TWO HARBORS, Minn. – Nolan Church joined the crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald as a porter late in life — a new career at age 50 after he was laid off from mining-related work in Silver Bay.

After long stints on the massive taconite-carrying laker sailing mostly from Silver Bay to Toledo, Ohio, Church loved to spoil his children and tell stories that made them roar with laughter. They sometimes worried about him on the vast waters of the Great Lakes, his three daughters said recently. But when they would ask him if it was scary out there, he reassured them:

“Not on the Ed,” came his steadfast response, according to daughter Bonnie Kellerman.

Church treated his family to shopping and an early dinner at Duluth’s Chinese Lantern before heading out on what was going to be his last trip of the season on Nov. 9, 1975.

The next evening, the 55-year-old father of five and 28 other crew members disappeared with their trusted ship in one of the most legendary wrecks on the Great Lakes. Their bodies were never recovered.

Though the ship sank in Canadian waters close to Michigan, its mythic status looms large in Minnesota. On every anniversary, the decommissioned beacon at Split Rock Lighthouse north of Two Harbors is lit in honor of the lost men. Church was one of two Minnesotans who perished on the ship, along with seven men from northwest Wisconsin.

“There hasn’t been another casualty like it since the Fitzgerald sank,” said David Schauer of the Lake Superior Maritime Visitor Center. “Nothing to the extreme of losing a laker of that size with all hands.

“This time of year when the gales of November kick up, it’s almost impossible not to think of the men on the Fitz.”

As communities all along Lake Superior commemorate the 50th anniversary of the storm and the wreck Monday, memories and the mystery of what exactly happened still haunt Church’s family and many others.

Even if they never find answers, they said, they want to make sure their loved ones are not forgotten.

A storm was brewing as the Edmund Fitzgerald, under the direction of Capt. Ernest McSorley, left the Burlington Northern Railroad Dock No. 1 in Superior, Wisconsin, loaded with 26,116 tons of taconite and headed to Zug Island in Detroit.

As the Fitz and another ship called the Arthur M. Anderson moved north across Lake Superior, winds whipped to nearly 60 miles per hour and waves topped 25 feet. McSorley radioed Capt. J.B. Cooper of the nearby ship to tell him the Fitz was listing to one side and taking on water, though he believed the pumps could handle it. McSorley asked Cooper to stay close.

But visibility was tricky, with waves obscuring the ship on the radar screen. And it had begun to snow.

The Fitzgerald slowly puttered close to Whitefish Point, Michigan. The first mate of the Anderson radioed for a check-in just after 7 p.m.

“We‘re holding our own,” McSorley famously told him.

Then, in a blink, the Fitzgerald was gone.

Cooper reluctantly turned the Anderson back to look for signs, according to transcripts of communications.

“Well, I’ll go back and take a look, but God, I’m afraid I’m going to take a hell of a beating out there,” Cooper said. “I’ll turn around and give ’er a whirl, but God, I don’t know. I’ll give it a try.”

Cooper would tell investigators that the Fitzgerald disappeared without a distress signal, leaving only an oil slick, lifeboats and debris in 41-degree water.

Back in Silver Bay, a 10 p.m. news broadcast delivered the report of the sinking. Church’s children began gathering at their mother’s home as news crews descended in the days that followed.

“We didn’t know any more than they did,” said Church’s daughter Marilynn Peterson, who was 21 at the time.

The U.S. Coast Guard and others searched for the ship, once the largest and fastest on the Great Lakes.

Its sinking is a mystery that has never been solved. Did it ground in shallow water before floundering? Did it break in half navigating a trio of aggressive waves?

In the following decades, a handful of teams made expeditions for a look at the massive loss. Larry Elliott, who was on the board at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, went along on three. He remembers the breathtaking view from a submarine as the long-lost ship appeared out of the darkness at 530 feet deep.

“To see the ship, to see the name Edmund Fitzgerald on the side of the pilot house is just awesome,” he said of its grandeur.

The ship rests split in two. Its stern is upside down, and a thick steel plate is caved in at the bow. Taconite covers every horizontal surface. The door to the pilot house is open and doesn’t seem damaged. In a storm, it would have been locked shut. Elliott said he wonders if that means there was a split second when someone inside of it knew their fate.

“We’ll never know the answer,” he said.

While much has been made about the ship’s sinking, less has been said about its crew.

“They were all blue-collar and felt lucky to be on a ship, compared to a mine or a factory or a farm,” said John U. Bacon, author of the recently released “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

Collectively, they were adventurous, self-taught and curious, Bacon said. They continued to read up on their trade and associated topics like meteorology. More than half had survived the Great Depression. Some served in World War II or the Korean War.

The rest were baby boomers and might have been to college or had plans to attend.

Besides Minnesota and Wisconsin, the men of the Fitzgerald came mostly from Great Lakes states including Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Other ships might have had divisions between those who worked in the engine room versus the men in the pilot house, Bacon said. Not the Fitzgerald; McSorley insisted on camaraderie among his crew. He had a “no jerks policy” and had no problem booting a troublemaker from the team, according to Bacon, who spent years getting to know the crew members posthumously through their survivors.

Church’s daughter Debbie Gage said her dad saw the Fitzgerald crew as family.

Church loved to celebrate holidays with his family, which included his wife, Thelma, and children Bonnie, Ricky, Debbie, Marilynn and Michael. In addition to painting Christmas scenes on windows, he crafted boxes for the children’s Valentine’s Day cards. He brought ducks and bunnies home on Easter and made the kids elaborate costumes for Halloween.

“He never let us go without,” said Kellerman, his eldest daughter.

It was fitting, the three daughters said recently, that on his last day with them, they shopped and had a meal together. His daughters were in their 20s then and beginning families of their own. But he was insistent that his eldest, who lived hours away, come home before he boarded the Fitz.

“It was just like he knew something was going to happen,” said Kellerman, now 75.

As they dropped him off at the freighter in Superior, he handed his cowboy hat to Kellerman’s son, Greg, who was 3.

“He told him that he’d get it when he came back,” she said.

When the Great Lakes ships were laid up for the winter, Blaine Wilhelm, an oiler, went home to his wife and seven kids in Moquah, Wisconsin, a few miles west of Ashland.

After months away, the kids would pile on top of him, thrilled to see him, said daughter Mary Nolan, 70.

She remembers him making scrambled eggs, ham and fried donuts on weekend mornings to give his wife, Lorraine, a break. He would bring home coffee cans filled with poker winnings from games played on the Fitzgerald, dumping out the money to be divided into seven equal piles, one for each child.

“He was a loving father,” she said.

He taught his kids to fish and swim. On Sundays, he would bar-hop with friends in Ashland, an event they labeled “Sunday school,” said daughter Heidi Brabon, 62.

Wilhelm, a U.S. Navy veteran, spent 19 years working on the Great Lakes.

Thomas Borgeson, the only man aboard from Duluth, had gotten a job on the Great Lakes when he was 16. He stepped away for 11 years for a landlocked job as a machinist but had returned to the ships a few months earlier. He left behind five children, according to the Duluth News Tribune.

Ransom Cundy, of Superior, was a watchman who had been on ships for 30 years, including eight aboard the Edmund Fitzgerald. His family was among the most widely reported on after his death.

His buddy Fred Beetcher, a porter in the galley who was also from Superior, had been a seaman for seven years, shipping out “when he got tired and wanted a change of pace,” his son told the Duluth News Tribune in the aftermath of the wreck.

John Simmons, of Ashland, Wisconsin, was best friends with McSorley and the second-oldest on board at age 62 (McSorley was 63). The wheelsman was a storyteller, a jokester and a pool shark, according to Bacon.

John Mazes, also of Ashland, had sailed most of his life and never married, according to the Kenosha Times.

Allen Kalmon, 43, was in his first year on the Great Lakes. The ship’s second cook operated a pizza kitchen in Ashland and had been a bookkeeper and the city assessor, the Kenosha Times reported in 1975.

Michael Armagost, of Iron River, Wisconsin, was the ship’s third mate. He was in his first year aboard a ship, The Associated Press reported at the time.

The men worked 42 weeks a year and formed tight friendships. Back on land, their families were largely unknown to each other until they were united in tragedy.

Over the years, some family members became more deeply connected over their desire to keep the site of the sunken ship sacred. Teams had begun diving expeditions, including one that found a body outside the ship, preserved by the cold water.

Families also wanted a memorial. A team with ties to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society proposed raising the ship’s bell, which was attached to the top of the pilot house.

“Maybe we could make one more dive, recover the bell and make that the centerpiece,” Elliott recalled the team deciding. “That was our commitment. That would be our last dive.”

They went down again in July 1995. Vintage video shows a man dressed in a puffy yellow Newtsuit, akin to what an astronaut would wear, cutting the 200-pound corroded bell loose before a team lifted it to the surface.

Elliott remembers its first ring, considered “the voice of the ship,” after it was pulled from the water.

“We all gasped,” he said recently.

The Canadian government has since limited access to the wreck.

The lack of real closure has always weighed on Church’s children. Each daughter had recurring dreams of their father in the months and years that followed his death.

Gage dreamed that he had washed up on an island and lived there, wearing animal skins to stay warm. Peterson dreamed that he made it to shore. Kellerman had dreams of him walking through the door of their home, surprising them.

They’ve had to fend off dark thoughts about his last moments and have absorbed scores of theories on why the ship went down.

Their mother, who died of cancer in 1993, would grow ill around the anniversary and during storms that whipped through the lake.

A headstone for Nolan Church rests next to his wife’s in a local cemetery. But his surviving children consider Lake Superior his gravesite. And the tragedy has made their relationships to the lake complicated. All three live near it in the Two Harbors area. But Gage, now 73, has for 50 years been too frightened to be on it or in it.

It’s beautiful, she said, “but you never know with that lake.”

Brabon, who lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, is drawn to the water. She visits Whitefish Point and the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum there often. She likes to stand on the beach among the driftwood and memorials to the Fitzgerald crew, knowing that 17 miles out her father, Blaine Wilhelm, rests.

“It brings me peace somehow,” she said.

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