Copyright USGenNet Inc., 2015 All Rights Reserved USGenNet Data Repository Please read USGenNet Copyright Statement on this page: Submitted by Linda Talbott for the USGenNet Data Repository http://www.us-data.org/ ========================================================================= USGenNet Data Repository NOTICE: These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or presentation by any other organization. Non-commercial organizations desiring to use this material must obtain the consent of the transcriber prior to use. Individuals desiring to use this material in their own research may do so. =========================================================================== Formatted by USGenNet Data Repository Chief Archivist, Linda Talbott All of the above information must remain when copied or downloaded. =========================================================================== 2 Survivors Tell Grim Story of Great Lakes Sinking; 33 Lost ----------------- Charlevoix, Mich., (AP) - The grim story of the sinking of a storm-battered Great Lakes freighter which carried 33 men to a watery grave was told last night by the two sur- vivors of the disaster. Frank Mays and Elmer Fleming were thrown from their small raft three times in the night by the violent waters of northern Lake Michigan and three times they managed to find the raft in the dark, climb aboard and hang on for their lives. Mays and Fleming, the only known survivors of the giant cargo ship, Carl D. Bradley, which went down Tuesday, told their stories from their hospital beds here. The two were plucked from the swirling waters by a Coast Guard cutter that also re- covered eight floating bodies. * * * * THE JOB of trying to iden- tify the bodies went on through the night in this town's little one-story city hall which has been turned into a temporary morgue. Coast Guard teams searched the islands and waters near here yesterday where the ship went down and planned another search today on the chance some of the other crewmen made it to land. Eighteen bodies were re- covered by sundown yester- day. Seventeen were here. The other was picked up by a freighter bound for Mil- waukee. The Coast Guard units were to set out at dawn from this windswept northwestern Michigan town at the top of the Lower Peninsula to re- sume their search of the now calming waters for the 15 men still missing in the worst Great Lakes shipping disas- ter in 18 years. * * * * * MAYS AND FLEMING, al- though weakened and suffer- ing from exposure, spoke with strong voices, and ap- peared little-the-worse for their 14-hour ordeal. They told of the terror and confusion on the sink- ing Bradley, once the larg- est freighter on the Great Lakes, and of their praying and shivering on the tossing raft in near-freezing tem- peratures. Fleming, the Bradley's first mate and a 43-year-old vet- eran of sailing the Great Lakes, did most of the talking in a brief interview with newsmen. * * * "I WAS in the pilot house on watch with the captain," he said. "We heard a thud. The the alarm bell started ringing. "Something spun us around," he said, "then we looked down on the deck; It wasn't hard to see some- thing was wrong. The stern was sagging." Fleming managed to get off a distress signal on the Brad- ley's radio. Then he was in the cold water. It was almost sundown. "We climbed on the raft and held on with all we had." * * * AT FIRST there were four on the raft, a firmly-built orange-painted wooden struc- ture with a low metal railing and metal pontoons. "We lost one of them when the raft took a complete flip," Fleming said. "I swam until I got back to it. Then I helped the others get back on." ..Twice more in the night the waves whipped up by a 60-mile-an-hour wind lifted the raft and overturned it. * * * MAYS, 26, was below decks in the conveyor room when the mysterious thud and the alarm bells sent him running to deck. "Once we got on the raft," he said, "I thought we'd be all right. I knew they would find us." The Bradley carried one raft - the one that saved the lives of Fleming and Mays - and two lifeboats. Although there were scattered reports of debris, the two lifeboats were not found in the first day of the search. The freighter was com- manded by Capt. Roland Bryan, who spent his winters in Loudonville with his broth- er, Arno Bryan, who operates a grocery store. He is missing and believed to have been lost with the ship. "The Knickerbocker News", Albany, N.Y. Thursday, November 20, 1958 ===========================================================================