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
Twenty-four years ago this past week, my friend John Hartford died. John was best known as a fiddle and banjo-playing bluegrass musician who wrote the three-time Grammy Award-winning tune, “Gentle On My Mind.” However, before he gained fame in the music world, John dreamed of becoming a steamboat pilot.
Born John Cowan Harford on December 30, 1937, in New York City, to parents Carl and Mary Harford, he grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, near the Mississippi River, which influenced his life and later, his music. On the advice of musician Chet Atkins, John changed his surname from Harford to Hartford. For the rest of his 63 years on this earth, he lived in two worlds: music and the river.
We met on the steamboat DELTA QUEEN in a world we mutually shared, loved, and understood. Two decades earlier, John Harford worked as a Night Watchman aboard the QUEEN, nearly ten years before I started in the same position.
John Hartford charmed and captivated everyone he met, whether it was a fan who spent a few minutes with him at a concert while he signed an autograph or someone who had known him for years. Anyone who has ever met the bluegrass musician and steamboatman cherishes a beloved story to share about their connection, regardless of its length or brevity.
The best memories I have of John were those times when we were away from others clamoring for his attention. Like the time I was in Orlando, Florida, trying to get a slot on a ship headed for the Caribbean, when union organizational problems nullified my acceptance, stranding me until I saw the marque on the theatre in downtown Orlando declaring:
“JOHN HARTFORD HERE THURSDAY”
I’d bussed over to Tampa to see Busch Gardens early on Thursday, and was settling down amidst the clamor of my cheap hotel room ($14) when I realized John was playing in Orlando. Without hesitation, I grabbed my belongings, crossed the street to the Greyhound bus station, and inquired about the next bus to Orlando. “There’s one ready to go in five minutes,” the ticket seller announced.
By the time I entered the darkened former movie theater, John Hartford was already on stage, performing his routine. Luckily, I found an open seat in the front row, relaxed, and enjoyed the performance. After the show, while John gathered his equipment, I asked him which way he intended to go next, thinking I might catch a ride north, where I could grab a bus back to the shipping office in New Orleans. Not recognizing me at first, looking across the bright footlights of the stage, he appeared bewildered,
“Why hello, Don, I’m surprised to see you. We’re heading to Key West. Wanna go?”
Of course, I spent a couple of days in Florida’s southernmost city with John, his lovely wife, my friend Marie, and Shel Silverstein, the author and artist I’d admired since my college days, when I followed Shel’s cartoon satire in Playboy Magazine.
Following our adventures in Key West, the next time I saw Shel was at John and Marie’s wedding at their home, Hartford Place, situated on a steep limestone bluff overlooking the Cumberland River. When I introduced my wife, Peggy, who was seven months pregnant with our first son, Jesse, to Shel, he asked Peggy if he could rub her belly. “You can if I can rub your bald head,” she replied. There, these two were amid the glitter and glamour of a Nashville celebrity wedding, rubbing their tummies and crowns while laughing as if they’d known each other all their lives.
Often remembered as a beloved crewmember of Captain Dennis Trone’s swift, sternwheeler JULIA BELLE SWAIN, the story of how John and Captain Trone met may be best recalled in a column I wrote for the TRIBUNE in January 2019:
In 1971, when the JULIA BELLE was new, the DELTA QUEEN was in Peoria to race Captain Trone’s sleek, new sternwheeler. Still, because of a mechanical malfunction, and as hard as he and his engineers tried, Cap’n Dennis could not get his steamboat to run. With a boatload of excursionists aboard who paid dearly for the experience, the QUEEN went and “raced” as though the JULIA was alongside. Also aboard the DELTA QUEEN was the “banj’er-pickin'” Bluegrass musician and river aficionado, John Hartford, who was at his peak of fame following hard on the success of his hit tune, “Gentle on My Mind.” John and I had met on the DELTA QUEEN a year before and became instant friends.
After “the race that wasn’t,” I asked John if he would like to meet Captain Trone, so we walked over to the JULIA BELLE SWAIN, where we rousted Captain Trone from where he was napping on a pile of life jackets. I introduced them and changed steamboat history in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century.
Other times were not so dramatic. Like the time Peggy and Marie went “junkstore” shopping in our hometown of Covington, where Marie found a bundle of long-sleeve, white shirts, similar to the ones her husband wore while performing. Marie bought the shirts for fifty cents apiece. And the time we all piled into our car with our infant son Jesse and drove to Captain John Beatty’s place, Yankee Landing, above Markland Dam on the Middle Ohio River. Although we didn’t plan to stay long, Mrs. Claire Beatty insisted that we stay for dinner. Before long, Cappy Clem Beatty, then in his 90s, Captain John Beatty’s father, dropped by with his girlfriend and joined in on the fun. It was well past midnight before we got the Hartfords back to their tour bus.
Aboard my 300-foot sternwheel casino boat, the GRAND VICTORIA II, at Rising Sun, Indiana, during John Hartford’s waning days battling Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, I called him from the pilothouse at his home on the Cumberland River at least once a month. Usually, my Bridge Mate was Capt. Sandra Clark, a gifted all-around boatwoman. As a girl, she taught herself to play the fiddle well enough to be accepted into a high school for the performing arts. Later, she graduated with honors from the United States Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York.
The pilothouse telephone had a long cord for the handset. Holding it, Sandra would say to John, “Captain Don’s going to blow a whistle for you.” Then she’d hurry out onto the wingbridge and hold the handset up towards the GRAND VIC’s three-chime Crosby whistle while I blew a long, mournful salute. Before the last tone faded off the Kentucky Hills behind Rabbit Hash, Cap’n Sandra would rush back into the pilothouse and hand me the phone in time to hear John say in a longing, wishful voice, “Sounds like the SPRAGUE.”
The last time I was at Hartford Place was for John Hartford’s funeral. Peggy, our youngest son, Jonathan Evan Hartford Sanders, named for John, and I arrived soon after the attendants sealed the casket. Rumors abound that John wore a Batman cape. It was a grand affair — everyone who could was in attendance, from the river to country and bluegrass music. When the mic opened for comments, I said a few words. So did Captain Trone. After the burial, Earl Scruggs and I sat on the back steps of Hartford Place, reminiscing about our friend.
These past 24 years went by like, as John Hartford so often described, “a moment in time.” John would be satisfied to know that his music lives on with young and older Hartford fans nearly a quarter of a century after he passed from this earth.
In John Hartford’s own words:
Where does an old-time riverman go
After he’s passed away
Is he still afloat on an old steamboat
After he’s gone from here…
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
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.