By Dan Patrinos
His grandfather and granduncles were ship captains on the Great Lakes.
A two-football fields-long freighter, then known as the “Queen of the Lakes,” was named after him, and its sinking made his name an unbidden household word.
He played a key role in planning the celebration opening the St. Lawrence Seaway.
He was influential in founding a marine historical society that now archives tens of thousands of records and photographs of ships and marine activities involving the five inland seas.
The man is Edmund (Fitz) Fitzgerald, the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s 2022 honored Founder.
Each year the Society fetes the memory of one of its founders. The honoree is normally celebrated at the Society’s January annual meeting. In 2022, as in the previous year, the pandemic is preventing Society members and guests from gathering at the annual meeting dinner.
Nearly sixty-three years ago, on January 28, 1959, Fitzgerald, then board chairman and former president of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co., along with other prominent Milwaukee community leaders, formed the Society. Its mission: to collect, preserve and share documents and artifacts relating to the marine history of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway.
That was in response to Herman Runge’s bequest of his personal collection of shipping records to the Milwaukee Public Library less than a year earlier. It was at Fitzgerald’s urging, and that of others like then Port Director Harry C. Brockel, that Runge donated his huge collection of shipping information – the comings and goings of ships, their cargo, crew, destination, and much more – to the Library. The transport of his manifold assemblage of books, newspapers and clippings, photos and boxes and file cabinets of his famed index records from his home to the Library took several truck-loads.
Herman Runge’s bequest
A revealing story about how the collection ended up at the Library is told by Suzette Lopez, the Society’s executive director. “In the 1950s, Fitzgerald and Brockel were very interested in expanding shipping on the Great Lakes,” she recalled.
“They had approached Runge, seeking to keep his well-known marine collection here in Milwaukee, as he was being courted by other big cities, including Cleveland and Detroit. They then approached the city librarian, who at the time was Richard Krug, and asked him for space and an office for the collection at the Central Library. The Library had several exhibits rooms available,” she said.
Krug said, yes; Runge said, no. “Runge said he worked on his collection at all hours and having an office wasn’t something he wanted.”
Runge eventually agreed to give his collection to the Library upon his death. “After the collection was moved to the Library, Fitzgerald continued to contact other marine collectors to expand Runge’s lifelong work,” Lopez said.
Today, the collection is one of the largest in the country and has grown far beyond Runge’s original massive accumulation to include 50,000 photos, thousands of ship records, information on shipwrecks, nautical charts, marine directories and histories, biographies, and artifacts. The Society now has work space at the Library where WMHS volunteers and its executive director prepare marine information for access by the public. (Since early 2020, Covid-19 restrictions have prevented volunteers from using the work space.)
Edmund Fitzgerald came from a nautical family. Elizabeth F. Cutler and Walter M. Hirthe, an authority on Great Lakes schooners, wrote about his heritage. In their book, Six Fitzgerald Brothers – Lake Captains All, they recounted that William Fitzgerald, the patriarch of the family, came from Ireland in 1836, settling near Grand Haven, Mich. His youngest son, John, became master of nine ships and started a ship- and barge-building and repair company in Milwaukee. Later, the company merged with the Wolf & Davidson Yard to form the Milwaukee Dry Dock Co. It was John’s son, William Edmund Fitzgerald, who eventually took over as company president and, with others, formed the American Ship Building Co. in 1899. He died as a result of a gas explosion in his Lake Nagawicka summer home in 1901. His son Edmund, Elizabeth Cutler’s father, was then six years old, the Library’s Milwaukee Reader reported in reviewing the book.
The brothers six
The Six Fitzgerald Brothers was published in 1983 by the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society.
When planning began for the opening celebration of the St. Lawrence Seaway, Fitzgerald organized the Milwaukee segment of the ceremonies. On June 26, 1959, Queen Elizabeth II of Canada and U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower officially opened the waterway. Part of the opening involved Operation Inland Seas, a U.S. Navy task force of twenty-nine ships from the Atlantic Fleet. The detachment sailed up the seaway. Later the flotilla, including the HMY BRITANNIA with the queen aboard, visited Great Lakes ports. Milwaukee was one of those ports of call.
In recognition of his role as chairman of the Milwaukee St. Lawrence Seaway Celebration Committee, William B. Franke, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, cited Fitzgerald for “his imagination and drive” in forming “an organization which produced one of the greatest civic celebrations ever observed in the Mid West, and which showed the U.S. Navy in an extremely favorable light.”
Edmund’s name became a household word after the namesake iron ore freighter S.S. EDMUND FITZGERALD foundered in mountainous waves in Lake Superior during a pounding storm on Nov. 10, 1975. The crew of twenty-nine was lost. Launched in 1958, the ship was owned by Northwestern Mutual, which financed its $8 million construction, and named it after Fitzgerald, then the company’s board chairman. The behemoth was the first laker built to the maximum size allowed to navigate the St. Lawrence Seaway, which was to open a year later. At 729 feet, the “Queen of the Lakes” was then the longest vessel on the Great Lakes. The Milwaukee Journal reported that for seventeen years the ship hauled ore from Lake Superior, through the Soo Locks at Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., and via Lakes Huron and Erie to steel mills in Michigan and Ohio.
With the sinking, the calamity became the subject of a haunting popular ballad, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, by Gordon Lightfoot.
Deep personal distress
At Fitzgerald’s death in 1986 at age 90, the Milwaukee Sentinel quoted popular public relations executive Ben Barkin as saying that Fitzgerald, feeling deep personal distress about the sinking, flew to Ohio to meet the families of crew members at a memorial service. Three years later as scientists used a video robot to probe the wreckage, Fran Bauer, a Milwaukee Journal reporter, talked to Fitzgerald’s son about the impact on his father.
“It was a shadow so deep that it stayed with him for the rest of his life, a shadow so troubling that his family kept any reminders of the sinking from him,” Bauer wrote after talking to Edmund Bacon Fitzgerald in 1989. “The family took pains to spare Fitzgerald from ever hearing the retelling of the sinking in the Gordon Lightfoot song . . . ,” Bauer said. The “family tried to avoid exposing him to anything that would revive memories of the sinking.”
Besides the wide-spread press coverage, and the popularity of Lightfoot’s poignant and evocative song, the story of the wreck bruited his name on graphic T-shirts, snow globes, refrigerator magnets, coffee mugs, bottle openers, beer signs and coasters, a beer bottle label, a clothing patch, postcards, decals, trading cards, and even a cribbage board design. Re-sale websites show a plethora of such items, including at least twenty-five books authored about the shipwreck.
Born on March 1, 1895, in Milwaukee, Fitzgerald attended city elementary schools and Milwaukee East Division High School, now Riverside University High School. Already he was captivated with the idea of Great Lakes shipping. As a senior in the class of 1912, he wrote an essay titled, The Development and Importance of Great Lakes Navigation. In it, he said:
“The great iron ore deposits of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin are
the largest in the world. The vast wheat fields of the Dakotas and Western
Canada are easily tapped by the leviathans of these inland seas. In the
same states where the ore veins lie, there are also large forests of pine,
maple, and other woods. The mammoth coal fields of Pennsylvania pour
ton after ton into the ports of Lake Erie, from which harbors the black
diamonds are sent to every part of middle and western Canada and the
United States. Besides these products, there are many others which are
carried in the bottoms of the lake freighters.”
He went on to Yale University, where he graduated in 1916. After the United States entered World War I, Fitzgerald left a job in sales at a paint company to go overseas as an artillery captain. The Milwaukee Journal reported that in 1919, he became a molder and core maker for Northwestern Malleable Iron Co., rising to secretary of the firm before leaving in 1927. Other jobs included working as secretary of a paper company in Appleton, vice president and director of the former Second Wisconsin Bank in Milwaukee, and in 1932, vice president of the First Wisconsin National Bank.
He joined Northwestern Mutual in 1933 as a trustee of the company, becoming vice president the same year, the company’s tenth president in 1947, and chairman of the board in 1958. He held that post until his retirement at 65 two years later.
Civic affairs
Besides shipping, Fitzgerald’s other interest was civic affairs.
The Milwaukee Journal said his accomplishments were so numerous that an editorial writer once called him a “one-man army.”
His leadership and influence in Milwaukee was especially evident in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. He played a prominent role in the development of the War Memorial Center, the Performing Arts Center and the purchase of the Chicago and North Western Railroad right of way — which opened Milwaukee’s lakefront to the development seen today.
He was chairman of the Milwaukee Harbor Commission and one of the founders of the influential Greater Milwaukee Committee. Much of what he accomplished was done through the GMC, made up of leaders in business, labor, and the professions.
A former colleague and friend described him to a Milwaukee Journal reporter as a calm person, with “a touch of the aristocrat.” He said Fitzgerald was pleased that occasionally he was described as a Rolls Royce –– because of its intimation of being in a patrician class and one of elegance and power.
He served as a director on at least fifteen major Wisconsin corporations, the Milwaukee Sentinel said in his obituary.
He was “one of the most remarkable men I’ve known,” said John L. Doyne, who worked on key city projects as a county supervisor and as Milwaukee County’s first County Executive with Fitzgerald during the 1950s and 1960s. In the same obituary, Irwin Maier, then former chairman of the board of Journal Company, said Fitzgerald “was just first class in every respect.”
– Most of the research for this story was done by Suzette Lopez, executive director of the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society, using the Society’s archives.
Dan Patrinos is a retired journalist and a member of the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society. He lives in Milwaukee.
Photos:
The photo at the top of this page shows Edmund Fitzgerald standing in front of the S.S. EDMUND FITZGERALD.
Photo credits: Great Lakes Marine Collection of the Milwaukee Public Library and Wisconsin Marine Historical Society.
