Lake Michigan, Manitowoc, WI

Lake Michigan, Manitowoc, Wisconsin, September 5, 2010

It's not often that the Great Lakes and Midwest become haunting, poetic subject matter in a pop song. Though the Edmund Fitzgerald sunk in Lake Superior, we always sang the line "Old (Lake) Michigan steams like a young man's dreams" from Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" as we biked along the shore on foggy days. There was another pop song on 45 RPM about the fog and waves of Lake Michigan and the "lonesome moaning" of the light houses in Manitowoc, two Rivers, Kewaunee, and the Two Creeks Nuclear plant called "T.R. Special" by The Nite-Cappers (performed in a Johnny Cash style). It was a favorite on the local AM radio studio in the 1970s and can sometimes be found on YouTube.