Edmund Fitzgerald life ring found

[kenb]

A piece of history may have been found last week on the shore of Lake Superior in Copper Harbor. A downstate family believes they found a life ring from the Edmund Fitzgerald which went down in a storm near Whitefish Point in 1975.

Joe Rasch and his family were vacationing in Fort Wilkins State Park.

"Well, I just thought I found an old life ring," said Rasch. "And I rolled it down to my daughter. I didn't take any time to read it or anything. I just rolled it down to her. And another daughter said, 'Dad, there's a name on it.' I said, 'Really? What is it?' She says, 'Well, it's...Ed...it's really hard to read....Edmund...Fitzgerald.'"

The Rasch family hasn't authenticated the ring, but plan to do so when they donate it to the Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Point

http://www.wluctv6.com/Global/story.asp?S=6893103&nav=81AX

kenb

 

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[Jeffro]

Turn up your speakers-



[youtube=425,350]8_8s2zsNhSM[/youtube]

 

[Jeffro]

Floating around for 32 years? Yeah, thats creepy. Wonder if it was snagged on the wreckage and finally found its way loose or something?

 

[djui5]

nice picture Jeffro

 

[Gypsy Heart]

Very cool.......I remember reading about people finding deck chairs from the Titantic years later washing up on shore

 

[bergie]

They were looking at downed trees and it was well into the tree. Sounds like it was up in the tree before the tree came down. It's possible it got caught up in the tree years ago when the tree was smaller then went up in the air as the tree grew. Then it was not discovered until the tree came down.

 

[kenb]

Re: Edmund Fitzgerald life ring found(UPDATE)

Life ring probably not from 'Edmund Fitzgerald'

Family found object with ship's name written on

The Associated Press


DETROIT — The Edmund Fitzgerald, already the stuff of Great Lakes legend, has spawned another tale.


A vacationing family hunting for rocks along a remote patch of Lake Superior shoreline earlier this month believed they had found a life ring from the Edmund Fitzgerald that sank roughly 200 miles away 32 years ago. It reads "Edmund Fitzgerald" in faded but mostly legible white letters, and matched in many ways a ring recovered from the ship now on display at a shipwreck museum.


But the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum received a visitor recently who refutes the ring's authenticity.


Cynthia Edwards, of Oakland County's West Bloomfield Township, says her father acquired the orange preserver more than 20 years ago and stenciled "Edmund Fitzgerald" on it.


The ring was kept at the family's cabin along Lake Superior and the Eagle River — not far from where it ultimately was found in the Upper Peninsula's Keweenaw Peninsula — until it was lost about two years ago. Her father painted the ship's name on the ring as kind of a remembrance of the ship, Edwards said.


"It was never to trick anybody or make anybody think it was real," she said.


Edwards told a museum employee last week the truth behind the orange preserver.


"With the information coming in now, it looks more and more like it's not from the Edmund Fitzgerald," said Tom Farnquist, executive director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, which owns the museum.


Farnquist believed it could be the real deal but made no promises when Joe Rasch and his family brought the ring to the museum in Whitefish Point in early August. It matches in size and configuration to the ring on display, but has some key differences: The one Rasch found has no "S.S." before "Edmund Fitzgerald" and reads "Duluth" on its back side.


Farnquist said the differences were puzzling but at least the latter came with a plausible explanation: The Milwaukee-based ship spent its winters in Duluth, Minn.


http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com...?AID=/20070821/GPG0101/708210537/1207/GPGnews

kenb