The Gales of November Quotes

“There's a port on a western bay
and it serve 100 ships a day
Lonely sailors pass the time away
And talk about their homes.

There's a girl in this harbour town
And she works laying whiskey down
They say, "Brandy, fetch another round"
She serves them whiskey and wine,

The sailors say, Brandy, you're a fine girl
What a good wife you would be
But my life, my love, and my lady is the sea”
― John U. Bacon, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald

“earned”
― John U. Bacon, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald

“In 1913, in the midst of this unprecedented prosperity, the copper miners went on a strike that lasted nine months and culminated in disaster. On Christmas Eve the strikers and their families gathered to keep their spirits up at Calumet’s Seventh Street Italian Hall. It had a saloon and an A&P store on the first floor and a spacious banquet room on the second, with a stage at one end. A crowd arrived for a holiday party it hoped would provide a little cheer during hard times. The party was in full swing when somebody yelled, “Fire!” The alarm was false, but the resulting panic was real. Because it was still commonplace for homes and buildings to burn to the ground within minutes, incinerating whoever was trapped inside, cooler heads could not prevail. The entire crowd ran to escape, but with only a pair of doors at one end of the hall, both of which opened inward, the more people pushed, the harder it became to open them. The screaming and shoving didn’t stop until nine men, eleven women, and fifty-three children had been crushed, suffocated, or both. The Calumet Town Hall served as a morgue for seventy-three casualties. “The union blamed the [mining] company for yelling, ’Fire!’ and vice versa,” local historian William John Foster said, “but to this day no one knows for sure.” The tragedy inspired a well-known limitation on free speech: It is illegal to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater.”
― John U. Bacon, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald

“The difference between ships and trucks, therefore, is not 6 percent or 60 percent—margins any corporation would covet—but 600 percent, an astronomical savings. Shipping entails far less friction and traffic, and accommodates much more volume. A flatbed truck can haul two large steel coils; a train car can carry up to five; but a typical barge can hold two hundred, and an average-sized freighter like the Harvest Spirit, at 448 feet, can take six hundred.”
― John U. Bacon, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald