Spend enough time along the shores of Lake Superior and it won’t be long before there’s some reminder of what happened “when the gales of November came early.”

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the largest and most famous of the estimated 6,500 ships that have gone down in the Great Lakes. But the

Fitzgerald is remembered while the others are forgotten, thanks in large part to Gordon Lightfoot’s haunting 1976 folk ballad that became a surprise hit.

The Fitzgerald, a 730-foot long freighter named after a Milwaukee insurance company executive, went down in Lake Superior on Nov. 10, 1975. All 29 men on board died.

The Fitz, as it’s still affectionately called, was the largest ship on the Great Lakes when it launched in 1958 and kept that title unt

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