REMEMBERING HOW THE RIVER RUNS

"Pulling heavy seas" means encountering heavy waves from another boat.

Below Baton Rouge, La., captains are known by numbers instead of names.

"Once you get your feet wet, you're lost" is the explanation often given for working on the river by people who do.

Twenty-five-hundred years of river experience and lore were in the room Thursday when the Association of Retired Marine Personnel met in Cape Girardeau. Sixty-four of the organization's 155 members came from as far away as Evansville, Ind., and Nashville, Tenn. Capt. Dan Crowder, who lives in Jackson, organized the gathering at the Port Cape Girardeau Restaurant.

Not all those attending were riverboat pilots. "Their common bond is that they are connected with the Mississippi and Ohio rivers," said Capt. Jack Clark, one of the organization's officers.

Clark, who lives in Paducah, Ky., had 45 years on the river before retiring. He started working on the river as a kid because fast food jobs hadn't yet been invented. "The river was one of the few places you could get employment," he said.

In his years on the river, Clark said, safety was always his first consideration. "Man was not meant to swim. My main concern was falling in the river." He isn't much of a swimmer.

"A lot of times you don't have a chance for a second mistake," he said.

The treacherous spots on the river are well known to all the pilots. One of them is the stretch coming downriver past Cape Rock, setting up for the Mississippi River Bridge. Then the pilot has to set up for the Thebes railroad bridge. "It's been hit by everybody but Christopher Columbus," Clark says.

When he started out, he might be gone for 60 or 70 days and back home only a week before going out again. Now most people who work on the river get a day off for every day they work.

"It's a job like a postal worker," says Capt. Al Pannier of Cape Girardeau. "... it's not everybody's cup of tea," Pannier said. "You've got to have a good wife."

Ninety-year-old Capt. Charles Hooker Poe was in town to give a talk about the history of the Lee River Lines. Kathy Flippo was here selling copies of her book, "Between the Saints: Louis and St. Paul." James Swift, whose first byline appeared in the Waterways Journal in 1941, attended as a contributing editor of the industry publication. The St. Louisan has a book coming out titled "Backing Hard Into River History."

Flippo, who lives in Morrison, Mo., worked on the river with her husband, Capt. Pat Flippo, for many years. The book is dedicated to Gary "Slim" Lowes, a Jackson resident who was Flippo's first mate.

"People on boats become closer almost than land families," she said.

She has donated copies of her book to the Cape Girardeau, Jackson and Riverside libraries.

The cook is one of the most important and the hardest working people aboard the boat. "She has to produce three squares a day," Clark said. Riverboat cooks traditionally are women.

The marine workers described mountainous breakfasts of sausage and bacon and eggs on the river. "It's Thanksgiving three meals a day," Flippo says. Now that he's retired, her husband "misses his cook," she said.

Most riverboat pilots started out as deckhands and worked their way up. Pannier was a cabin boy at age 15. "I shined a lot of brass," he said.

He retired in 1995 after 39 years on the river, at the end as general manager of the American Commercial Barge Line and port captain in Cairo, Ill.

The job took him up and down the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Tennessee, the Yazoo and the Intercoastal Canal.

The first boat he piloted had a 500 hp engine. His last boat was powered by an 8,400 hp motor.

The Mississippi River is much deeper and swifter now than when he began piloting boats, Pannier said, but he doesn't blame the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. "The Corps has done a lot to help," he said.

None admitted to being drawn to the river by romantic notions created by Mark Twain. "There isn't a romance about it," Clark says, "but there's an attraction."