The Introduction (Part III)

                                    The Introduction (Part III)

The Incinerator was a squat brick building set upon massive limestone blocks, carved and dressed in the manner of late-nineteenth century craftsmen, with a red tile roof and a high chimney that seemed too wide for its height.  Massive steel roll-up doors were on either end of the rectangular face of the structure, and cement ramps set upon limestone allowed garbage trucks to drive up and into the inside and exit out and down the other side.  Once within the incinerator, the trucks were weigh on an old-fashioned balance beam floor scale by, as mother described, “a dried-up little old Italian man” who worked in a tiny corner office and weighed and recorded all the weights of the refuse coming into the incinerator to be burned under the thick concrete floor that covered entire open interior of the building.  His name was Walter Questa. 

Walter was a dear friend of my grandparents.  He roomed with them, sleeping sitting upright in an overstuffed armchair on the second floor of their West 38th Street bungalow.  His arthritis was that bad.  In the 1930’s, before my parents were married, Walter, Grandma Edith, and Grandpa Jesse jointly owned the Questa & Sanders Saloon on Madison Avenue, across from Anna Belle’s Beauty Shoppe, where mother’s Aunt Anna Belle and her husband, Alton Hull, specialized in applying “permanent waves”, then popular with the young women of the ‘30’s and remained a favorite of that flapper generation well into their old age, thereby assuring Aunt Anna Belle and Uncle Alton a life-long source of income that lasted until their patrons became too old, or infirmed, to come to the beauty shop that later moved fourteen blocks south on Madison, or died.  In the latter case, my aunt and uncle would go to the funeral home where the deceased’s body was being prepared for burial and give their faithful customer one last permanent wave.  

But it was in the saloon, in 1936, that the eldest son of one-half of the partnership was tending bar, when a young girl from Ludlow, the next town down the river and a niece of the beauticians, came over on a hot, summer day to fetch a glass of ice water for her aunt, met, later married, and became my parents. 

Covington’s garbage incinerator sat on the riverbank at the foot of Main Street before the floodwall was built around the town that stopped the annual inundation of the Ohio River. The nearest neighbor to this building, built of oversized bricks perhaps a left-over lot of street pavers, was a graceful shantyboat set upon steel oil drums on the riverbank, far enough up the hill to keep the boat out of the water except for the highest floods.  The shantyboat men kept water inside the wooden hull so that the cypress planks were always swelled tightly for those times when the river reached the top of the drums and set the tiny ark afloat.  In an earlier life, this boat had a paddlewheel on the stern end, but since becoming a permanent home on the riverbank, the wheel had long since been removed and a back deck built in its place. 

The shanty boatmen also had a fleet of several jonboats they used to fish the waters of the Ohio River for catfish and carp they cleaned and sold uptown.  These practical wooden boats, with double square ends, sported a luxury few other boats of their class had.  Over each johnboat, a canvas canopy stretched between upright wooden posts that protected the fishermen from both the sun and the rain, for they spent incalculable hours upon the river tending their trot lines, mining the murky waters for the riches contained in the flesh of fish. 

A friend of the shantyboatmen, also a close friend of both grandpa and Walter, worked for the city waterworks and had a name that was musical to a small boy’s ears.  He was named Chalk Kuhn, but the way grandmother pronounced his name it sounded like “Chaw-Coon”.  It became a mantra.  Mr. Kuhn was often at the incinerator, both on the business of the city government and to visit Walter and grandpa, and I thrilled to hear the music of his name.  Chaw-Coon also fished in the little boats that bobbed on the river on windy days with their colorful canvas tops flapping like luffed sails.

Grandfather Jesse was the first policeman at the Boone County Airport, and in fact, he was the only police officer the airport had at the time, soon after the War had ended.  Uncle Ray had made it home safely from the Navy though he had narrowly escaped death in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic before going overseas to the Pacific where he fought in many of the famous sea battles of the War.  He was aboard his ship, in Yokohama Bay, when the Japanese signed the surrender on the USS MISSOURI, not far from where his was anchored.  “I shot down a Jap Zero,” he admitted, years later, as he reflected while lying on the bunk of our sternwheel houseboat, MARJESS, where the rocking of the boat must have taken him back to his Navy days.  That is about all Ray ever told me about the War, except that he hated it. 

Grandfather was at the incinerator quite often, and as I tagged along with him ever chance I could, so I, too, was a frequent visitor there where the little fishing boats bobbing in the wind held a special fascination.  By and by I began to fantasize that I was in one, rocking with the rhythm of the river. Eventually this fantasy was put into words that soon reached Chaw-Coon’s ears, and he suggested we could go down to the river’s edge, with grandpa’s permission, of course, where we would get aboard one of the beautiful jonboats with the vibrant canvas tops.    Chaw-Coon promised grandpa he would take good care of me in the boat, and grandfather trusted his old friend enough that he gave him his approval to take his oldest grandson on his first river adventure since the ferryboat fiasco of a few years earlier.  So it was set for me to go.  All I had to do was take Mr. Chalk Kuhn’s hand and thread my way down the worn path to the river’s edge where a chain was shackled around a willow tree and out to the bow of one of the prancing boats.  

How I wanted to go.  But at the last minute my courage fled and the old gripping fear returned.  No matter how much anyone around me encouraged me to go, I could not overcome the dread when it was time to fulfill my fantasy of being on the river in one of the tiny boats.  This was the same loss of courage also experienced at various other times in my life as when I wanted to ride the Shooting Star roller coaster at Coney Island, jump off a high willow tree limb and into the Licking River, or ask Darryl, the popular girl next door, for a date.  The sensation of unqualified, raw, absolute terror, though, had subsided somewhat, and in its place a curiosity for the river was beginning to bud, though I was not aware of the change just yet.

The memory of that beautiful shantyboat has remained with me over the decades as my special dream “hide-away-place”, a mental refuge where I have often escaped. Years later, as the shantyboatmen grew old, they offered their immaculately-kept boat to my folks for a thousand dollars, who after a quick deliberation, promptly turned down their offer.  Consequently, the boat ended up in a barge fleet as an office where it lasted but a short time amongst the mammoth steel monsters and became kindling for the descendants of the fish once mined from the river by the original owners of the handsome shanty. 

Walter Questa died in grandpa and grandma's home on 38th Street in November 1947, and Grandfather Jesse Sanders, Sr. passed-away in the same house on February 9, 1952, the worst day of my life that I pray remains so, for I could never again handle such a tragedy.  He was only fifty-eight.  Grandmother Edith outlived him by thirty-two years.  Chaw-Coon lived another thirty-some years, or so, and Uncle Raymond Robert Sanders died a year before his mother, breaking her heart.  The green-shingled bungalow at 110 West 38th Street in Covington, Kentucky was sold to a near-by church congregation who immediately tore it down, breaking my heart.  It was to houses what the floating shanty was to boats.  The steamer ISLAND QUEEN was still running excursions during my early years, and I have vague recollections of riding the great white sidewheel steamboat, but the memories, like mostly-forgotten nightmares, recall sitting on hard benches on the open top deck, at night, dreading the deafening shriek of the steam whistle.  When the Coney Island steamer exploded at the Pittsburgh Wood Street Landing in 1947, the Cincinnati press and radio coverage has seen its equal only in the more recent reportings of the Kennedy assassination and the 9-11 tragedy.  As a second grader absorbing every word coming over the radio, I recall the ISLAND QUEEN explosion as clearly as I remember the more recent two. 

©  Capt. Donald J. Sanders 2006