Fifty years on, Detroit’s bells still toll for the Edmund Fitzgerald

Family members of crew who perished when the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald sank 50 years ago in Lake Superior were among hundreds gathered at Mariners' Church of Detroit on Sunday, Nov. 9, to commemorate the shipwreck immortalized in a Gordon Lightfoot song.

The standing-room only crowd spilled beyond the pews of the church overlooking the Detroit River and into an entryway. A bell rang out 29 times in honor of each of those lost – an annual tradition inadvertently started by the church’s late rector, who attracted the attention of puzzled reporters when he rang an approximately 45-minute death knell the morning after the Nov. 10, 1975, wreck of the lake freighter.

John O’Brien, 67, rang the bell once on Sunday for his father, Eugene O'Brien – a wheelsman on the ship from Toledo. O’Brien flew t