Forty Years a Riverinan by Captain E. Clare Carpenter I was born and lived until I was sixteen years old near Ripley, West Virginia , about forty miles from Marietta. In 1924, my family moved to Meigs County, Ohio , which is the next county down from Marietta about forty-five or fifty miles . Until then I really didn ' t know much about the Ohio except what I'd read in the geography books. Close to our farm there was a little ferry boat that ran back and forth across the river. The fellow that owned the ferry had a couple of sons about my age with whom I got to loafing on the boat. And that was my introduction to the life of the river. After I got out of school, the Depression was starting, and I happened to stumble onto a job as a coal passer on a little towboat, the Leona, at Letart Falls , mile 234 on the Ohio , under charter to the Army Corps of Engineers. During the Depression there weren't a whole lot of jobs. I started to work in May of 1930, wheeling coal out of an old barge with a wheelbarrow and bringing it up to the firemen . I also worked actually firing the boilers. When I had gained enough experience, I was able to do what we called on these boats a watchman's job, which is actually a second mate's job. I transferred to the American Barge Line in 1932, and continued the same sort of work until 1936--six years-and then got my mate 's license . After that , I did the same jobs I had been doing, wheeling coal, doing deck work and standing the watch opposite the mate . Then in 1937, I finally got on to one of the ABL boats as what we called a steersman-in Mark Twain 's lingo , a cub pilot. During my time as steersman, I was on the Inland, which sank. I was in the pilot house when it happened . I wasn't at the wheel-the captain was. But when that happened , the company decided that things were falling off a little anyway and they weren't going to keep any steersmen for awhile. So I went back to doing whatever there was to do on the boat. In the fall of 1939 I decided it was time to get back into the pilothouse one way or another, so I switched boats. I was on the Arthur Hider just about two months when the boilers started leaking . The inspectors came aboard and crossed the boilers out, and she was laid up for six months for repairs. After she was back in service I went back on her as mate for six or seven months with a letter in my pocket that said that I could transfer to any boat as steersmen that the captain okayed. Well , the captain said , "I want you here , and you stay mate until I can find somebody.'' Six months went by and he never found anybody he liked. But in the meantime I did a lot of steering. Finally I said the heck with this racket and went for my pilot's license. This was in 1941 , eleven years from the time I started working on the river. After I had the license, I worked a few short hitches as pilot, but I was low man on the list. So in September of that year, I took what was supposed to be a three-day job for a company in Pittsburgh, Union Barge. The three days stretched out to more than thirty-two years before I finally retired .
To Be A Pilot To get your license, the law says that you shall have three years experience in or around the pilothouse, working as an observer and so on. Then you have to have one captain, one pilot and one engineer sign your application, which basically means that you know enough that they would be willing to work with you. Then , you have to take the Coast Guard-in my day it was the Steamboat Inspection Service of the Treasury Department-examination. You are certified for whatever part of the river you take your test for. The most important part of the exam is drawing a freehand map--a reasonable facsimile of a map--of the stretch of river you want to work on . You have to indicate all 18
the bends, the aids to navigation, the locks and dams , the bridges and so on. You can cover as little or as much as you want. A friend of mine took hi s original test from Marietta down to Memphis. I did mine from Pittsburgh to Huntington, West Virginia , about 300 miles . I later got licenses for the Monongahela, part of the Allegheny, the Kanawha River, which comes into the Ohio at Point Pleasant, and a short license on the Little Kanawha down around Parkersburg-and all of the Ohio. I don't have anythi ng on the Mississippi or the other big tributaries, but I wound up with 1205 miles all told. Back when I started on the rivers, the towboat business hadn't really developed into what it is today. At that time , nobody had any idea that you could push stuff up the river, against the current. When you got to where you were going, you off-loaded your cargo and brought the barges back empty. And that was a dead expense. Then the company I was working for, American Barge Line out of Louisville , got a contract for towing scrap iron from New Orleans and Natchez into the Pittsburgh area. Carnegie Steel had a couple of big boats they 'd built to tow their own products down to New Orleans-they were the first to handle really big tows after the locking system went in on the Ohio-so we went and chartered one of their boats. I have since heard that a lot of people scratched their heads and said, Well , that's the end of those people , because you can't ship cargo upstream and make a profit on it. But right now ABL is the biggest barge line in the whole inland water system, and of course everybody followed their lead . I would say that today 75 percent of the river cargo moves upstream. The industry really took off during World War II, when we ran into gasoline problems. You couldn't ship around the east coast on account of the submarines, so we brought it up here to the Pittsburgh area and then pipelined it over to the eastern ports. For about four or five years an enormous percentage of the cargos went upstream. Of course, the rivers-the Mississippi, especially--change constantly and when you've passed your pilot's test, it only means you know the river better than most people . I suppose one of the worst things that can happen is when the river floods, not so much during the flood-although that can be pretty bad, too-as what happens to the river afterwards . The currents change, sandbars build up and so on.
Winter Problems One time , I was on the Isthmian taking a barge up the Mississippi and we ran aground about eleven o'clock in the morning. The next morning, it was December-my birthday, to be exact-you could walk clear around the boat and not get your feet wet, except for a little puddle right under the wheel. We were there for ten days , and we had to walk out across the sandbar to where the dredge was-about 150 feet-to get water to wash with. It was cold-about 10 degrees. The captain and engineer decided they 'd pump water into the barge-it was a brand new barge-so we'd have water for our boilers and so on. Well , it got about half full and the thing broke in two . A brand new barge-the first trip it had made and it broke in two. Then they got afraid something would happen to the boat-maybe a broken steam line would scald somebody or something-so we cooled it all down. The only heat we had was from the cook stove (which happened to be coal fired), a pot-bellied stove in the pilothouse and a little four-burner type laundry stove. That was it. A major problem in winter used to be the ice . We haven't had any ice to stop traffic around here for probably ten years, SEA HISTORY, SPRING 1987