Deaths

Simply couldn't let this pass without a comment regarding "true airline service". Having grown up in an airline family, (my dad worked for TWA for 38 years) I very much remember what that was like. (I guess transportation had always been in my blood, so when I rode the D.Q., she hooked me on steamboats and the river.Yes, I also like trains.) Living in Dayton, Ohio, I got a "double dose" of airline saturation. My dad got to meet such worthies as Charles Lindbergh, Orville Wright, and Amelia Earhart, not to mention one rather eccentric company owner named Howard Hughes, who helped design my personal favorite plane, the "Connie". I am so grateful that Dad shared these stories around the supper table, and this has kept those times alive for me-a touch to the past. We do the same on this web site, in our gatherings, in your fine old boat column, in the S&D. I sincerely hope we have not seen the end to overnight steamboating, but we must continue to treasure and share our memories,as well as support the excursion steamboats we still have.

Shoot, Barbara -- you beat me to the punch! As I flew home yesterday, the same thing occurred to me, that Alan had left airlines off his list!

Airlines and steamboat lines

Ozark...Republic...Southern...Braniff...TWA...Northwest...PanAm...Eastern... Allegheny...
I fly them, they go under.
Now here's a related one on steamboats, off the top of my head without doing any thinking about it: were there mergers of steamboat lines/companies, if so, who? Did any packet lines evolve into today's towboat business?

Mergers often happened during packet boat days and are still being made today. Ingram is one of the biggest conglomerates and if I recall rightly they absorbed lines from the Green River like Hines 'way back when.

In my diatribe about death I meant whole systems that have passed into the nether world. Alarm clocks were not needed when every factory in town blew whistles. I'd say about 85% of today's churches have no bells or even towers to hold them. Have any of today's office accountants ever worked a comptometer? When is the last time any of us pumped gasoline by hand? How many of us can actually row a boat and do it with style and efficiency? And so on. . .

Bells and whistles

Our church still has a bell and uses it each Sunday - much to the chagrin of some of our neighbors. I remember the 2 factory whistles on the old Sash and Door Works on the river. One blew at 7AM, the other at 8AM. I'm sure they blew at other times, but those were what I could hear from home. When they demolished those buildings about 15 years ago, I could see the whistles still high above the rubble, but I don't know who managed to 'acquire' them, it wasn't me. Here's another thing dying rapidly: the key. Probably aren't any skeleton keys still used already, but the programmed cards hotels use now, and now push-button starters on cars - this one I don't get, as you still need to have the key in proximity. I'd rather just insert it into the keyhole instead of laying it down somewhere where I can forget it. Progress? And of course, the key to the lock which the new deckhand would have to go find as the boat approached the lock...

The first airplane I ever rode on was a Constellation, which by the time I did so, these aircraft had been relegated to the charter industry. Other things that have gone, or are going, south: linotype machines, hard wired telephones (and the good connection that goes with them), handwritten letters. Staging something of a comeback: Vinyl records (as far as some of us are concerned, they never left) Still popular, for some strange reason: Bicycles

Ah yes, the Linotype machine. Sam Clemens lost great bucketsfull of money on a mechanical type setting machine. He got tied in with a machine that was far too complicated and failed miserably. The hot type setting machine that triumphed was quite a mechanical fire breathing machine in itself.

The last operating one I saw in regular everyday service in a print shop was in Cairo, IL in a small building right behind the floor wall just a few hundred feet upriver from the entrance through the floodwall where the passenger boats used to dock.

I was in Cairo a couple weeks ago and am sad to report that Smith & Groves is gone, building heavily vandalized.The print shop is closed, building still standing but it too heavily vandalized. For a few seconds considered looking through the broken down plywood used to board up the entrance to see if the linotype machines were entombed but decided in favor of the air conditioned vehicle.

If we thought downtown Cairo IL was rather desolate in the late 60's it will make one cry today.

My least favorite "improvement" is business that does NOT have a live person to answer the phone! Poking and pushing numbers and finally talking (?) to someone who can barely speak your language. Cap'n Walnut.

Judy,
ROFL!! I suppose the new kitchen help was sent to the engine room to get some "stuffing" for the turkey too. . . . (Hmm, or it could be the other way 'round, send the new oiler to the kitchen for some stuffing. . . .)
Anyone been huntin' Snipes lately?
S'
David D.

Cairo

Cairo is where I made my phone calls home in the airconditioned office of the owner of an insurance company...and wasn't that where the ladies gave rides to the passengers to their historic home, of which they were so proud?
Cairo is where our June 1980 DQ St. Louis/Cincinnati trip started and where the repaired cracked crosshead was returned after the midnight hour. Shipyard Sam was on the towboat which pushed us until they got the crosshead reinstalled and we went under our own power from Paducah up.

Ah, yes, the Constellation! I recall the brisk fire that arose from the engine nacelles when they started them. My first view of the St. Louis Arch was through a Constellation window and a hole in the clouds.
My first airplane ride was in a Waco biplane owned by my father in 1928. On weekends he sold excursion rides. When ticket sales lagged Mother would "buy" a ride, then walk across the apron leading me or my little sister by the hand. We'd get our ride and the formerly reluctant men would say, "If that little lady is brave enough, so am I," and sales would improve. That went on until the so-called Great Depression called a halt.

Yeah, Alan, that Waco was some airplane. A friend has one that has likely been re-powered that he uses for stunt flying. Donno if it is the same year or model as your dad's but suspect that it is. Cap'n Walnut.

My father's was powered by a water-cooled OX-5 inline engine. I think it was new. Mother, who was also an aviatrix, was a member of the OX-5 club for years. Pop did more than excursions with it. A man named Sid Parks ran an aerial photography firm. Pop would fly the course of a new powerline or highway and Parks would lean over the side to make the pictures. While they were at it they would take pictures of local-pride landmarks and sell them as postcards. Sometimes they would do stunts at county fairs, no wing-walking, but lots of power dives, loops, etc. He flew something more than 1,000 hours before the depression ended it.

Did he ever do any crop dusting?

No. I think crop-dusting was a later invention. My brother, Hugh, did crop-dusting around the Greenville area, and worked his way up to DC-10's. I had no notion of flying because of a mal-functioning right eye. Today I refuse to go through the agonizing and demeaning searches and delays of commercial flights and traverl only on the ground. Bin Laden won that battle against the U.S.

I flew on Ozark from Owensboro, Ky to Louisville in 1962. The round trip fare was $ 18.00, which I thought was way too much, and they passed out chewing gum due to the non-pressurized cabin. The plane was a DC-3. Wish I could do it again today, even for much more than that amount!

I also flew on TWA from Indianapolis to Newark (or was it Philadelphia) en-route to McGuire AFB where I transferred to Overseas National Airways (a 707) courtesy of Uncle Sam in April, 1967 in transit to Frankfurt and assignment to a Hawk missle battalion near Hanau, Germany. En-route, we landed at Pittsburgh where I saw a Convair on the tarmac lettered for "The Beach Boys". Departing Pittsburgh. my plane was called back because the landing gear wouldn't go up. I don't recall what model the airplane was.

The only other 707 I flew on was a charter airline from Miami to Cuba in 1983 but that's another story.

-Jim Herron