Namesake of ill-fated Edmund Fitzgerald to get his due

Namesake of ill-fated Edmund Fitzgerald to get his due

When launched in 1958, the Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest ship traversing the Great Lakes, setting records for hauling taconite iron ore mined in Minnesota and destined for Midwest steel mills.

The ship’s esteemed history is overshadowed by the tragedy that sent the vessel plunging to the bottom of Lake Superior with all 29 crew members on board in 1975, a catastrophe immortalized in the Gordon Lightfoot song.

What few know is the ore carrier was named after the president of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co., which owned the ship. Edmund Fitzgerald came from a long line of Great Lakes ship captains, and a ship was named after his father — the W.E. Fitzgerald. So when the new ore carrier was built and named after Edmund Fitzgerald, it was a proud moment.

“The day that ship was launched was the probably the happiest day of my grandfather’s life,” said Edmund G. Fitzgerald, who owns a marina in Manitowish Waters.

On Edmund Fitzgerald’s 65th birthday, his employees gave him a 4-foot-long ship’s model of his namesake during a big party at Milwaukee’s Auditorium. He kept it in his office until he died at the age of 90 in 1986, when it passed to his son Edmund B. Fitzgerald, who in turn kept it in his office.

When he died in September, it was bequeathed to the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s Great Lakes Marine Collection at the Milwaukee Public Library.

On Saturday, the ship model will be unveiled at an event open to the public at 10 a.m. at Milwaukee’s Central Library, 814 W. Wisconsin Ave. The museum-quality model will join more than a dozen other models of Great Lakes ships on display in the second-floor Zeidler Humanities Room.

It is fitting that the intricately detailed model would end up in the collection, because Edmund Fitzgerald was the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s first president. The society’s archives include thousands of photos of Great Lakes ships, nautical charts, an online database, paintings, memorabilia and ship models.

“A lot of people don’t think of the man, they think of the ship,” said Peter Hirthe, president of the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society. “This unveiling is to spotlight the man.”

Fitzgerald’s family tree is loaded with Great Lakes ship captains, including many of his uncles and great-uncles. In 1912, when he was a senior at East High School, now Riverside, he published a paper about Great Lakes shipping in the yearbook.

“Within five decades, he had a Great Lakes ship named after him,” Hirthe said. “The layers of this family’s involvement in the Great Lakes is incredible. He was just carrying on the tradition.”

After graduating from Yale University, Edmund Fitzgerald started working at Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance in the 1930s, rising through the ranks until becoming president in 1947. He was instrumental in pushing the firm into computers, acquiring one of the first IBM 705 data processing systems at a cost of $1.6 million to improve efficiency, said company spokeswoman Betsy Hoylman.

At 729 feet, the Edmund Fitzgerald was the first laker constructed to the maximum size of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

“Shipping in the Great Lakes was a great opportunity. To be able to build a big ship that could move steel back and forth, we thought that was a great investment,” said Hoylman.

The Edmund Fitzgerald model display includes photos of the company president standing next to the ship when it docked in Milwaukee, as well as when he received the model from his employees. It also includes a small plaque listing some of the groups at Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance that gave the model, including the company’s men’s and women’s bowling teams, stamp club and sportsmen’s club.

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