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
My dad, Jess Sanders, Jr., was right. I spend too much time “living in the past,” as he called my fondness for studying history. But I’m a retired steamboatman interested in steam-driven boats, great and small, on the waters of the Western Rivers, as the Mississippi and its tributaries are labeled.
Except for two, and possibly a third, all the steamboats from the past are gone, and, except for a few souls still above the dirt, I’m constantly intermingling with dead folks.
Blame time, never-ending, relentless, and grinding on like the river itself, moving silently and constantly by. How I’d like to set time to ‘cruise control’ while I slip off alone elsewhere. But where would that be?
Alas, it looks like I’m dreaming about the river again. Where else? Why not? So let’s talk about some boats.
When I was a small fellow, my mom and dad took me to ride the second Cincinnati Coney Island Amusement Park steamboat, the ISLAND QUEEN. The park had two boats by the same name. Both were sidewheelers with two humongous paddlewheels enclosed in ‘paddle boxes’ –one on each side. The first IQ burned in the Great Cataclysmic Steamboat Fire of 1922 at the Cincinnati Public Landing. Before her ashes even cooled, park officials had a second boat in mind. Less than 2 ½ years later, a second ISLAND QUEEN resumed packing throngs of fun-seekers from downtown Cincy to the park, some 8 miles upstream. This is the boat that people like me remember riding. It’s easy to mix them up if you don’t know the difference between the two ISLAND QUEENS.
In an earlier column, I wrote about the hard wooden benches behind the IQ’s pilothouse, and how I was terrified whenever those strange old men in that small cubicle blew that deafening steam whistle, especially at night. I still don’t know why, but my mom, Anna Margaret, always insisted on riding on the roof close to the pilothouse. Why couldn’t we have been below, in the light, near the popcorn and soda pop concessions, where salty kernels and tall, ice-laden drinks sold for inflated prices? I’d rather we listened to Clyde Trask’s orchestra than that loud racket-maker blasting on the roof.
Mother, like most young women (and men), had ties to the ISLAND QUEEN stretching back through most of her life. Even when she wasn’t on board the sidewheeler, its presence in the water bordering her hometown, Ludlow, KY, downstream from the Cincinnati public Landing, gave her cause for entertainment, as I’ve told before:
“Before she met ‘Jess,’ as (my father) preferred to be addressed, Anna Margaret, and everyone else, assumed she’d marry George, her hometown boyfriend, after graduating with the Class of ’36. She and George spent many idyllic summer days canoeing the first roller behind the side paddlewheel of the Coney Island steamer, the ISLAND QUEEN. ‘It was great fun,’ as I often heard her tell. The canoe was always upset, throwing its occupants into the churning waters behind the grinding maul of the massive wood-and-steel wheel driving one side of the steam-powered behemoth. When asked how she survived, though she couldn’t swim and never wore a lifevest, Mother nonchalantly replied, ‘Oh, I just held onto George.'”
My last actual memory of seeing the ISLAND QUEEN before she exploded and burned at the foot of Wood Street in Pittsburgh on Tuesday, September 9, 1947, with a loss of 19 crewmembers, was on the 4th of July that year. My family and I were in our “machine,” as cars were called then, at the Coney Island Amusement Park to watch the celebratory fireworks. We parked right by the river, practically beneath the ISLAND QUEEN’s paddlebox. From the backseat, my entire window view was nearly filled with the side of the QUEEN, outlined in lights that seemed dimmed for the fireworks holiday extravaganza.
Every time one of the ‘bombs’ detonated atop the steamer’s paddlebox, I slunk lower into the seat. And because it was the Fourth of July, the pyrotechnic explosions lingered on far too long for my childish comfort. Still, nearly 80 years later, I can see the sidelights dimly outlining the ill-fated sidewheel steamboat that brought so much joy to the Greater Cincinnati community just weeks before fate ended her days so cruelly.
Other steamboats became part of my life, too. Thankfully, as a young man in my teens, I returned to the river, found my niche, and achieved reasonable success in that watery world. The AVALON, DELTA QUEEN, and MISSISSIPPI QUEEN were “my” steamboats in that they became a part of who I am. There were other boats, too. Several of them. Steam and motor vessels and a tiny ship at sea, too, in a raging storm facing 30-foot waves higher than a two-story house ashore. Five ‘gambling boats’ carried me through a different kind of storm when no other decent jobs existed in the passenger boat trade on the river.
I’ve owned three unique boats in my lifetime. My first was the 1937 Bay City (MI) trawler, JOHN HENRY, named for the legendary “steel driving man,” a man of color, whose skill in driving holes into rock with his sledgehammer to be packed with explosives, opening the way for the railroad, is one of our country’s greatest stories.
The SUN*FISH, built as a towboat in Genoa, Wisconsin, and later converted to a liveaboard when I found her on the Tennessee River in northern Alabama, is back towing small barges for a construction company. Lastly, I bought the Rafter CLYDE, perhaps the best-known small paddlewheeler on the river, from its builder in Pepin, Wisconsin, and, with the help of my hometown friend, Everett Dameron, brought the sassy paddlewheeler nearly 1,300 miles down the Upper Mississippi and halfway up the Ohio River to Aurora Bend.
Since my USCG-issued Unlimited Master’s license for steam and motor vessels went into escrow, my last two private boats have been the closest my association’s been to the river. With time’s relentless onslaught, I’ve chosen to sell my boats and observe the river from a distance. At this stage of my game, that’s likely the best place I can be.
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.