This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Several years ago, I stood with old Fred Kahlke in the ruins of the Kahlke Boatyard in the west end of Rock Island and learned something about building steamboats. Fred's father had come to Rock Island from Germany. Several of the boats he and his sons built were among the best on the Upper Mississippi.
I was curious about why there were almost no steamboat plans surviving in archives and river museums. I wondered aloud how 19th century boat builders did it with no committee of engineers, without Computer Aided Drafting and Windows 98.
It turned out that plans were almost never used. "It's in here," Fred said, pointing to his head. "You either have it or you don't." A steamboat was designed by first laying out a piece of paper the size of the boat, on the floor of a shed. On this paper, the builder drew freehand the boat's shape. From this crude drawing, the hull rose. As the boat grew in the imagination of the builder, the first deck, the boiler and engines, and the paddles appeared. Imagination, itself fueled and encouraged by the smell of new wood, turned into staterooms, into more decks, into gingerbread and smokestacks, into a Texas deck and a pilot house. Finally, a name: the “Mary Jane,” the “Keokuk,” the “Clara,” the “Warrior,” the “Eagle,” and the boat was ready to launch into the river.
Would the new boat go on to become one of the river legends or a tub wallowing in the current? Would it set new records or sink in the first storm? The first trip would tell.
Fred and I walked through the fallen sheds, rotting hulls, and the debris of the long-gone Kahlke Boatyards: old bills of lading, logbooks. Then I drove him back to his home. I was curious to know what made the Kahlke boats and the Kahlke vision so true. Boat building was a sharp business. Mere inches here and there determined the difference between a boat that would set records or a boat that would catch every sandbar.
"Where did you get the ideas for those curves that made the Kahlke boats so graceful," I asked.
"Off good-lookin’ women," Fred replied.
Add that to the list of things Windows 98 can’t do.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by the Scott County Regional Authority, with additional funding from the Illinois Arts Council and Augustana College, Rock Island.
