Robert Steen (D)
(7:10) Mr. Steen describes life on a riverboat.Florence- Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive Interview with Robert Steen April 14, 2008 Florence, Alabama Conducted by Ken Johnson Clip 4 Robert Steen: Now on the boat the watches or the shifts we were there for twenty- four hours. You continued...
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Florence-Lauderdale County Public Library
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Electronic |
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Oral Histories Collection |
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Florence-Lauderdale County Public Library |
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Florence-Lauderdale County Public Library |
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Oral histories -- audios and transcripts |
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Oral histories -- audios and transcripts Robert Steen (D) Florence-Lauderdale Public Library |
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Oral histories -- audios and transcripts Occupations; Tugboats |
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(7:10) Mr. Steen describes life on a riverboat.Florence- Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Robert Steen
April 14, 2008
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Ken Johnson
Clip 4
Robert Steen: Now on the boat the watches or the shifts we were there for twenty- four hours. You continued to, to move up or down the river twenty- four hours a day. You had a captain and you had a pilot; the captain serving also as a, as a pilot. He worked six hours and then he was off six hours, off duty, not off the river, still on the boat. Same way with the engineers; so, they were alternating, six off and on six hours. I worked that kind of shift, because of the deckhands, that we had five, they have a group that they call on, had them on call. Whenever there was work to do, and if for however long there was work to do, those folks continuously worked. I would work, normally, six hours on and my shift was from twelve o’clock at lunch till six o’clock in the evening. I’d sleep until twelve o’clock at night; I’d get up at twelve o’clock at night. Now that was primarily to be on watch with the other crew members. You had fewer crew members there in case there’s an emergency, you had something out on the tow they had you go out and also keep the pilot enough coffee and keep him awake and also, foremost, was to keep the galley clean, ready for the cook to come in and to cook breakfast. So, there was always something to do. The, the Arrow could push six to ten barges depending on whether they were loaded or empty and the speed of the boat really depended on several things. Depended on whether you were going upstream, downstream, where you had empties and, and the current. But, generally we would probably travel five and a half to six miles an hour. Now that seems to be pretty slow, but when you multiply that numbers of hours out by, by the fact that you’re travelling twenty- four hours, that did not mean that you were continuously going because you had all these dams that’s spread out and it was taking the time, so you’d lose maybe ten or twelve hours sometimes getting through the Wilson lock and especially with it being a bottle- neck you had to wait on your turn to get through that. So if you were going six miles an hour and you could go continuously, that travel, probably about 150 miles in a day. And you did have some stretches of the river that you could, could travel that far. I asked the question the other day of an uncle of mine who worked as an engineer on that boat, I said, “ How many gallons of fuel did we burn in, in a day’s time?” And he said, “ Six hundred gallons of fuel.” I think I calculated that out, and that’s probably about twenty- five gallons an hour, but that’s twenty- five gallons an hour and you’re travelling about 5 ½ miles, 5 ½ to 6 miles an hour; that doesn’t seem like far, but then you look at the fact that you’re pushing six to eight barges that are holding 1500 tons each, you’re pushing a lot of stuff up, up the river. The work, as I said, as far as out on the barges and making up those tows, there was a lot of strapping the boat— the barges together with cables and we had ratchets and we had wenches and pulling them and pulling together. Now, I don’t know that I knew it at that time, but the work was dangerous.
Ken Johnson: I was wondering about just how dangerous all of this was.
RS: And as I was getting my thoughts together for this meeting, and it was on the eleventh day of April, there was a death in Wilson lock, the deckhand getting killed and the story hasn’t come out yet as to how, but it’s dangerous work, especially out there at night, making up a tow, and making up a tow is connecting all those barges together; lot of times you’re having to pull barges out from among several barges and at night the pilot has a big light from the top of the pilot house that you can move around and give you some light, but you may be doing something over here and he has to switch it over there and all you’ve got is your flashlight and you’ve got these barges banging and you’ve got a narrow walkway probably not any more than two feet that goes around the edge of those barges and the water’s right over there and I have heard of individuals falling off, you know, in between, in between the barges. So, so it is dangerous, but being young I probably didn’t pay that much attention to it.
KJ: Did, when, when you were going, beginning your work there, did they give you any kind of special instructions about the work you were to do or the dangers you were facing and such as that?
RS: Ah, they did, but, you know, I guess, in my earlier years, I was accustomed to some hard work and so, you know, this was not much harder than the other work that I had done in years gone by even as a kid, so it, it wasn’t that bad, but it took some endurance to stay with it.
KJ: I would think so. I would think so.
RS: So, as a deckhand I made $ 255 a month. Now, $ 255 a month doesn’t seem like a lot of money; it was for me right out of high school and $ 255 a month, if you look at that over a year, that was about $ 3,000 a year. That’s not much, but considering the fact that I taught school for $ 3,135 a year, back in the 1960 time frame this wasn’t bad pay. And, furthermore, there was no cost to my maintenance, food was free, you had a place to sleep and we ate, we ate well. If they didn’t have it, just ask the cook to put it on the next grocery order. I mean, we’d go through Wilson lock, for example, and we would buy groceries from a company down in Clifton, Tennessee. Clifton, Tennessee is kind of like— T. S. Stribling is from Clifton, Tennessee.
KJ: Right. Right.
RS: It’s kindly a riverboat town and so a grocery store down there, the best I recall was a Mr. Roberts and Robert’s grocery store and he patronized the, the riverboats and he had a little, a little boat that he would load your groceries on, whatever you ordered, and he’d come out and you’d kindly slow down the boat and he tie on to the riverboat and then you’d throw a steam ahead and unload your groceries and he’d end up way, on down the river a ways and he’d cut, cut loose from it and then go back and answer the next one, but we’d order that by telephone and then he would keep track of us by, by radio as to when we were going to be there. But, we ate well and no, no expense to what I was doing and so I came off of there after a summer, that I had quite a bit of money in pocket and I was able to pay my way through college. |
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Robert Steen (D) |
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Robert Steen (D) |
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Florence-Lauderdale Public Library |
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Florence-Lauderdale Public Library |
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FLCPLoral_hist240 |
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https://cdm15947.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/oral_hist/id/240 |
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Robert Steen (D)Occupations; Tugboats(7:10) Mr. Steen describes life on a riverboat.Florence-Lauderdale Public LibraryFlorence-Lauderdale Public LibraryRobert Steen2008-04-14sound; textaudio/mp3; text/pdfEnglishPart of the Florence-Lauderdale Public Library collectionContact the Florence-Lauderdale Public Library for permission to use.Florence- Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Robert Steen
April 14, 2008
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Ken Johnson
Clip 4
Robert Steen: Now on the boat the watches or the shifts we were there for twenty- four hours. You continued to, to move up or down the river twenty- four hours a day. You had a captain and you had a pilot; the captain serving also as a, as a pilot. He worked six hours and then he was off six hours, off duty, not off the river, still on the boat. Same way with the engineers; so, they were alternating, six off and on six hours. I worked that kind of shift, because of the deckhands, that we had five, they have a group that they call on, had them on call. Whenever there was work to do, and if for however long there was work to do, those folks continuously worked. I would work, normally, six hours on and my shift was from twelve o’clock at lunch till six o’clock in the evening. I’d sleep until twelve o’clock at night; I’d get up at twelve o’clock at night. Now that was primarily to be on watch with the other crew members. You had fewer crew members there in case there’s an emergency, you had something out on the tow they had you go out and also keep the pilot enough coffee and keep him awake and also, foremost, was to keep the galley clean, ready for the cook to come in and to cook breakfast. So, there was always something to do. The, the Arrow could push six to ten barges depending on whether they were loaded or empty and the speed of the boat really depended on several things. Depended on whether you were going upstream, downstream, where you had empties and, and the current. But, generally we would probably travel five and a half to six miles an hour. Now that seems to be pretty slow, but when you multiply that numbers of hours out by, by the fact that you’re travelling twenty- four hours, that did not mean that you were continuously going because you had all these dams that’s spread out and it was taking the time, so you’d lose maybe ten or twelve hours sometimes getting through the Wilson lock and especially with it being a bottle- neck you had to wait on your turn to get through that. So if you were going six miles an hour and you could go continuously, that travel, probably about 150 miles in a day. And you did have some stretches of the river that you could, could travel that far. I asked the question the other day of an uncle of mine who worked as an engineer on that boat, I said, “ How many gallons of fuel did we burn in, in a day’s time?” And he said, “ Six hundred gallons of fuel.” I think I calculated that out, and that’s probably about twenty- five gallons an hour, but that’s twenty- five gallons an hour and you’re travelling about 5 ½ miles, 5 ½ to 6 miles an hour; that doesn’t seem like far, but then you look at the fact that you’re pushing six to eight barges that are holding 1500 tons each, you’re pushing a lot of stuff up, up the river. The work, as I said, as far as out on the barges and making up those tows, there was a lot of strapping the boat— the barges together with cables and we had ratchets and we had wenches and pulling them and pulling together. Now, I don’t know that I knew it at that time, but the work was dangerous.
Ken Johnson: I was wondering about just how dangerous all of this was.
RS: And as I was getting my thoughts together for this meeting, and it was on the eleventh day of April, there was a death in Wilson lock, the deckhand getting killed and the story hasn’t come out yet as to how, but it’s dangerous work, especially out there at night, making up a tow, and making up a tow is connecting all those barges together; lot of times you’re having to pull barges out from among several barges and at night the pilot has a big light from the top of the pilot house that you can move around and give you some light, but you may be doing something over here and he has to switch it over there and all you’ve got is your flashlight and you’ve got these barges banging and you’ve got a narrow walkway probably not any more than two feet that goes around the edge of those barges and the water’s right over there and I have heard of individuals falling off, you know, in between, in between the barges. So, so it is dangerous, but being young I probably didn’t pay that much attention to it.
KJ: Did, when, when you were going, beginning your work there, did they give you any kind of special instructions about the work you were to do or the dangers you were facing and such as that?
RS: Ah, they did, but, you know, I guess, in my earlier years, I was accustomed to some hard work and so, you know, this was not much harder than the other work that I had done in years gone by even as a kid, so it, it wasn’t that bad, but it took some endurance to stay with it.
KJ: I would think so. I would think so.
RS: So, as a deckhand I made $ 255 a month. Now, $ 255 a month doesn’t seem like a lot of money; it was for me right out of high school and $ 255 a month, if you look at that over a year, that was about $ 3,000 a year. That’s not much, but considering the fact that I taught school for $ 3,135 a year, back in the 1960 time frame this wasn’t bad pay. And, furthermore, there was no cost to my maintenance, food was free, you had a place to sleep and we ate, we ate well. If they didn’t have it, just ask the cook to put it on the next grocery order. I mean, we’d go through Wilson lock, for example, and we would buy groceries from a company down in Clifton, Tennessee. Clifton, Tennessee is kind of like— T. S. Stribling is from Clifton, Tennessee.
KJ: Right. Right.
RS: It’s kindly a riverboat town and so a grocery store down there, the best I recall was a Mr. Roberts and Robert’s grocery store and he patronized the, the riverboats and he had a little, a little boat that he would load your groceries on, whatever you ordered, and he’d come out and you’d kindly slow down the boat and he tie on to the riverboat and then you’d throw a steam ahead and unload your groceries and he’d end up way, on down the river a ways and he’d cut, cut loose from it and then go back and answer the next one, but we’d order that by telephone and then he would keep track of us by, by radio as to when we were going to be there. But, we ate well and no, no expense to what I was doing and so I came off of there after a summer, that I had quite a bit of money in pocket and I was able to pay my way through college. http://server15947.contentdm.oclc.org/u?/oral_hist,240 |