The River: A boy’s life couldn’t get any better — all that mattered was the river and learning all he could

The riverboat captain is a storyteller, and Captain Don Sanders will be sharing 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 PAL-O-MINE was at home at the Newport Yacht Club, on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River upstream from the Mouth of the Licking River and opposite the Cincinnati Public Landing during the era when Newport’s soiled reputation for gambling and prostitution was years, yet, from reformation. The yacht club enjoyed its own notoriety. Once when reading aloud the boat club’s name set in bright red, neon letters displayed on the outside of the huge, wooden harbor boat, as we drove across the Central Bridge, my father warned:

“Let no one know you know where that place is…!“

The PAL-O-MINE was at home at the Newport Yacht Club.

But despite Dad’s warning, I immediately felt comfortable at home the first time I walked across the swaying gangway and stepped aboard the harbor boat where the pungent odors of stale beer, hemp rope, open bilges, and long-since-fried greasy steaks greeted me.

Though Walter usually “handled” the PAL during departures and landings, he preferred to join his guests while the boat cruised, so he handed the steering duties over to Lorraine’s nephew, “Swope,” a fellow just a few years older than I. Swope, I concluded, was the luckiest kid alive, and I became determined to learn everything he knew so I would, someday, be piloting the PAL-O-MINE like him. Swope, it turned, out, was more than happy to break me in on the techniques of steering the boat, and over the next couple summers, I was getting more and more wheel time as the nephew faded out of the picture.

What I learned most about Walt Hoffmeier, was that if I showed my willingness to work and help him with his boat, he reciprocated by teaching me more about the operation and care of his vessel and sharing secrets of a river upon which he was born, grew up, and was growing old on. Little did I know, but Walt’s teachings and training would guide me for a lifetime; something he had no intention of doing, but when I opened myself to him, a lifetime of knowledge flowed from one generation to the next.

For three consecutive seasons, Walt invited my family to ride the PAL-O-MINE practically every weekend. My brothers and I were becoming seasoned river boys, something that did not escape the notice of our parents. Houseboating was honest family fun. Soon, my folks began a search for a boat of our own that ended on the banks of the Great Miami River near Hamilton, Ohio, only 35 miles from home, where repeated visits to the Hamilton Boat Club netted the Grand Prize – the most lovely thirty-eight-foot paddlewheeler named the SHANGRI LA that my parents bought, transported overland to the Cincinnati Public Landing, launched, and paddled it under its own power to the Covington Boat Harbor, downstream the south pier of the Roebling Suspension Bridge, where they, Marge and Jess, renamed it for themselves… the MARJESS.

Though Walter usually “handled” the PAL during departures and landings, he preferred to join his guests while the boat cruised.

Could a boy’s life get any better?

By the time school was out that spring afternoon, the MARJESS was bobbing merrily alongside the dock at the Covington Boat Club within the shadow, literally, of the Suspension Bridge. Mother immediately made the MARJESS as comfortably snug as possible. Her “cookstove” was an electric, two-burner hot plate, but the meals that came off that primitive stove were as sumptuous as any she fixed at home. In those days before air-conditioning was common, we slept beneath wool blankets on nights when folks, ashore, were sweltering.

Many sorts of fun were available on the river. Swimming became safer that year after a nationwide inoculation of Dr. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine began. We tried our hands at fishing, but it was more fun to shoot bottles floating by with a BB-gun borrowed from the boat next door.

Again, as with Walt Hoffmeier, I found an opportunity to make myself useful helping someone with their boat chores… and that option came courtesy of the “harbormaster” of the boat club, a former steamboatman who lived with his small family in an authentic shantyboat adorned with many varieties of river plunder and paraphernalia that lay tied at the end of the harbor next to our paddlewheeler. To everyone on the fleet, they called the harborman “Tex,” the first professional riverman in my life who taught me the rudiments of boats and the river that began a metamorphosis from a casual pastime toward what became a lifelong career.

Among Tex’s river plunder were two 16-foot wooden skiffs and a smaller jonboat he, himself, built. Before long, I was spending more time with Tex than I was with my family aboard the MARJESS.

My brothers and I were becoming seasoned river boys, something that did not escape the notice of our parents.

“Here’s how you tie a headline to a post,” Tex told me my first lesson. “Take a bite of line and go, right hand under the left,” Tex instructed as he placed the bight or loop of “line” – never “rope,” over the two-by-two vertical posts on the dock… and “do another one over-top that one… The line will break before it pulls out,” he concluded.

And so a simple secret, known to practically every riverman, but mostly a mystery to those of the pleasure-boat sect, passed on to a young greenhorn aspiring to be like his teacher.

Arriving at the Covington Boat Harbor later that summer, I found the shantyboat and all the plunder were missing from the end of the fleet. Tex, his wife Joy, and their little boy had gone down the river. Tex’s replacement was another washed-up, old river rat called “Mac.” Though I helped Mac with a chore, or two, he was friendlier with my father who seemed to want to keep me separated from the sun-beaten boatman. But that was fine, not only did I spend more time aboard the MARJESS while at the harbor, but at home, my brothers and I had, only recently, on May 19th, 1955, discovered the pleasures of the forbidden waters of the Licking River as our new playground within an easy walking distance from the house wherever both our folks were away at work.

Eventually, May 19th became our Camp Day, marking the beginning of another summer of fun-filled days on the Licking River full of swimming, riding passing “blue logs”, diving out of overhanging willows, roasting pilfered potatoes in beds of red-hot coals, and all other forbidden delights we boys could contrive on those long-ago shores.

The paddlewheeler named the SHANGRI LA that my parents bought, transported overland to the Cincinnati Public Landing and launched.

After two seasons at the Covington Boat Harbor, the MARJESS paddled smartly to a new marina half-a-mile downstream and below the C&O Bridge where our friend Walter Hoffmeier was starting a new harbor he named for himself: “Walt’s Boat Club.” It would be the beginning of a new era of river adventures. As I grew older, my rather-strict parents allowed me to spend more time at the boat harbor helping and learning from Walter. Sadly, Walt died in December 1959, soon after I left Covington for college.

Many years later, I summarized what those early days with Walt meant: “Walter Hoffmeier had a decisive influence on a kid who’d never been much good at anything in particular until he met the skinny, hard-cussing taskmaster who taught him carpentry, painting, and river skills. Most of all, he taught a boy what a man expected if he wanted to hold on to on a job although the wages paid were an evening’s supper and the opportunity to be on the river working in every sort of weather and on all stages of water.”

The next summer found me decking on the excursion steamer AVALON where I soon caught the attention of Captain Ernest E. Wagner who continued my education that Walt had begun. One of the greatest achievements in my many years on the river was a day in mid-1972 when Captain Wagner accompanied me to the Cincinnati office of the U. S. Coast Guard where I signed the Enrollment Papers; thus, becoming the Alternate Master of the DELTA QUEEN with Captain Wagner.

And so, my river career was off and running, and what a delightful run it’s been after finding the river right at my doorstep!

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.

Shantyboat, Cov Boat.. Tex’s authentic shantyboat…that lay tied at the end of the harbor next to our paddlewheeler.

Mother’s “cookstove” was an electric, two-burner hot plate, but the meals that came off that primitive stove were as sumptuous as any she fixed at home.

Our friend Walter Hoffmeier was starting a new harbor he named for himself: “Walt’s Boat Club.”

On the excursion steamer AVALON I soon caught the attention of Captain Ernest E. Wagner who continued my education that Walt had begun.

Captain Wagner accompanied me to the Cincinnati office of the U. S. Coast Guard where I signed the Enrollment Papers; thus, becoming the Alternate Master of the DELTA QUEEN with Captain Wagner.