![]() Crew members ranged in age from a 21-year-old deckhand to the 63-year-old captain, Ernest McSorley. The Fitz sank about 17 miles short of reaching Whitefish Bay near Sault Ste. to a steel mill near Detroit, with plans to dock in Cleveland for the winter afterward.ĭivers later retrieved many of the taconite pellets, and Johnson keeps a bucket containing hundreds of them in her apartment. ![]() The ship was carrying 26,000 tons of taconite pellets, which are tiny balls made from refined iron ore, to be used to build cars. She said her father didn’t feel comfortable on the Fitz but decided to make the trip and retire when it ended. Another cook who formerly spent about a decade on the ship turned down a chance to make the trip, Johnson said. Rafferty initially wasn’t supposed to be on the last voyage of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which was known as “the Fitz,” but the ship’s cook suffered bleeding ulcers that left him unable to go. They had three children and one on the way. When her father died, she was 23 and living with her husband at Fort Benning, Ga., where he was serving in the Army and waiting to go to Germany. Johnson married when she was 17 and her husband was 20. He lives in Toledo, Ohio, where they grew up. She has a half-brother from her mother’s first marriage, Randall Williamson. Johnson was the only child of Rafferty and his wife, the former Brooksie Williamson, who were married in 1949. The “winds of November” whipped through the park as “the crowd lapped up her stories and her cake,” the newspaper reported. The Detroit Free Press reported Johnson used one of those in November 2013 to make apple Dutch cake, which was served to guests at an outdoor memorial ceremony the River Rouge, Mich., Historical Museum held in a park about 1,000 feet from where the Edmund Fitzgerald was launched. “I use a lot of his recipes now,” she said. Johnson opened a worn copy of her father’s cookbook, “Ship’s Cook and Baker.” She said, “I would ask, ‘What are we going to do with all that?’” When he was home, Rafferty would make huge pots of spaghetti and chili, Johnson said. On his bald head he often wore a fedora, which is a felt hat with a wide brim and indented crown. She recalled Rafferty as a kind, jolly, heavy-set man who loved his family dearly and was accustomed to cooking for 30 or 40 people at a time. Still, Johnson said the statements attributed to the cook were the type of thing her father would have said. Lightfoot took some artistic license in writing those words, as nobody knows what the men on the ship really said. ![]() “When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin’Īt 7 p.m. Lightfoot’s song mentioned the ship’s cook as it described the doomed vessel’s final hours: I’m just the daughter of the cook on the Edmund Fitzgerald.” “Up there it’s like I’m a famous person, though I’m really not. Johnson made a presentation Saturday at a “Gales of November” conference held to mark its 40th anniversary in Duluth, Minn., and she is scheduled to appear Tuesday at an event in Detroit.ĭuring an interview last month in her apartment, Johnson said she looked forward to returning to the Great Lakes area. She has also spoken often in public about the sinking. ![]() Johnson became an active part of the ship’s community of survivors, and has been interviewed many times for books, TV reports and newspaper articles. Pam Johnson said Lightfoot personally persuaded her 15 years ago to begin attending events held each November in the Great Lakes area to memorialize the ship’s crew. She noted that an autographed copy of “Summertime Dream,” Lightfoot’s album containing the song, is among memorabilia she keeps in the fifth-floor, high-rise apartment where she lives with Bill Johnson, her husband of 46 years. “I love Gordon Lightfoot and that song,” the 63-year-old Johnson said in a recent interview. 10, 1975.Ĭanadian singer-songwriter Lightfoot paid tribute to those who died by writing the song, which rose to No. Her father, 62-year-old ship’s cook Robert Rafferty, was among the 29 crew members who all perished when a storm bringing near hurricane-force winds sank the freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior on the evening of Nov. The song holds special meaning for Abilene resident Pam Johnson. So begins Gordon Lightfoot’s haunting 1976 ballad, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead “The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
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