In his memoirs Sow's Ear to Silk Purse James Edward Blake Graham describes serving aboard Windsolite during the Second World War when experienced mariners were serving on Atlantic convoys, leaving their positions to be filled by inexperienced young farm-boys like himself.

[3] According to Graham the vessel required a crew of approximately thirty seamen to staff two watches.

In his memoirs, My Life on Earth and Elsewhere, R. Murray Schafer described the nine months he spent serving as a novice deckhand aboard Imperial Windsor in 1955.

Schafer described how, even though she was flat-bottomed, and unsuited to ocean travel, the vessel made occasional trips to ports on the Atlantic seaboard.

After she was sold in 1973, while traveling light in the Pelee passage, the vessel, which had recently been renamed Cardinal was struck by the larger and older lake freighter Henry Steinbrenner.