It’s amazing how finding a way to retell a tragic story can give friends in recovery a new sense of purpose.

What started in May 2023 with retired friends smoking cigars and sharing their favorite Gordon Lightfoot songs shortly after the singer’s death later became a moving radio play that dramatically retells the 1975 demise of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Lightfoot immortalized the ‘Fitz’ in a 1976 hit. Sunday marks the 49th anniversary of the shipwreck.

The radio project, according to narrator and retired journalist Dave Nimmer, gave a group of friends in their seventies and eighties something good, meaningful and real.

“We’re a bunch of guys who are recovering alcoholics and want to go somewhere,” said Nimmer, whose voice once invited viewers into his stories at WCCO News. ‘Yes, I want to go somewhere. I want to be happy. So you do what you do. And I tell stories.”

According to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald began its final voyage on Lake Superior at approximately 2:30 PM on November 9, 1975 from Superior, Wisconsin, with Captain Ernest M. McSorley in command. It was later joined by the Arthur M. Anderson, led by Bernie Cooper, from Two Harbors, Minnesota. The ships, which were in radio contact, were somewhere between 10 and 15 miles away.

On November 10, weather conditions continued to deteriorate, with high winds and rough waters. As the day passed, McSorley radioed about the damage to the Fitzgerald and said the ballast tanks were taking on water. The two ships had their last radio contact on November 10 at 7:10 PM. At 7:15 a.m. the Fitzgerald’s radar signal disappeared. All 29 members of the crew were lost.

The radio play project actually began 42 years ago, when Hal Barnes wrote a script about the “Fitz,” based on a National Transportation Safety Board report, including broadcasts between the doomed ship and the Anderson. He lived in Duluth at the time and was intrigued by the shipwreck.