The riverboat captain is a storyteller. Captain Don Sanders shares the stories of his long association with the river — from discovery to a way of love and life. This a part of a long and continuing story.
By Capt. Don Sanders
Special to NKyTribune
So far, with the bitter weather of January 2025, this time of year reminds me of more extremely frozen times on the river. As I may have mentioned in previous columns, I love these cold, snowy days – or, at least, I did as a young fellow working after high school hours at Walt’s Boat Harbor on the frigid Ohio River across from the Cincinnati West End Power Plant. Holmes High School let out at 3:15, and Walt expected to see me get off the school bus at the top of the hill at promptly 4 o’clock.
Although the river could be a mean environment during January, a list of chores the old taskmaster expected me to accomplish still awaited my arrival.
My assignments were those Walter could not do alone with his frail health and weak heart. One of my favorite responsibilities was utilizing a two-wheel dolly to haul moderate-sized barrel loads of coal from the pile stacked high atop the hill. After a hundred pounds or more of lump bituminous filled the stout cardboard container, I got behind the load and shoved it to the top of the steep, concrete sidewalk stretching from the parking lot down to the river, some 100 feet lower, depending on the elevation of the water.
The very top of the ramp sat at a precariously sheer angle which, had it not been for a pair of stout fireman’s boots I wore for the chore, I could have never handled the load weighing nearly equal to that of my skinny frame plus bulky, winter clothing. However, the thick rubber soles and heels of the boots allowed me to hang onto the handle of the heavily laden load of coal as I slid down the ramp on the bottoms of the boots until the cart and I reached the ramp of the headboat. From there to the potbelly stove inside the boat was the most arduous ordeal of the entire trip. One thing I learned long ago was finding joy in the hardest of chores and making a game of what others generally regarded as work, but I called fun.
As a member of the first crew of Captain John Beatty’s CLARE E. BEATTY during the last week of December 1970 and into January 1971, raising sunken coal barges at Gallipolis, Ohio, the ambient air temperature instantly froze my handlebar mustache as I stepped beyond the warm galley door and onto the deck of the CLARE. All the salvage rig’s lines (ropes to ye lubbers) required pummeling against the deck or something else solid to break the ice crystals, binding them into the grotesque shapes they were left the last time anyone handled them.
Before diving on the sunken wrecks, a wet-suited frogman required an insulated cooler full of heated water dumped inside his rubber garment before plummeting beneath the murky, frigid waters of the Upper Ohio River. Though the freezing water temperature severely limited his time beneath the seething tide, the skilled diver quickly performed his assignments, was out of the river, and recuperated in a hot shower onboard the CLARE. In his younger days, Captain Beatty dove on submerged wrecks wearing a hard-hatted standard diving dress or a deep sea-suited heavy underwater gear until lighter and more comfortable subaqueous wear appeared like the wetsuit the aquatic crewman wore on the Gallipolis job.
Seven years later, Captain Betty dealt with freezing conditions on the Ohio River that were far worse than those hampering him at Gallipolis. In January of 1978, prolonged plunging temperatures and record glacial weather paralyzed the Ohio Valley—snowdrifts from the Blizzard of ’78 as high as 12 feet smothered everything. Towboat traffic snarled in the ice-choked Ohio River when Cap’n Beatty volunteered his beloved CLARE E. BEATTY into the freezing fray to help sort things out among the confusion around Markland Lock & Dam. For some time, the heroic skipper and his trusted CLARE snagged and corralled the runaway barges until the CLARE found herself engulfed in the crushing ice above the dam. Newspaper photos of the time caught the Captain and his crew abandoning their beloved vessel before it descended to the bottom of the river on a shifting mountain of broken ice.
Eventually, the CLARE found rebirth after her owner raised and restored her to her former glory. After Cap resurrected his flagship, I made several trips with him as a Pilot, including his last trip on the Mississippi River, helping bring “Beatty’s Navy,” as he called his ragtag fleet, safely back to Yankee Landing, his homeport in Warsaw, Kentucky after an unsuccessful attempt to raise barges at Helena, Arkansas.
If we must discuss blustery and wintry meteorology, let’s remember the “granddaddy” of them all, the lethal Winter of 1917-18, one of the coldest on record when the Ohio River froze along its entire length. Up and down the Ohio, countless large and small vessels succumbed to the relentless, grinding ice. Steamboats moored at the Cincinnati Public Landing suffered severely.
My 20-year-old grandmother, Edith Sanders, watched from the kitchen window of her apartment on Front Street in Covington, across the river from the public landing. She witnessed the demise of two of the most magnificent steamers ever to run on the Ohio River.
“I saw them all go under the ice,” Grandmother Edith often recalled.
At the top of the tally of that winter’s destruction, the majestic twins, the CITY OF CINCINNATI and the CITY OF LOUISVILLE of the Louisville & Cincinnati Packet Line owned by Covington’s Commodore Frederick Laidley, were both total wrecks. With the loss of so many steamboats, the packetboat trade on the Ohio River never recovered. Soon, railroads and towboats assumed the businesses once dominated by the pageant of the packets.
Captain Don Sanders is a river man. He has been a riverboat captain with the Delta Queen Steamboat Company and with Rising Star Casino. He learned to fly an airplane before he learned to drive a “machine” and became a captain in the USAF. He is an adventurer, a historian and a storyteller. Now, he is a columnist for the NKyTribune, sharing his stories of growing up in Covington and his stories of the river. Hang on for the ride — the river never looked so good.
Purchase Captain Don Sanders’ The River book here
Capt. Don Sanders The River: River Rat to steamboatman, riding ‘magic river spell’ to 65-year adventure is now available for $29.95 plus handling and applicable taxes. This beautiful, hardback, published by the Northern Kentucky Tribune, is 264-pages of riveting storytelling, replete with hundreds of pictures from Capt. Don’s collection — and reflects his meticulous journaling, unmatched storytelling, and his appreciation for detail. This historically significant book is perfect for the collections of every devotee of the river.
You may purchase your book by mail from the Northern Kentucky Tribune — or you may find the book for sale at all Roebling Books locations and at the Behringer Crawford Museum and the St. Elizabeth Healthcare gift shops.
Order your Captain Don Sanders’ ‘The River’ book here.
Capt. Don tells it well. Thankfully, in our latitudes, it’s not an annual event to get frozen rivers from prolonged zero and below winters. Like Capt. Don, many of us will never forget being deckhands and having to buck up under miserable, bone chilling, nostril freezing, feet and hands aching-then having no feelings, just brutal conditions in those “granddaddy” winters in the 1970s.
Another great read Cap.
Well told accounts of wintertime on the river/\.