Today’s Cracked Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
It was to be the last trip of the season for the 640-foot steel bulk carrier Carl D. Bradley when it left Buffington, Indiana, bound for Rogers City, Michigan late on November 17, 1958. Captain Roland Bryan and his crew were eager to be heading home. Although the weather was not ideal, no one wanted to delay the boat’s departure.
Over the course of the season there had been some concern about the Bradley’s condition. In a letter to his girlfriend, Captain Bryan had written, “This boat is getting pretty ripe for too much weather.” The aging boat was scheduled to have major repairs and a new $800,000 cargo hold installed over the winter.
By the next afternoon the weather had worsened steadily until the wind was blowing between 60 and 65 mph and Lake Michigan was spewing up to 25-foot (7.5m) waves. At 5:30 p.m. the Bradley had passed Cana Island and was turning to head across the open lake when deckhands Frank Mays and Gary Price heard a loud thud unlike any of the regular noises made by the rusting hull. They hurried up to main deck and found a wide crack running through the middle of the deck and saw the stern beginning to drop. The ship was breaking apart.
Within a mere fifteen minutes, the Bradley broke in two and sank bow first. There was barely enough time to send a mayday. Trying to reach a life raft on the deck behind the pilothouse, two crewmen, Fleming and Mays, were thrown overboard when the boat lurched to port. They came upon a raft that had been swept off the deck, climbed up, then pulled deckhands Gary Strzelecki and Dennis Meredith to safety. The four men struggled to keep the raft upright, but lost Meredith when it flipped over. During the night their precarious craft flipped several times and eventually the struggle to survive proved too much for Strzelecki – he floated away, despite the urging of Mays and Fleming. The only survivors were Mays and Fleming, who were picked up by a Coast Guard cutter 14 hours after the boat went down. In all, Rogers City would lose 33 citizens in yet another November tragedy.
The Doomed Carl D. Bradley
Culled from: Disaster Great Lakes
Garretdom
It’s time for another vintage morbid article, this time illustrating the point that bad cops have always been out there beating up the innocent. (And yes, I’m getting lazy in my advancing age, and thought I’d just start sharing the articles as clippings instead of transcribing them.)
October 8, 1886
Marion Times-Standard
I was able to locate a follow-up article indicating what happened to the murderous cops. Something, but not much:
October 16, 1886
New York Times
More bad news can be read at Garretdom.