daughter Sarah was born on the twenty third anniversary of the sinking, November tenth nineteen ninety eight, with her grandfather on it, a grandfather she'd never meet naturally. And then on her twenty first birthday, on November tenth twenty nineteen, she got a tattoo. And Sarah says I'm sorry. Heidi says to her daughter, Sarah, Sarah, show John your tattoo. And she pulls up the left sleeve on her hoodie, and it says, we are holding our own. The last words, of course, from captain McSorley. And these families really are. And this last year has been very reassuring for them that they're not forgotten. The book is, five time New York Times bestseller. I think it's doing very well in Canada too. And the enthusiasm for it across North America has been more than we expected. And like you and the song, the song spiked again last month. It is somewhat reassuring to know these guys did not die in vain. There's not been a single Great Lakes shipwreck since then. How about that? This one accident like nine eleven, like Titanic really, woke up the industry, and the families take pride in that. So thank you for sharing this, Bob. Folks, you're loyal listeners. Bob does his homework. Bob, a real pleasure talking to you.

This has been amazing. And, yes, people can pick up pick up the, the Gales in November, your book on the Summit series, the Halifax Halifax Explosion, a bunch of other beauties. I can't wait to dig into the rest of them. This has just been the thrill of a lifetime, John. I can't thank you enough.

Bob, too kind. I'll come back on anytime. Thank you.

The Growth Mixtape podcast with Bob Mathers is produced by Bespoke Projects, music by Joe Mappel Walter Cronkite. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to follow and rate us. When When you do this, it helps to raise our podcast profile so that more people can find us. If you wanna connect, you can find me on LinkedIn using the link in the show notes.