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
The river’s traditional communication medium, the “Sternline Telegraph,” has been working overtime recently after Opry Entertainment Group in Nashville announced that their sternwheel showboat, GENERAL JACKSON, will retire this coming mid-December after 40 years on the Cumberland River. An Opry spokesperson cited “mechanical issues” as the excuse.
(Oops…excuse me, I meant to say, “reason.”)
Only yesterday, it seems, I watched from a distance as the new passenger boat under construction at Jeffboat Shipyard in Jeffersonville, Indiana, across from Louisville, took shape. My steamboat pilot and Bluegrass musician buddy, John Hartford, was in a frenzy to write and record a song commemorating the launching of the sternwheeler, destined to be called GENERAL JACKSON, after Nashville’s most prominent citizen and our country’s seventh president — and bound for Opryland Park, outside Music City on the Cumberland River.
Just thinking about the GENERAL has John’s words spinning round and round inside my head:
Down on the river, way down the river
I hear a showboat band
Big wheel a flashing, old GENERAL JACKSON
Rolling on to Oprey Land…
Besides buckets of tears following the announcement, others are crying out to preserve the GENERAL and maintain the reasonably young, 40-year-old paddlewheeler as a floating casino or nightclub. At least one riverman proposed remodeling it into an overnight passenger boat, much like the century-old DELTA QUEEN. Why not? Stay tuned for further bulletins as they arrive on the sternline telegraph.
Meanwhile, the news from Aurora bend on the Middle Ohio River, from my angle, anyway, was about recent readings from my book, THE RIVER, at the Behringer Crawford Museum in Covington, Kentucky, my hometown across the river from Cincinnati, to devotees of the stories of another Covington lad known as “Seckatary Hawkins and his Fair & Square Club.” Cincinnati Enquirer writer Robert Frac Schulkers’s stories captured the imagination of millions of kids of all ages after the newspaper series began on February 3, 1918, about a “gang of boys” playing on the Ohio and Licking Rivers along Covington’s riverbanks — just like my brothers and I did three decades later.
Apparently, Schulkers’s great-granddaughter and F&S Club Meeting coordinator, Dr. Diane Schneider, saw the similarity between my scribblings in the NKyTribune and those about Seck Hawkins and his pals, so she invited me to come to the gathering and recount what life was like for a boy growing up with many of those same experiences told in her ancestors’ narratives.
My eldest son, Jesse A. Sanders, accompanied me and made the occasion better with his contributions, especially when Diane asked Jesse if he’d grown up like his dad and Seckatary Hawkins playing around the river. With a broad smile on his face, Jesse answered: “No… I was a Nintendo kid.” Everyone laughed.
Although the meeting ran later into the afternoon, Jesse and I excused ourselves early to attend to some family arrangements. But we enjoyed our first meeting of the Fair & Square Club, which actually stirred my memories of reading reprints in the Cincinnati Enquirer several decades ago. I’ve always remembered writers Schulkers and Daniel Carter Beard, who wrote about growing up in an extraordinary river town bordered on two sides by amazing watercourses. Dan Beard, of course, drew on his boyhood adventures along those storied Northern Kentucky shores and incorporated them into the founding of the Boy Scouts of America.
Just Saturday, a week ago, on October 17, Jesse and I visited the Harlan Hubbard Studio and Preserve in Ft. Thomas, Campbell County, Kentucky, where Harlan built a house for his mother and a painting studio for himself in the 1930s. Although I had known Harlan and Anna Hubbard since we first met aboard the Steamer DELTA QUEEN in 1972, and I had visited them at their home at Paine Hollow, Trimble County, Kentucky, about five miles downstream past Madison, Indiana, this was my first time visiting Harlan’s home county abode.
Although the brick studio was simply built, I felt my old friend’s warm presence. This was where he lived with his new bride, Anna Eikenhout, before they moved under a tarpaulin on the Ohio River at neighboring Brent, where the masterful craftsman constructed the shantyboat from salvaged timbers from a Covington warehouse and driftwood scrounged from the river. While Harlan worked on the tiny ark, Anna prepared their humble meals over campfires on the riverbank sand.
Once Harlan formed a watertight roof atop the vessel, the newlyweds moved aboard the motorless craft. At the next rise in the river, they set off on a multi-year odyssey down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, then westward on the Intercoastal Canal until they decided it was time to find a lasting residence somewhere “back home.” The Hubbards settled at Payne Hollow, in Trimble County, where they lived out their creative lives “on the fringe of society.”
Their adventures appear in several books by Harlan Hubbard, mainly “Shantyboat: A River Way of Life” and “Payne Hollow: Life on the Fringe of Society.” Harlan also has other books and journals.
Inside the humble studio, I read a column I’d written about meeting the Hubbards aboard the DELTA QUEEN in 1972 when my close friend Harvey Simmons, a man of many talents including washing pots and pans and tending bar aboard the DELTA QUEEN, introduced the couple to me during a New Orleans-Cincinnati round trip when I was the Captain of that palatial steamboat.
All too soon, the morning faded into afternoon, and it became time to pack up the Harlan Hubbard paintings participants brought along. Jesse and I packed the two Hubbards that have adorned the walls of the many homes we’ve lived in since Harlan gave me “Gray Days,” a somber study painted on hardboard and framed simply, highlighting the dismal, rainy weather the Ohio River Valley experienced when Harlan created the artwork at his Payne Hollow studio above the nameless creek which empties into the Ohio River at the hollow.
I am very grateful to those who purchased copies of my book, THE RIVER, still available from the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.
Before we packed our plunder back to the car, David Wicks, an interesting fellow associated with the Hubbard’s Trimble County home, invited me to a Hubbard get-together at Payne Hollow later this year or next spring.
Although I’m most interested in visiting Payne Hollow again, I need to consider it carefully. If I can go, I’ll have to go by boat—that landside adventure’s just too much for these old bones.
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 and will share his stories of growing up in Covington and his stories of the river. Hang on for the ride — the river never looked so good.
Click here to read all of Capt. Don Sanders’ stories of The River.
Purchase Captain Don Sanders’ The River book
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.
Click here to order your Captain Don Sanders’ ‘The River’ now.