Looking back, it was quite a well-defined goal, including good food, a warm place to sleep and pretty good wages. The years after World War II found many of us graduating from high school, and job prospects were challenging. To even consider “working on the boats” required some form of “connection” and many a day sitting in the shipping office on west Superior Street in Duluth, Minnesota. Similar groups gathered in Port Arthur, Ontario, Marquette, Michigan, and Ashland, Wisconsin, on Lake Superior, as well as every other significant port on the whole Great Lakes.

I finally landed a deckhand job on the Steinbrenner Fleet’s Harry L. Findlay, learning quickly to keep the port hole over my little bunk closed if moisture was possible. Before long, the challenges of the maritime world made themselves known, finally leading me to seek a career that included much less water.

Some of this came back to me when we published The Night The Fitz Went Down (by Hugh E. Bishop), the recounting of the terrible fall storm that sank Edmund Fitzgerald and Captain Dudley Paquette’s experiences on the lake that same night. Then to get a letter from an old friend who felt that the book described what actually happened added to belief in all of our efforts.

John Sorenson now calls Spooner, Wisconsin, his home, and he sent quite a letter. I’ve known John for years, and we’ve been involved in many an enterprise along the way. Divergent interests separated us, but mutual respect maintained our bond of friendship. John had sailed for several seasons years ago, but he was not the only “sailor” in his family. His aunt and uncle worked in the galley on the boats for many years.

In his letter to me, John referred to a passage in the book that talked about a cook and his wife from a boat on which Captain Paquette served. “Every time his wife would do something he didn’t like, he’d cuss her out and kick her in the legs,” Paquette remembered.

Now let me share a bit of John’s letter:

“As I came to page 41 … I roared with laughter as ‘Gladys Birdie’ and her husband ‘Mac’ McDonald were my Aunt Birdie and Uncle Mac (she was my mother’s sister).

“I was aware of this funny story about Mac kicking Birdie in the legs,” John goes on, “but didn’t know anyone else knew about it.”

John wintered in those days with Birdie and Mac in Florida, leading to his meeting their friend Captain Sidney Ward, master of the old SS Joseph Block, one of Inland Steel’s veteran ore boats. This led to John gaining a job on that ship in 1953, his second year on the lakes. While on other Inland Steel boats during the next five years, John never sailed with Captain Paquette.

John has agreed that I may share his letter with our readers. I’m sure that you are intrigued, so read on:

“You see,” John continues, “back in the mid- and late 1940s my mother used to take me to visit Aunt Birdie and Uncle Mac whenever their ship arrived in Allouez, a part of Superior, Wisconsin. Of course, Aunt Birdie would always stuff a $20 bill in my pocket (without my mother knowing, of course) and often Uncle Mac would do the same plus a bag of fresh-made doughnuts. (Thirty or 40 bucks was big time for a young kid back then.) During these childhood visits to the Joseph Block and other Inland Steel boats they were on, I became acquainted with various personnel sometimes mentioned in the book.”

John’s story does not end there, dear reader. He intrigues us with this insight: “I didn’t take the time to tell the captain a funny story about old Uncle Mac and his final resting place, but I will share it with you.

“Along about 1965, Uncle Mac passed away down in Florida. I guess I was his only male heir as he willed me his gold watch and his ’55 Cadillac which was sent up to me. A few weeks later Aunt Birdie phoned, requesting I fulfill his last wish and take care of distributing Mac’s ashes in Lake Superior where he had spent a lifetime sailing on the ships.

“Of course, I agreed and in another few weeks I was informed by the Crawford Mortuary in Duluth that the remains of William J. McDonald (Uncle Mac) had arrived.”

“The easy and smart thing to do would have been for me to throw the box containing his ashes into Lake Superior from one of the Duluth Entry piers. But no, I had to get fancy by going up to Rice Lake and renting Ray Walburg’s J-3 Piper Cub float plane so I could properly cast the ashes from aloft - as they might do in the movies. It was a beautiful afternoon and after climbing to about 5,000 feet, I decided that such sea burial ceremonies should be conducted closer to the final burial area.

“Thus, I dropped down to 500 feet from the water about five miles off Two Harbors. At this altitude, and flying the Cub with the stick between my knees, I proceeded to open the box with Uncle Mac’s remains. (He now looked like cigar ashes.) Flying the plane with my knees/feet and holding the open box in my left hand, I opened the upper hinged side door of the plane with my right hand. In so doing, a tremendous rush of air into the plane resulted, and the vacuum of this air blast completely sucked Uncle Mac from his box, into my mouth, lungs and eyes, and what wouldn’t fit there distributed itself throughout the interior of the airplane!

“Poor Uncle Mac never made it to the water, but I damn near did,” John admits. “It was only through an instinctive panic pull-out I was able to fly again another day. Of course, when I returned the plane to its dock, Ray wanted to know what had happened to the interior of his airplane. I spent the next few hours ... cleaning …

“I never did tell Aunt Birdie,” John admits in closing, “about Uncle Mac’s final burial ceremony.”

A selection of Jim Marshall’s columns of lake lore and his inland sea voyages has been published as Lake Superior Journal: Views from the Bridge by Lake Superior Port Cities Inc. Follow this link for more information.

Feedback: jrm@lakesuperior.com