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
Last week’s column about the Delta Queen Steamboat Company’s announcement to place a FOR SALE sign on their historic steamboat received a broad audience throughout the river community.
Following a decade of “trying to secure both the necessary federal legislation that allows the DELTA QUEEN to operate by lobbying the U.S. Congress, as well as the funding for the complete refurbishment needed to carry overnight passengers again,” the company decided it was time for someone else to step up and continue the effort to preserve the QUEEN.
Although readers made many positive and supportive comments posted on social media, there were also remarks like this:
“If no solutions have come to (the) surface in the last 10 years, there will not be one now. We are talking MILLIONS of dollars to get this boat moving again. I would be surprised if it even floats.”
Or:
“I don’t see a sale happening… I just hope it is not too late to save this National Landmark.”
As a former Master (Captain) of what was, in the early 1970s, perhaps “the most famous operating steamboat in the world,” I am surprised that ready, willing, and able groups of eligible supporters are not clamoring over the right to become the ones who Save the DELTA QUEEN. How easily we forget.
So far, a commotion to save the DELTA QUEEN has yet to arise like the melee which occurred in California to preserve and restore the QUEEN’s brother ship, the DELTA KING.
Both the KING and QUEEN, completed at Stockton, California, in 1927 with Scottish galvanized steel hulls and choice exotic woods, including California-grained Golden Oak, Philippine Mahogany, and Teak, with Walnut trim, ran nightly passenger and freight cruises between San Francisco and Sacramento from 1927 to 1940. The opening of two of the world’s greatest bridges, the Golden Gate and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridges, significantly improved motor vehicle transportation, but they also lessened the need for a steamboat line. Both steamers ceased operation after the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair. World War II, though, saw the twins assume a different role.
During the Second World War, the KING and QUEEN became ferries, troop shuttles, and barracks boats for the U.S. Navy. Following the War, both boats went up for auction. With the purchase of the DELTA QUEEN in December 1946 by Captain Tom R. Greene of Cincinnati, the QUEEN found herself on the Mississippi, Ohio, and tributary rivers, where she had an illustrious and storied career. The KING did not fare so well.
Cap’n Tom initially bid on the DELTA KING. Still, he lost the offer to an importing and exporting business in Siam, which bid sight-unseen and mistakenly thought the river steamer was a seaworthy, propeller-driven ship. Captain Greene’s winning bid for the DELTA QUEEN began a memorable chapter in steamboat history.
With the departure of the DELTA QUEEN from California waters, the DELTA KING faced the wrecker’s ball when the once proud steamboat was again posted for sale by the Maritime Commission. The bid by the KING’s original owner, the River Line, failed to satisfy the Commission, and the KING went to the mothball fleet. When a bid was finally accepted, in 1948, by an outfit wanting to tow the KING to Seattle, plans quickly soured due to financial concerns, and the KING remained at a dock at the old Fulton Shipyard. While the DELTA QUEEN rose to fame as the new princess of the Mississippi River System, the KING became nearly forgotten.
In May 1950, when the KING’s owners announced, much like the present owners of the QUEEN had recently, that they were unable to carry out their original plans and were seeking new buyers, a burst of interest arose among various factions excited about the many options possible for the venerable steamboat.
In 1952, a construction company bought the DELTA KING, which towed the steamer some 1,500 miles north to British Columbia. There, it was beached within an artificial inlet and became a dormitory for construction workers at a Canadian aluminum smelter near the town of Kitimat. The KING’s engines, paddlewheel, shaft, and machinery were all removed except for the boilers and electric generators. These not only provided electricity and heat for the KING, but they also furnished these resources to the neighboring community. After six years at Kitimat, recently constructed housing nullified the need for the KING. Again, the KING found itself offered for sale.
In early 1959, interest arose in Stockton, California, the birthplace of the DELTA steamboats. After some wrangling with various organizations, groups, and concerns, a Stockton real estate broker announced the purchase of the DELTA KING from its owners in Canada. After workers made the riverboat ready for the trip through open waters, the KING braved three storms and arrived safely back in San Francisco Bay on April 28, 1959, where excitement mounted before the KING made its way to the City of its birth.
All along the way to Stockton, crowds gathered despite the KING arriving home after midnight. Several hundred fans crowded boats, the shoreline, and the docks. Newspaper headlines heralded the arrival of Stockton’s errant steamboat offspring. But after only a month of jubilation for the KING, a dissatisfied prospect seeking to own the boat filed a lawsuit claiming “someone snatched the KING out from under him.” Financial backers for the Stockton enterprise quickly withdrew their support at the first mention of a lawsuit.
However, for a brief moment in late ’59, the DELTA KING found fleeting notoriety in the MGM film, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where technicians disguised the Sacramento River boat to resemble a twin-stacked Mississippi River-style steamboat. There is a difference.
Ahead for the DELTA KING at Stockton lay a decade of entanglements, lawsuits, threats, financial troubles, official interruptions, and assorted headaches of various origins. Numerous buyers quibbled over buying the KING while it lay neglected and forlorn at Stockton. Still, despite all the quibbling, prevarication, and ambivalence surrounding the DELTA KING, interest in the steamer continued to keep the KING in the general thoughts of the public, as well as among the interests of various celebrities, including attorney Melvin Belli, the defender of Jack Ruby, the assassin of Lee Harvey Oswald, the slayer of President JFK.
By the late 1960s, a Sacramento newspaperman’s column lamenting the loss of both the DELTA QUEEN and KING rekindled interest in returning the KING to the northern destination of the riverboats when they were the primary connectors between the California Capital and the City by the Bay. Others picked up and rekindled interest in returning the KING to Sacramento.
What followed was a scheme to hijack the KING under the cover of secrecy and return her to Sacramento. With the voluntary aid of a fledgling lawyer, a non-profit organization was founded for that purpose. By sheer piracy, according to Melvin Belli, the KING found its way to the Sacramento waterfront after an absence of 30 years.
Belli charged, “Piracy on the low seas!”
Once back in Sacramento, the pirate group lost possession of the KING to the U.S. Marshals after more lawsuits claimed the plaintiffs were owed money for whatever they contended in the suits. Still, the group responsible for the return of the KING continued to raise funds for the eventual time when they expected to reclaim ownership of the much-contested vessel. But after much wrangling and carrying on, the DELTA KING, after losing its docking space, left Sacramento bound for San Francisco. She never made it. Instead, she got about halfway.
What followed over the six or seven years is too much to reiterate in this short column. But in April of 1981, while moored improperly at a dock about six miles above San Francisco during high tide, the DELTA KING slipped over the pier and hung up. Upon the falling tide, the KING listed hard a’ starboard, and water overlifted a series of strangely placed windows cut into the hull during attorney Belli’s tenure. Quickly, the hull filled, and before long, the KING rested on the muddy bottom in 20 to 30 feet of brackish water.
Everyone witnessing the forlorn, bedraggled KING implanted on the bottom surely agreed that this was the demise of the DELTA KING.
Now we come to a point where we can compare the two twins at similar crossroads in their lives. The DELTA KING is practically filled halfway with salty bay backwater, without engines, smokestacks, or a paddlewheel. Sections above the water show significant portions of scaling gray navy paint. Broken windows, chipped paint, splintered wood, moss, and many years of neglect add to the forlorn appearance of the once palatial riverboat. The entire interior of the KING lies in total disrepair, with the once-grand and exotic wood trims swollen and delaminated. The vessel is a likely candidate for the shipwreckers.
Despite the comments of unknowing and untrained observers, the DELTA QUEEN remains intact with its engines, pitman arms, paddlewheel, operating equipment, stack, and floats sturdily on a relatively recently built steel hull. Her interior remains intact throughout. Although her exterior appears desolate to the novice, a run through one of America’s great shipyards will work wonders. There’s nothing on a vessel that a good boatworks cannot fix.
So what happened next to the DELTA KING? Was it broken up and scrapped out? Fortunately for the KING, the family who owned the forlorn steamboat announced their intention to raise the boat and restore it. “Whatever it takes,” they announced. However, after the KING sank again during salvage operations, a particular developer came on the scene. Again, what transpired is beyond the limits of this brief column. But in June of 1982, after six weeks of desperation, the DELTA KING floated again for the first time in almost 15 months.
Long story short, today, 43 years after the DELTA KING came off the bottom, “looking like a drowned rat,” as one wag remarked, it lies at its moorings in Sacramento looking as fresh as it did when both the KING and the QUEEN ran nightly trips between San Francisco and Sacramento during the 1920s, ’30s, and until 1940.
What strikes me most about the complex and intriguing story of the DELTA KING is that those talented individuals with the ability to “make things happen” never lost faith in the vessel as a worthy component of the region’s history. Without such souls, the DELTA KING would be a name lost to time.
Now it is the KING’s sister, the DELTA QUEEN’s time to face a similar crossroads in history. Do kindred people like the saviors of the DELTA KING still exist to save the DELTA QUEEN? Are you one, or do you know those who might be? If so, please contact the Delta Queen Steamboat Company at website@dqsteamboat.com.
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.
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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.
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