| Summary: | (4:28) Holland Greer describes his father's work as a tugboat pilot during the building of Wilson and Wheeler Dams. This interview was conducted as part of a joint project of the Music Preservation Society and the Florence-Lauderdale Public Library. This project focus was oral lhistory interviews with area residents who had lived or worked on the Tennessee River.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Holland Greer
November 6, 2007
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Patti Hannah and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 1
Patti Hannah: It’s Tuesday November 6th at a little after two o’clock and Rhonda Haygood and Patti Hannah are interviewing Holland Greer. Mr. Greer will you say hello to us.
Holland Greer: Hello and how are you today?
PH: Good
Rhonda Haygood: When did your dad work as a tow boat pilot? Is that correct? He worked as a pilot?
Holland Greer: Yeah, he was a tug boat pilot and he worked at Wheeler Dam during the construction 1933-1936.
RH: What was his name?
HG: Alison. And then later on, when they built the Florence bridge it’s 1938 he was a pilot on the tug boat there also, hauling sand and gravel.
RH: What’s your first memory of your dad as a tug boat pilot?
HG: Well, he farmed on the Cunningham Plantation there at Center Star and he had a job up at Wheeler as a deck hand to begin with and then he got to be a pilot. TVA licensed him to be a pilot, I remember seeing the license. I don’t know what happened to it but he was a licensed pilot. And he worked the swing shift. I remember he made about $28.53 ever two weeks. He spent the two, 3.53 and put the twenty-five in the bank. That was big wages for a pilot on a tug boat at Joe Wheeler. From Joe Wheeler he went down to Wilson most of the time to get sand and gravel and of course he moved the barges around up there at Wheeler while they were, you know, pouring the concrete for the dam and occasionally he’d go down to Pickwick. Of course, the dam was not there then, but in that area down there where they were dredging sand and gravel. But the tug boat was nothing like what you see on the river today, you could, kinda back in this corner here, probably had a car engine in it. I remember he got Bob Drane who was a mover of Florence to get him the job on the bridge down here during the construction. He owned Shell Oil Company and of course we sold Shell gas at our station and so he got daddy a job as a pilot. And then he finished up in thirty, 1936 on the dam and my daddy was the last one that was laid off out of the fleet. They had a fleet up there, had a big steamboat. That was Capt. Conway Graden’s headquarters. I think they had a dining room on it and then they had an ambulance boat and three or four tug boats and other boats. They referred to it as the fleet. I’ve got a picture of it at home.
PH: Oh.
HG: They backed off, they had a photographer that took thousands of pictures during the construction up there. And they’re over there in the power house on the south side in big books. You can just look, and look and look and look. But the photographer backed off down river and they got all those boats that were in the fleet and he took a big wide angle picture. I‘ve been intending to carry it up to the East Lauderdale News and let them put it in the paper.
RH: Okay, what about any special skills associated with tug boat work? What would you know about what your dad had to do, any special skills?
HG: Well, he was kinda drive minded I guess you’d say. It kinda ran in the family. You know he could operate and drive anything. So evidently as they expanded maybe from one or two tug boats to three or four why they moved him from deck hand to pilot.
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