Before Interstate 75 mauled the West End of downtown Cincinnati and encapsulated the softball meadows of Willow Run on the Covington side of the Ohio River in cement, north and southbound traffic from Detroit, Michigan to Jellico Tennessee, and back, flowed on US Route 25. Most people called this road the “Dixie Highway”, but to others it was the “Hillbilly Highway”.
On Friday evenings, the road was jammed, bumper to bumper, with cars carrying Detroit automobile plants workers back to their ancestral Appalachian homes in rural Kentucky and Tennessee. The hillbilly highway crossed the river on a bridge that shared the same piers with a railroad counterpart and the combination highway and train bridges were collectively called the C&O Bridge.
My father, Jess Jr. was a Covington police officer and in command of the Traffic Bureau. Friday was also payday for the police department, so every Friday night, mother, my brothers Dick and Bob, and I would pile into our car and join dad where he was at work on the southern end of the bridge with the men under his charge. Dad was due to end his shift by nine pm, but he never got off until well after midnight on Friday nights, not until the last of the long homeward bound parade had finally crossed the C&O Bridge and cleared the far-most boundaries of our town.
The police had a small segment set aside for them in the parking lot of the Bridge Café and Liquor Store, across from the ramp of the bridge. The rest of the parking lot was filled with the automobiles of colored men and women from Cincinnati. For it was payday for them too, and the Bridge Café was a favorite place where they cashed their paychecks, which they spent liberally in the café before returning to their vehicles where they consumed their purchases drunk from small waxed paper cups provided by the café for that purpose. Little was generally said about the drinking in the parking lot as long as it was consummated within the confines of the cars and the lot had the frolicking air of New Orleans during carnival. Rarely was there any trouble outside of an occasional shouting match or the indignation of a man, or woman, who found his, or her, mate in the backseat with another, especially as the night wore on as the whiskey flowed. Perhaps the presence of my father and his men was enough to keep the peace, but everyone was there for fun at the end of a week of labor, and trouble with “the law” was the last thing anyone wanted, so generally the crowd policed themselves.
To my bothers and I, the black men and women drinking and cavorting in the parking lot was frightening, but also exciting, and we dreaded, but also anticipated Friday nights in the parking lot of the Bridge Café. We did have father and his men to protect us, so we boys put on airs of indifference and acted as though the goings-on in the parking lot were all apart of our everyday routines.
Dad and his traffic cops spent so much time around the Bridge Café that it soon became their favorite after-work place to stop for a beer, or two, and the Bridge is where, on Friday nights after the traffic had cleared, father bought his weekly case of Wiedemann Beer and a carton of six twelve-ounce bottles of Pepsi-Cola for us three boys. That was two sodas, apiece, to last a week, and if for some reason any of us displeased our mother, her worst punishment was to open one of the bottles and drink the Pepsi while we watched. This meant that two of us would have to, as she liked to say with delight, “Split one.” Those words still grate like grinding metal when I hear them.
The "Bridge" was delighted to have the best of Covington’s Finest frequenting their establishment as great sums of money changed hands over the counter and the check cashing service attracted varying levels of the social ladder--much of it from the lower rungs. The manager of the liquor store was another “dried-up, little old man” whom destiny had chosen to inspire me and set me on a course that I have been traveling ever since. His name was Walter, but just about everyone called him “Walt”. Walt Hoffmeier.
Walt was born on a shantyboat on the Licking River sixty years before he and my father became pals. He and his tiny wife, Lorraine, owned a fifty-two foot, wooden houseboat called the PAL-O-MINE, a boat well-known in the Cincinnati harbor long before the Hoffmeiers bought it at Henry’s Boat Harbor above the city. One early summer day, in 1952, just a few months after grandpa died, Walter and Lorraine invite the young cops who directed the traffic in front of the liquor store, and their wives, for an evening cruise on the PAL. Again, the old fear returned when my mother and father were late returning to grandmother’s house where we boys were staying while they were house-boating on the river. Tears streamed from my eyes while I stood on the bottom rail of the white picket fence that enclosed the front yard of the bungalow on 38th Street as I prayed for their safe return.
Two weeks later, mom and dad were invited to ride the PAL-O-MINE, again, but this time we boys were invited to ride, too, and whatever happened on that day changed my life forever. Now as I sit looking out the window of this pilothouse, six stories above the river, I am still enchanted by that magical spell that started the first time I stepped onto the wooden deck of the PAL-O-MINE and met the small, bony man who became my first teacher and mentor. This is what I later wrote of him:
Walter Hoffmeier made it possible for me to become a riverman. Walt and his wife, Lorraine, owned a 52-foot, wooden houseboat that they invited my family to ride on in the summer of 1952. A love of the river was immediately born that first year and continues, half a century later. Walter had a enormous influence on a kid who'd never been much good at anything in particular until he met this skinny, hard-cussing, taskmaster who taught him carpentry, painting, and river skills. Most of all, he taught a boy what was expected of a man if he wanted to hold onto on a job, though the wages he paid were a evening's supper and the opportunity to be on the river working in every kind of weather, on all stages of water from a lake-like pool to raging floods and crushing ice. When I began steamboating at age seventeen, I already had seven years of experience that quickly caught the attention of Captain Ernest E. Wagner who continued the education that Walter had begun.
For better or worse, I harbor no regrets that the river has been my life.
(C) Captain Donald J. Sanders 2006
