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
This week, my “writing day” for my weekly NKyTribune column also falls on Christmas Day, 2025.
Everything’s quiet outside my window overlooking Aurora Bend on the middle Ohio River. Absent are the loud cars and pickup trucks racing up and down in front of the house. I wonder if they drive like that in their neighborhood?
Although unseen from my desk, surrounded by so many steamboat paintings and prints — I’m pondering whether to mount some of them on the ceiling — life goes on as usual on the occasional towboat navigating the river at the bottom of the street. On the water, not much changes.
Perhaps Christmas dinner features a few extra dishes or desserts. This session is also my last column for the year, after beginning this new adventure eight years ago. Sitting quietly before the computer gives me time to reflect on my own time on the river and, perhaps, recall some of my accomplishments as a “writer” these past eight short years.
Holidays, first of all, were nothing extraordinary for me on the river. When I was on the DELTA QUEEN, we usually tied up after the fall run from St. Paul to New Orleans, with Halloween being the last holiday of the season. Any merriment on festive days belonged to the paying passengers, not us, the hired help, whose duties included making every day aboard the steamboat as special and exciting as possible for our guests.
Although I was the first mate and Alternate Master aboard the boat, I refrained from taking special privileges, such as drinking in the bar or eating in the Orleans Room, the passenger dining area. Captain Ernest E. Wagner, my mentor and the steamer’s senior master, emphasized the importance of not being seen drinking in public. Besides, I’d rather nip Boone’s Farm Wine with my deck crew uptown in my spare time away from the boat.
On the five casino boats I “captained” during my stint in the gambling boat trade, holidays were the busiest times of the year, with most people off work and looking for extra-special activities to enrich their festivities beyond their usual homegrown capabilities. Holidays were always mandatory workdays for the crew and staff of the casino boats — sort of an “All Hands on Deck-type” command, or having as much help as possible on board to serve the holiday throngs.
With the licensed marine crews, however, we officers had four rotating shifts to cover the bill, as required by the U.S. Coast Guard to keep the “gaming boats” manned 24/7. As my immediate family did not especially anticipate holidays, I often chose to swap time with another captain who appreciated their time at home with the kinfolk, while I endured the crushing casino crowds and the canned turkey loaf, dressing, and cranberries served in the “EDR,” or Employee’s Dining Room.
Aboard the GRAND VICTORIA II, at Rising Sun, Indiana, New Year’s Eve was always the most well-orchestrated holiday of the year, highlighted by a balloon drop from the vaulted overhead, or ceiling, high above the central stairs and escalators, precisely at the stroke of midnight, heralding the New Year. But what made that event especially worrisome was the balloons hanging in a large suspended net that an outside party-favor supplier had delicately placed there a few days earlier.
Rotating deckhands kept watch for pranksters and vandals eager to cut the cord holding the balloons aloft, sending them cascading down four decks before their appointed time. When the New Year finally arrived, and the inflatable party favors finally fell as planned, precisely at the stroke of midnight, a significant burden of responsibility fell too.
Perhaps one of the strangest New Year’s Eves I spent on the river happened when I first worked for Captain John Beatty aboard his newly-acquired twin screw, diesel-powered towboat, which he was fixing to name for Mrs. Beatty, the CLARE E. BEATTY, formerly the SEMET, built by Dravo Shipyards in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1940. That New Year’s encounter with the late Cap’n Beatty is, perhaps, best described in my October 21, 2018 column:
“Before midnight, on the 31st of December, as New Year’s 1971 overtook the old, the CLARE was in Gallipolis Lock, about eight miles downstream from our destination. As the pilothouse clock chimed the mitternacht hour, Captain Beatty pulled hard on the cord attached to the beautiful set of Kahlenberg air horns on the roof and welcomed in another year on the river. For the first time since I met the captain, he smiled and then wished us all a “Happy New Year!” After a minute passed, Cap’n John turned and looked grimly out the pilothouse window as the revelry ended as quickly as it began, and I went into the wintry blast to stand by my line and waited for the upper lock gate to open.”
Equally as strange, or perhaps even stranger yet, was the heralding of the 21st Century on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1999, in the pilothouse of the GRAND VICTORIA II, at mile 506, middle Ohio River, at Rising Sun, opposite Rabbit Hash. No one knew what the coming year would bring, not only for the world’s computer systems but, more importantly, for the complex electronic apparatus that controlled the heart and soul of the local casino and all its dependencies.
Everyone with influence within the company, from the general manager to my boss, Marine Director Tom Sanders, on down, including Arlan Boyd, the director of security, frantically rushed around, worrying about what the new millennium had in store for the Grand Victoria Casino and Resort.
The pilothouse became the central headquarters for all the frantic hysteria as the New Year approached. As Captain of the GVII, my primary mission remained ensuring the countdown to the coming year coordinated with the televised ball drop atop the skyscraper on Times Square in New York City, and that the hundreds of inflated balloons tumbled to the depths of the gambling boat promptly at midnight.
As Marketing Director Brice Kendrick began the final countdown to the coming new year, century, and millennium, I needed to focus on something stable outside the pilothouse windows. Below the GRAND VICTORIA II, on Front Street within the village of Rising Sun, my eyes caught the sight of a complex of structures built along the banks of the Ohio River before 1820. Although these stalwart brick buildings witnessed nearly 200 New Year’s Eves and the passing of the 19th, and now the 20th Centuries, they seemed unfazed by the approaching new millennium — so I focused on them as the count shortened.
“FIVE– FOUR–THREE–TWO–ONE– HAPPY NEW YEAR!”
As the balloons cascaded into the void and the boat broke into pandemonium, I remained focused on the ancient structures on Front Street. They remained solid and unmoving, and I knew that all was still right within my world.
As this New Year, 2026, approaches, my 85th, I want to thank all those who have followed my scribbles these past eight years, with a special thanks to those who’ve bought my collection of columns gathered by editor Judy Clabes in a book entitled THE RIVER, which is still available for purchase online.
Most of all, I wish everyone a Happy New Year, 2026, and, in the words of Tiny Tim in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, “God Bless us, every one.”
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.