Weenie Burner

Maybe I learned risk-taking and adventurous decisions from my parents, who as teenagers, got married in 1930, at the beginning of the Depression. It took a lot of love and guts to begin a marriage during those hard times. Dad was never out of work, and Mom helped him in several retail food stores. In 1940 they opened a frozen food locker, an enterprise facing both the technological challenges of early refrigeration, and the financial difficulties of a pioneer industry.

They instilled in my two older sisters and me a hard work ethic. We learned the pride of doing a good job by following their example. The notion of taking a risk had the built-in corollary of making the risk pay off through grit and perseverance.

Well, back to my own life. At Christmas in 1953 I had given my girlfriend an engagement ring, and we looked far ahead to married life. The summer of 1954, I needed to look for a job, and because I had quit Caterpillar to go to college, they wouldn’t rehire me. My future brother-in-law, Waldo, lined up work for us baling hay, but just before school was out, that job fell through and all the jobs were taken.
I applied everywhere, with no luck, even where “help wanted” signs were not posted. One long shot was asking about a job on a riverboat called Gravel Gertie. The name of the boat was a takeoff on a silver-haired crone named Gertie in the Dick Tracy comic strip, and the fact that this boat transported gravel. Some local businessmen had bought a decommissioned Army Corps of Engineers sternwheeler and used it as a towboat to transport barges of stone from gravel pits near Havana to Material Services Corporation in Chicago. I went down to the Havana riverfront where this boat was docked, in between trips, and asked for work. The skipper said they didn’t need any help, but took my name.

Usually on Saturday night my fiancé and I went to the movies. One Saturday, I got home from our date about midnight, and planned to sleep in the next morning. My dad woke me up at 7:30, telling me I had a job on Gravel Gertie and to pack a bag, because one of the boat owners was waiting outside to drive me to the boat for a week-long trip to Chicago and back.

I stuffed some clothes in a bag and headed for the door.

“Can you cook? The job is cooking for the crew. Their cook didn’t show up, and they’re ready to shove off.”

Because I needed the money, I mumbled, “Uh, yeah . . . I can cook.”

A few minutes later I was on the boat, and Chick, one of the deckhands, showed me the kitchen, which featured a huge cast iron range with a top about three feet by five feet, complete with an oven. This cast iron monster reminded me of the range in my Grandma’s house when our family lived with her during World War II, except it burned coal.

Chick told me, “The stove runs on fuel oil. Turn this valve to the left and you get more fuel and heat. Turn it to the right to lower the heat and turn it off.”

Opposite the stove was a walk-in cooler, well stocked with meat and produce. To one side, a cupboard held canned and dry goods.

I looked around for a bulletin board or notebook, asking, “Where’s the menu?”

Chick guffawed. “Cookie, we don’t care what you cook, just cook plenty of it.”

The crew’s nicknames for me were Weenie Burner and Water Scorcher.

I fixed my first meal for the skipper, who sent down an order for breakfast. I got together bacon, eggs, and toast, and carried it up the ladder to the wheelhouse. Gravel Gertie, like all boats, had a raised threshold to keep water out. I tripped on the high threshold and almost dumped breakfast in the skipper’s lap.

I made it through lunch and supper, and mopped down the kitchen and dining room. Then I had time to explore the boat. I looked into the engine room, the heart of the boat, dominated by two six-feet long GMC diesels, hooked up to electric generators. Large cables carried the current to the electric motors driving the single paddle wheel at the stern. George, the mechanic, carried an oversized oil can, applying liberal doses of lubricant to moving parts. I wandered around the tugboat, but didn’t venture onto the string of barges, the “tow” that Gertie was pushing up the river. Each barge was a metal rectangular open container, with a narrow ledge on each long side. I didn’t want to take a chance of falling into the cargo of gravel or into the Illinois River.

Going back into the kitchen and dining room, I noticed that the only reading material was romance magazines, like True Confessions. Reading until I was sleepy, I went to the bunk in my cabin, the gentle rolling of the waves lulling me to a peaceful slumber.

In the middle of the night, a jolt awakened me, and the headboard of the bed banged against the wall. For a few seconds I thought I was in my own bed in Havana, and a car must have crashed into our house.

Then I realized I was in a bunk on Gravel Gertie. And she was not moving. Soon, work boots stomped down the hallway, and the skipper’s shrill voice filled the night air. The carbon arc searchlights lit up the sky and the channel, to our right. The boat must have run aground. The diesel engines whined as they strained to their limit, and the paddle wheel thrashed, but the boat remained still. The skipper must have been urging the boat back and forth, shifting the paddle wheel from forward to reverse. When he slowed the engines to idle, he stepped out of the wheelhouse and screamed orders.

I was scared to death, but didn’t get out of bed. I wanted to help, yet didn’t know how, and feared that I might fall into the river and drown. My maiden voyage on Gertie might be my final voyage. Trying to help the crew on the wet and slippery deck would not be brave or risky. It would be foolish and maybe fatal. After a while, maybe only a half hour, but what seemed like an eternity, the boat backed up and then reentered the channel.

My heart still pounding, eventually I dozed off.

The next morning the deckhands razzed me.

“Hey, cookie, we could have used your help last night. Where were you?”

I ignored them, paying attention to the first batch of pancake batter I had ever mixed up.

Trying to flip the pancakes too soon, I created a mess.

Chick laughed. “Hey, cookie, let me show you how to fry pancakes.” He dumped my disaster into the waste basket, greased the skillet, and poured more batter in. “Now, see them bubbles around the edge? Wait til they get good and dry, then you can turn them over.”

He finished his cakes, and then I fixed more for the crew. Fortunately, as they told me when I got on the boat, they were more interested in quantity than quality.

I learned from the chatter of the crew the early morning problem that caused Gertie to run aground. A much larger towboat pushing oil barges had crowded Gertie, and she had to yield to the faster boat. Our skipper tried to make away for the larger vessel, but it insisted on passing in a rather narrow channel, and the skipper hit a sandbar. The larger boat did not slow down, causing a high wake that threatened to tear apart Gertie’s tow just as she grounded. The skipper directed his swearing more at the other tow and its captain than at his own crew.

All day long I was upset by the early morning episode, wondering if every night my sleep would be interrupted by the threat of an unplanned swim in the Illinois River. The crew brushed away this episode as just another day’s work. None of them ever donned a life vest, too macho to show that they might need help.

I spent much of the day nursing my fears, not looking forward to another stint in my bunk. Toward evening, I walked the deck to view a colorful sunset. George, the mechanic, was on the deck by the paddle wheel, smoking his pipe and taking in the beautiful scene He did not socialize with the crew, spending his time babying his ageing engines, or retreating to his cabin.

I ventured, “Gorgeous, isn’t it?”

He turned toward me. “Yes, that’s what keeps me coming back to leaky buckets like this. Keeps me in touch with the beauty of the world and the mystery of life. Mark Twain was right—if the river’s in your blood, you can’t stay away from it.”

We talked for an hour about Mark Twain, the river, and life in general.

“What’s your favorite novel?”

He puffed on his pipe, gazing at the rosy afterglow. “Hard to single out one, but Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea is a favorite.”

“I just finished reading it, and really liked it.”

George excused himself to look after the engines.

I was flabbergasted that this unassuming grease monkey mechanic had read so much and digested it. He seemed to be a kind of downhome philosopher, a small town intellectual.

After that first meeting, I spent time with him when I wasn’t cooking and cleaning, and he didn’t have to tend to mechanical matters. On the way to and from Chicago, we spent evenings at the stern, apart from the skipper and the deckhands. I thought George was more like me than the others, a Havana native who had found his way into literature and a way of life beyond the limited confines of a small town.

The trip to Chicago turned out to be uneventful. Going through the locks was interesting. And when we passed the state penitentiary at Joliet, the crew joked about the people they knew locked up there.

We delivered the gravel and picked up a tow of empty barges, then made the trip downriver from Chicago to Beardstown, a city south of Havana where we would make a swap for loaded barges. Docked in Beardstown, we had some down time. Chick, who was flat broke, persuaded me to buy him a beer at a local tavern. I went with him and treated him to a beer, but ordered a 7-Up for me, because I didn’t drink alcohol.

When we returned to the boat, I looked for George. He wasn’t in the engine room, so I went to his cabin and found him sprawled on the bed on his back, mouth open and drooling. He didn’t show up for lunch, and I began to worry about him sleeping so long, mentioning it to the crew.

“Cookie, he ain’t sleepin’. He’s on a binge, a bender. He’ll be okay when he dries out.”

I tried not to show my shock. I had looked up to George as a homegrown philosopher, a role model as someone who had escaped small town provincialism for a more thoughtful way of life. And he turned out to be an alcoholic. He burst the bubble of my youthful idealism.

By the time we left Beardstown with a new tow of gravel for Chicago, he had recovered enough to take care of the engines, but I could not renew my friendship with him.

While waiting to board Gertie at Beardstown, with our barges of gravel lashed together, a much larger towboat came up the channel at full speed, causing a wake that almost tore apart our tow. The skipper ran up and down the bank of the river, cursing and throwing a tantrum like a toddler.

On our way north from Beardstown, we stopped briefly in Havana, to restock the cooler and pantry. I got clean clothes from home, and brought along my Royal portable typewriter.

In my free time, and in the evenings, instead of chatting with George, I pounded out a short story to submit to True Confessions. I had always enjoyed writing, penned articles for a junior high newspaper, and edited the high school yearbook. I looked down on romance magazines as trash, but was confident I could write something equal to the sappy stories in their magazine.

I used the obvious formula of guy and gal meet, they fall in love, then they break up, and in the end, they come back together. Chick, interested in my writing, insisted on reading the story. When he finished it, he said, “Well, it’s okay.”

“Uh, you didn’t really like it?”

“Cookie, it needs more sex and violence.”

On our next stopover in Havana, I mailed the story to True Confessions.

Chick served as my first literary critic, and this magazine sent me my first rejection slip: “does not meet our current needs.”

Decades later, in a creative writing class I took, the instructor dumped a grocery bag full of his rejection slips on the desk, advising us that you don’t qualify as a writer until you have received a batch of rejections.

A summer on Gravel Gertie taught me how naïve I was about human nature. Chick might not have been a published critic, but he knew more about what a magazine would accept than I did. I had foolishly idealized George, thinking he was a cut above the deckhands, but he turned out to be a flawed character.

The captain I had totally misjudged, seeing him as a crotchety curmudgeon, and didn’t find out about this misperception until years later, when my brother-in-law Kermit asked me if I knew an R.B. Hillyer. I told him I didn’t know anyone by that name. It turns out he was the skipper of the Gravel Gertie when I cooked on the boat, but I had never heard his last name. Hillyer had served on a destroyer in the South Pacific during World War II, and needed translation of a Japanese record about which U. S. Navy ship got credit for destroying some Japanese submarines. That’s when I found out he had written several lengthy books: The Greatest Anti-submarine Action of All Wars, and Wooden Boats and Iron Men: A Saga of Havana, Illinois and the Rivers of Illinois, Missouri, Mississippi, Ohio & Kanawha. Kermit, a retired career army Master Sergeant who had served in Vietnam, passed on to me the signed copy of Wooden Boats and Iron Men. The captain’s inscription captured the spirit of these two talkative characters: “To Kermit Donaho, my friend, who is just as big a bullshitter as my self.”

This reminded me of the tired saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” I had seen the skipper as a temperamental and tantrum-throwing oddball, but I found out he was much more “bookish” than George.

Gravel Gertie provided the first opportunity to explore fiction and submit a story, and qualify me as a writer with a rejection slip.

In his retirement, skipper, aka R. B. Hillyer, returned to his Havana roots and wrote about his Midwestern life. After my own retirement, I have revisited my hometown in the book, At Grandma’s House: The World War II Homefront in Havana, Illinois.

The fall after I left the Gravel Gertie to return to college, the boat sank near Peoria, fortunately with no fatalities. Taking a job on Gertie was a risk worth taking, not only helping me make some money for college, but also teaching me a lot about life and people.