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Ed Lamp

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.

Ed Lamp is 97 years old. He still lives by himself in one of a cluster of small homes and cottages along the Rock River, a mile or so from where the Rock empties into the Mississippi. The homes are hidden from busy Black Hawk Road by a row of industries. The only access is a nearly invisible gravel road. The owners prefer it that way.

Ed spends his days in his tiny living room sitting in an old easy chair, accompanied by the soft hum of an oxygen pump. But his real life support system lies a hundred feet from his south window. It's the river. The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, noticing that all things change, said "No man steps into the same river twice." But for Ed Lamp, the Rock River has been the only constant in a life caught up in the roller coaster of the 20th century.

Ed began coming to the Rock River as a child growing up in Rock Island. Just before he went off to join the Navy in World War I, he bought a small wooden one-room camp as a weekend and summer retreat. He returned more and more frequently as the Great Depression deepened, came to fish and canoe, until World War II sent him back into the service—this time into the Army.

That is how he ended up in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium at Christmastime in 1944, working in a field hospital a mile from the front lines of the Battle of the Bulge. That is where he came across the bodies—stacks of American soldiers seventy feet long and five feet high, awaiting burial.

And that is why Ed Lamp determined never to marry, never to risk having a son who would be sent off to be killed at the age of nineteen. After the war, he helped his brother run the family plumbing business until the brother died in 1973. By then, Ed had already become a river rat. He added some small rooms to his camp, and moved to the river permanently, safe from governments who made war. Until a few years ago, he raised vegetables in his back yard and tended more than 75 varieties of roses. Today he watches the river he loves.

Like many casualties of war, Ed Lamp's name is on no lists and no monuments.

Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.

Community
Beginning 1995, historian and folklorist Dr. Roald Tweet spun his stories of the Mississippi Valley to a devoted audience on WVIK. Dr. Tweet published three books as well as numerous literary articles and recorded segments of "Rock Island Lines." His inspiration was that "kidney-shaped limestone island plunked down in the middle of the Mississippi River," a logical site for a storyteller like Dr. Tweet.