Apologies to the Brits. From the pen of my mama. Check it out.

One thing I thought I could do during WWII was to find out the customers of the O.P.C. [Ohio Power Company, now AEP] who had sons in the service, learn their names and ask about them when the customers paid their bills. Few checks were used back then so we were busy with cash customers. I always asked John’s Dad [my grandpa Maney] about John [my dad] and he would reply. Then, one day, he volunteered that John was on his way home! That’s why when I saw John in at Dolly’s [a now extinct local restaurant], I stopped to tell him his dad had told me he was on his way home and I wanted to thank him for all he’d done for our country–and for me. I shook his hand as my Dad had taught me, got my Coke and went to a booth to look at the Saturday Evening Post, a magazine I dearly loved for its funny cartoons. When I left to go get [my sister] Betty at Thomas’ Jewelry (I’d worked there Saturday afternoons and evenings for quite awhile) John was still sitting up front on a bar stool. I stopped to show him a cartoon, he asked me if I’d like to go to the movie and I said yes after I’d told Betty I wouldn’t be walking home with her. John wasn’t really sure who I was ’til he walked me home and saw Dad’s picture. I knew he hadn’t been with a girl for over 2 years so when he was leaving I kissed him on his lips (yips as [granddaughter] Bridget used to say) and I suppose it turned out to be too much for him.

Heh. Classic mama. I’m still trying not to think too much about that kissing stuff, though. Kinda disgusting, even at this stage of the game. 🙂 Remember, remember the 10th of November, a key date in Maney family history.

Hard to believe it’s been 40 years. I remember that day well. May her crew rest in peace and rise in glory.

It was exactly 40 years ago Tuesday when “the winds of November came early” and took the legendary Great Lakes freighter Edmund Fitzgerald and 29 souls to the bottom of Lake Superior, a disaster memorialized in book and song that remains mired in maritime mystery.

The 729-foot ore-carrier, called the “Queen of the Great Lakes” sank during a brutal storm on the eastern section of the lake, but the exact cause of its demise continues to elude experts and historians. From the plausible explanations offered in Gordon Lightfoot’s haunting classic, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” to crackpot theories involving space aliens, theories abound as to what caused one of the 20th century’s best-chronicled American shipwrecks.

“There were no survivors and no witnesses and we will never know, definitely, what happened on Nov. 10, 1975,” Fredrick Stonehouse, the author of the 1982 book “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” told FoxNews.com. “We do know that the crew must have thought, ‘We’re hurt, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.'”

The storm that day, by any measure, was horrible. But despite boasting 90 mph winds and waves measuring 25 feet, the vessel, laden with taconite pellets and headed from Superior, Wis., to Detroit (and not Cleveland, as Lightfoot sang), should have been able to survive, according to many historians. Its captain was the experienced E.R. McSorley and it was being followed by another ship, the Arthur M. Anderson, which never heard a distress call.

Read it all.