History Repeats Itself

*Sprinkler systems/SS MORO CASTLE fire*
Steamboatng colleagues,
Jim, interesting account of you and your family memories of Volney 'Stogie' White and all that went with him. I knew of a "divorce" but with no real details and never asked one question. Why? And he was one big 'party animal' as I recall.

'Stogie's' mention of Capt. Tom Greene nixing the passenger/packet runs with the CHRIS & TOM GREENE in 1936 a major change in Greene family operations. The TOM built in 1923, CHRIS in 1925 were fine boats but unfortunately built at the end of the era where scheduled passenger/freight by steamboats was coming to a quicker end than imagined. Both were fine boats and the 'last hurrah' with autos, trucks taking over quickly. In California Capt. C.A. Anderson had been 'advised' not to consider building even the DELTA KING/DELTA QUEEN due to changing economics, emerging road transport but moved on in the euphoria of the 'roaring 20s.' Everybody got a big jolt when the music stopped with the October, 1929 Wall Street stock market crash.

The then new 1936 law for 'automatic sprinkler systems on overnight boats' also felt afloat, ashore in hotels etc. The marine portion of the law came following the tragic, gristly fire aboard the steamship MORO CASTLE, September 8, 1934 at sea off the New Jersey coast. The uproar along with increasing demands by the seamens' union felt nationally and internationally. And yes, the Safety At Sea Laws were in existence then as now. More than one older steamboat/steamship line then were hit with the cost of sprinkler and other fire suppression systems as, naturally, many to most built with ornate wood interiors. Some lines still in lucrative business stepped up with the installation; others already on the margin just called it quits laying up their boats/ships or stripping them down for straight cargo handling. Then the big national maritime union strikes about that time hit other companies coast to coast, east to west, north and south like a sledge hammer with the old FALL RIVER LINE being just one. By then the Greene family smelled possible profits with one or more all passenger overnight cruise boats. Thus the GORDON C. GREENE and after W.W. II Capt. Tom's vision for the GREENE LINE in the form of his DELTA QUEEN. Again, what do I know?

R. Dale Flick
Coal Haven Landing, Ohio River, Cincinnati

I received a rather scathing email about my post. Apparently, the writer thought that I thought the DQ does not have a sprinkler system. I know she does, a state of the art one installed just a few years ago.
My point of this posting is that two disasters at sea caused problems for river passenger boats. The Maro Castle fire caused a change in the law requiring sprinklers and another deep sea ship fire 30 years later caused a change in law requiring noncombustible construction. The first impacted the TOM & CHRIS GREENE (which were both all steel construction), the second the DELTA QUEEN. That is what I meant by history repeating itself.
DQ trivia question......did the boat have a sprinkler system when she arrived from California or was the one I saw, when I first rode the boat in 1953, installed at Dravo in 1947?

*MORRO CASTLE/Sprinkler systems*
Morning, Steamboating colleagues,
Jim, good questions above and I don't know off hand--but have papers, letters, interior photos here before and after the DELTA QUEEN arrived and was taken to DRAVO in 1947.

My thinking, either right or wrong, was that the DQ, still in operation at and after the MORRO CASTLE fire at sea off New Jersey in the 1930s, had sprinklers installed. John Burns, while here at my home, never mentioned it and I forgot to ask. What the U.S. Navy required during her years ferrying troops on San Francisco Bay would be another matter. No doubt any presently existing sprinkler system on the DQ would still need to be thoroughly inspected or even updated. I thought I read in the various news articles and releases recently where the sprinkler system was one item to receive attention. No argument or debate there as it was stated clearly in black and white. Any sprinkler system in buildings and facilities ashore and afloat are periodically checks/evaluated as per requirements by insurance underwriters. No doubt Capt. Bill Judd knows far more with all his years of experience on the rivers and in marine survey work. We shall see.

The Str. TOM GREENE was built in 1923 at 'Marietta Manfucturing Co.' Pt. Pleasant, W.VA. Str. CHRIS GREENE built in 1925 with her steel hull done by 'Ward:' then fnished at 'Gardner Docks,' Pt. Pleasant W.VA. They both were state of the art steamers at the same time the L&C LINE finished the huge CINCINNATI in 1924. Again, these boats, along with the DELTA KING/DELTA QUEEN, CAPE GIRARDEAU came at the very end of an era. Expansion of auto and truck use, dependable vehicle tires, extensive construction of roads and highways soon spelled the end. People often assume it was the railroads that killed the packet boats. True and not true to a point. In many cases records show the packet boats and railroads often had a partership if not financial investment in both. The Great Depression following October, 1929 with all its social, political, economic factors hit hard as did the then disastrous maritime strikes coast to coast at the same time.

I know the hulls of the CHRIS & TOM were of steel but the upperworks and cabins were of wood. How the Greenes strengthened, reinforced their decks to handle those autos something I don't know. Again, Capt. Bill Judd may recall. The then new prevailing sprinkler system laws in the 1930s also hit other boats, ships on our coasts, Great Lakes, rivers east and the ocean. Again, what do I know?

R. Dale Flick
Coal Haven Landing, Ohio River, Cincinnati

Dale, you might check, but I know the decks of both boats were steel as I believe were the superstructures. I don't have my Ways Directory close at hand.

*CHRIS & TOM's steel decks?*
Hi, Jim,
I pulled WAY'S PACKET DIRECTORY as I usually do going to the true sources. Fred gives the boats their full 'bios' mentioning the steel hulls but nothing about their upporworks. 'Period' interior photos interior and exterior 'seem' to be wood. Interior cabins were wood as was her cabin deck. GL Purser Bob McCann would know in an instant. Frank Prudent may also know. The exterior and interior wood could have been secured with studs over the steel. No matter what, the then new prevailing fire laws/spinkler system and the disppearance of packet passenger and freight business almost within the twinkling of an eye the real morphine that knocked a rapidly disappearing out cold. Steel or not under that wood would still require a sprinkler system with crew and passengers. Steel contsructed boats then also got hit with the regulations. Then an ever bigger culprit just as dangerous came about in later years with the serious health threats from asbestos insulation in bulkeheads, around piping and electrical lines. I'll keep checking.

R. Dale Flick
Coal Haven Landing, Ohio River, Cincinnati

Tom and Chris

I'm not Bob nor Frank, but I have stayed at a Holiday Inn.... the TOM was used by Walker Boat in Paducah for many years as a landing barge/storage. I was aboard it during one of my DQ trips in the late 70s. Her first deck bulkheads and beams were intact and they were steel as I recall. Keith and I climbed around her in her last moments at Melbourne KY next to the CHRIS' hull, and I think there was still some stuff above the hull attached. I know I won't find those pix tonight, but if Keith is reading, he'll have them in an instant.

Eureka!

I did a 'search' on .org and found the posting about our visit and 2 of Keith's pix of the TOM and its steel beams.
http://www.steamboats.org/forum/steamboats-history/3503-chris-greene-hull.html

As you know the hulls of the Tom and Chris were steel some the decks were steel under the boilers and machinery sides of the cabin back by the engine room are steel. The boiler deck was steel but the rest of the boat was wood. When the Chris burned in 1967 in Dayton all that was left was the steel hull the boiler deck had fallen down on to the hull. The Tom boiler deck was in decent shape when we got her at least didn't leak from rain water but the hull was in worst shape after being moved and going thru ice so that led scrapping her out. I hope that answers your question.

Thanks Bob

Thanks for clearing this up definitively, and thanks for allowing Keith and me to visit the CHRIS several times and the TOM just before her scrapping. Those were memorable times for a couple of steamboat buffs.

The mystery deepens,,,thanks to the Murphy Library,,,,,here is a picture of the construction of the main cabin and it is all steel. I remember seeing the TOM GREENE's hull as a car carrier and it still had the steel boiler deck on it.

Another construction picture of the TOM GREENE, The transition from wood to steel didn't happen overnight, it evolved. Howards build several boats which had a "composite" hull...steel sides with wood bottom. By 1910 Howards was pretty much strictly all steel hulls. The GORDON C. GREENE was all steel from the hull up to the boiler deck as was the SPRAGUE,

*TOM/CHRIS with steel and wood*
Steamboating colleagues,
WOW! gang, you are really coming up with some incredible stuff here. Judy, I do 'now' recall seeing the photos you and Keith took with the steel members on the TOM after I dug in my foggy brain. I wondered if Bob Harrison would chime on here with his information. For years I saw daily the CHRIS docked over in Dayton, KY, I think,' from Eastern Ave. and Columbia Parkway on this side of the river. She was diminished but sill had that steamboat look.

The metal along with wood sounds right. Now I wonder if any of the overheads, bulkeads etc. had any insulation if at all? No matter if steel with wood or all steel--the then new prevailing sprinkler system requiements could not be ignored with passengers crew etc. By the time the CHRIS & TOM were built steel was becoming in use more along with being cost competitive. Fine lumber so required for boats was becoming scarce and very expensive. The Greenes were thinking ahead. I pulled out B/W photos of the then new big sidewheel CINCINNATI of 1924 but can't determine any sprinklers--and I doubt it. Then comes the use of these new so-called fire-retardant 'untumescent paints' but that's a whole different story. Thanks gang!

R. Dale Flick
Coal Haven Landing, Ohio River, Cincinnati.

Dale...the CINCINNATI wouldn't have required sprinklers since the requirement didn't become law until 1936 and by that time the overnight passenger boat CINCINNATI was long gone...Well on its way to becoming the excursion boat PRESIDENT.

the PREZ

She actually had been the PRESIDENT for 3 years by then in 1936.

*Str. CINCINNATI/PRESIDENT*
Morning, Steamboating colleagues,
Judy and Jim are 'right on' about the big sidewheeler CINCINNATI not having a sprinkler system. I sleuthed these old B/W photos of her interior seeing nothing. She was one very big boat for sure. The then L&C LINE made a big hoopla about the CINCINNATI being as fire retardant as possible. The dates of her construction and operation would have been well outside of the later regulations in the 1930s. By then it was all over.

A now long deceased neighbor and retired high school teacher back then for some years planned a big end-of-the-year trip on the CINCINNATI for the graduating seniors. Steven was a pace-setter then using a movie camera. He took considerable footage of the CINCINNATI on the outside and her upper decks along with river scenes on the two day, two night trip. On those film reels you could see other still working packet boats, big excursion boats on the river. Her upper decks looked like a hockey field in size with all that canvas decking. Alas, cameras and film then were a tad primitive with any attempt at interior views being dark beyond viewing. He did have some shots of her engines sliding in and out, wheels rolling. What has become of his films after all these years now a good question.

A few people have questioned IF the CINCINNATI could have survived as she was a near contemporary of the then new DELTA KING/DELTA QUEEN. Probably not with the Great Depression, declining freight business. Could she have made it as an all tourist boat? Hard to say now in 2015 in tandem with her high operating and maintenance costs. Who knows? Same goes for the last ISLAND QUEEN up to her tragic loss September, 1947. She 'could' have endured but already boat travel up to CONEY ISLAND and return was gradually diminishing from the end of World War II to 1947 as shown on her finance books. Even before 1947 Ed Schott of CONEY was watching the books seeing the inevitable trend. Expanding love of the auto, buses, suburbs growing out from the central city had more people driving or taking the bus to CONEY ISLAND. Thanks to you all for the above, Again, what do I know?

R. Dale Flick
Coal Haven Landing, Ohio River, Cincinnati

Dale, I was thinking the CINCINNATI was a tourist boat from the get-go. Or at least primarily a tourist boat, maybe accepting some freight, but I was thinking the passengers were expected to make her profitable. Capt. Fred Way wrote a great article on the CINCINNATI in the S&D Reflector some years back detailing the operation and its demise, saying that in the end, the bills were mounting and the owners found themselves "nosed in to the bank coming ahead slow" or something to that effect.

As we've seen, it is hard enough to make it with a tourist boat in the best of times, much less during a prolonged depression.

*CINCINNATI was a packet & tourist boat*
Steamboating colleagues,
Bob, L&C LINE took a gamble with the big CINCINNATI along with her sister to be the LOUISVILLE--which was scratched early on being sold to CONEY ISLAND CO. as the last ISLAND QUEEN finished from the hull up here in Cincinnati. L&C LINE almost in the same situation that CALIFORNIA TRANSPORTATION CO. would be with the DELTA KING/DELTA QUEEN in a few years with cars, trucks, new highways, bridges, dependable auto/truck tires. To even finish the DK/DQ the company there had to open up for a stock market offering for added capital. The DELTA QUEEN almost never made it with her builders carrying the project at DENNY BROS. in Scotland with a good rate of interest. They went on with the two boats with great success until the Great Depression hit. Even before that they also began cutting many way-stops for small freight handling focusing only on bigger stops--and this made smaller shippers and farmers angry out there. Thus we hear the term "truck farming."

The CINCINNATI ran in partnership with the QUEEN CITY. And it was the dual 'night boat' trade with passengers and freight. L&C did see the potential for the emerging 'toursit boat' angle. To make things up, the CINCINNATI had another upper deck added with more cabins. Already by 1924 L&C sent out an agent to canvas all the shippers and businesses from here to Louisville and back on a subtle 'subscription basis' with money for the line in a kind of contract system in a veiled "commemorative publication." She did make a number of Mardi Gras trips, trips to Pittsburgh and was chartered by various groups like the Ohio Valley Improvement Association. That's fine but, what do you do when a boat like that is off the 'night run' and what about shippers sending and receiving feight if you don't have a second or alternate boat? Fred Way drastically cut [as mentioned in other postings here] accepting but very limited freight with his BETSY ANN. Freight still paid the bills as it did with the GREENE LINE boats.

The mere size, operating expenses, maintenance, crew were a drain on the L&C. There were also rumors and fussng from witnesses about "things going on in the home office." I have notes, letters here from nobody but Charlie Dietz to me in later years lamenting the failure of a once great company. John W. Hubbard, the wealthy Pittsburgh manufacturer known as 'The shovel king' had nursed both the QUEEN CITY and then the CINCINNATI through good and bad times. Many said Hubbard artifically pumped up the dying packet boat trades beyond a natural life. IF the Great Depression hadn't brought the music to a halt, the CINCINNATI could possibly have lived on as a grand trourist boat. We will never know now. If she had, would the GREENE LINE have taken a flyer on the GORDON C. GREENE? What would this have meant down the road for Capt. Tom Greene to consider purchasing the DELTA QUEEN? The people then in that business didn't have their eyes misty with 'old steamboat romance.' When the bottom dropped out you could hear the sound all over the rivers. The DELTA KING/DELTA QUEEN did carry on out in California as the markets, geography were far different. Ah, so many questions and I know I don't know.

R. Dale Flick
Coal Haven Landing, Ohio River, Cincinnati.

Charlie Deitz told me the best steamboating he ever did was while he was on the CINCINNATI, it was a new boat and a young crowd. Do you suppose, in those days of prohibition, there was any drinking on those one night trips???? I wonder if a boat today could be successful going back and forth between Louisville and Cincinnati. I really believe that between mid-May and the end of October, it would be a sell-out every trip. Run the same schedule as the CINCINNATI did, leave Louisville at 5PM be in Cincinnati the next morning, spend the day in Cincy, then return to Louisville. A boat doing that would draw passengers from both cities and young people today seem to have all the money in the world (or at least a lot more than we did). Me thinks, the cash register in the bar would need an extra large cash drawer; party-hardy!

You know there was daily boat service continuously between Louisville and Cincinnati from 1834 until 1947 and it ended in 1947 not because of lack of business but because of union troubles. I'm not sure of the sprinkler law we discussed in this thread, but the TOM and the CHRIS did carry a few passengers in the Texas rooms up until the end.

*Charlie Dietz/Str. CINCINNATI*
Steamboating colleagues,
Jim, I read your above RE: Charlie Dietz with his memories of the big CINCINNATI. Charlie, until his last days on earth, continued to fuss and rave over the end of the L&C LINE and the big, double cabin CINCINNATI. In conversations and then letters, he--and others then--called it "the fall of a great line...corporate lightening at the top...every body 'getting a cut of the coal pile on the boats and in the office.'" 'Shovel King' John W. Hubbard was an absent owner back in Pittsburgh with his check book ever in his coat pocket to nurse things along when needed. In time hard, cold reality hit him in the eyes. You bet there was a "refreshment room" on the CINCINNATI along with what passengers brought aboard for 'refreshments' even during Prohibition. The L&C LINE even in 1924 appealed to the well-dressed passengers being "of a higher class." What's that tell you?

Still, with changing transportation needs, speed, trucks, cars, highways, Great Depression, size of the CINCINNATI, expenses, maintenance, no doubt the proverbial 'writing was on the wall.' And nobody was in the business for the 'romance of old time steamboats.' There has always been 'two worlds' between the officers, crew on the boats vs. the home office, bottom of the cash ledger. There were infernal 'bean counters' with hand-pulled calculators then as now. Both of those 'worlds' often existed side by side to keep the passengers, freight bookings coming in and those out on the river working. In the new age big trucks could pull in to unload, load and be off during the day with no dependence on the 'night boats.' It was door-to-door delivery without double handling on the landing or wharfboats. Then it was big freight handling that made the money in spite of the passengers up in the cabin. Fred Way in his time earned his scars and bruises with the BETSY ANN. Again, what do I know?

R. Dale Flick
Coal Haven Landing, Ohio River, Cincinnati

Jim, I think the exact same thing every time I'm on that stretch. Seasonal, to be sure, but oh, what fun! They could even get a contract to take small package freight for UPS!

I'd love to see that happen. It would require at least three things though to be a success: 1) A rock bottom fare that would be competitive with the foreign flag blue water ships, 2) Reasonably priced alcoholic drinks and 3) an owner with a huge amount of disposable income to bank roll the project before it builds a following!

Jim Reising;34588 wrote: Another construction picture of the TOM GREENE, The transition from wood to steel didn't happen overnight, it evolved. Howards build several boats which had a "composite" hull...steel sides with wood bottom. By 1910 Howards was pretty much strictly all steel hulls. The GORDON C. GREENE was all steel from the hull up to the boiler deck as was the SPRAGUE,

The photo here is identified as the TOM GREENE, but I think it might be the CHRIS. The boat is sitting at what I think is the Gardner Docks at Pt. Pleasant. That's where the Chris was finished off after being brought down from Charleston. Also it looks as if this boat has a bit more sheer than the TOM did.

OR was the TOM brought down from the Marietta Manufacturing Yards and finished off at Gardner's too? Ah sweet mystery of life!