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A life ring and a piece of a lifeboat from the Edmund Fitzgerald were sold at auction Friday for $150,000, a month after the 50th anniversary of the famous shipwreck. Lake Superior In which 29 people were aboard.
These remains were discovered along the coast by a carpenter in 1975 michiganUpper Peninsula. There were no survivors when the ore carrier was destroyed in a tremendous storm and sank 535 feet (163 m) to the bottom of the lake.
“I’m stunned,” longtime owner Larry Orr, 77, said. “I never thought I’d get so much money in a million years. Shocked.”
Orr was curious about the shipwreck and eight days after “Fitz”, as it was known, while on leave from his job, he found a life ring and a piece of wood from a lifeboat.
The sale was conducted by Dumouchels. detroit The auction house and art gallery located one block from the Mariners’ Church, where a bell is rung on each anniversary of the sinking. The name of the buyer was not disclosed.
Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot commemorated the ship in 1976 with an iconic song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”.
For decades, Orr, who has lived in Yuli, Floridagave permission to the Michigan Museum to display the artifacts. He said he decided to sell them because he needed the money.
Orr recently agreed to turn them over to the state of Michigan as part of a $600,000 settlement in a completely unrelated misconduct lawsuit against the state police. But the state agreed to return them after The Associated Press wrote about the strange deal. The amount of Orr’s settlement did not change.