People are gathering at ceremonies around the Great Lakes this weekend to honor the memories of the 29 crew members who died a half-century ago on Nov. 10, 1975, when the Edmund Fitzgerald — the largest freighter on the Lakes at the time — sank during a ferocious storm on Lake Superior.

Fifty years later, the loss of a ship known as the “Titanic” of the Great Lakes remains one of the most famous shipwrecks in history.

It’s buoyed in our memories by the haunting song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” released by Gordon Lightfoot a year after the tragedy, and the lingering mystery around what exactly happened to cause the Fitzgerald to go down so quickly that the captain didn’t even issue a distress call.

The anniversary of the tragedy is also a yearly reminder of the size, scale and p

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