Rock Island Lines

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I see that the starving artists are back at the Holiday Inn again for their annual sale, room 211. What would those artists do without rivers? Any painting over $19.95 is bound to have a stream or a rivulet winding through it, perhaps even the sweet Afton flowing gently.

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The communities clustered along the Mississippi around Rock Island have contributed their share of sports heroes to American folklore. There's Roger Craig in football, Gene Oliver in baseball, and Jack Fleck, the golfer who beat Ben Hogan in the U. S. Open.

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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.

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We Rock Island Lutherans don’t take much stock in the doctrine of predestination—except when it comes to church potlucks. Somewhere in the fine print of the Augsburg Confession, the early church fathers determined that Lutherans whose last names begin with A through K must always bring salads to church suppers.

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The first few minutes of a war are exciting. Some madness seems to make men eager to leave home and family to hunt each other down.

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If you come for a visit to our Mississippi Valley and want to bring a souvenir back to the relatives in Potosi, Wisconsin, here's some advice. Avoid those cute ashtrays made in Taiwan that say, "Greetings from the Quad Cities," or the bumper stickers that say, "Support mental health or I'll kill you." Instead, take a walk along some of the more out-of-the-way stretches of our Mississippi River, where the current has deposited a stash of old clam shells. With any luck, you'll soon find one that resembles a Swiss cheese—with half-inch holes over the whole shell.

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If you have ever visited the Battlefield of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, you may have seen the statue of John Buford at the northwest entrance. An inscription reads: In memory of Major General John Buford, commanding the First Division Cavalry Corps, Army of the Potomac, who with the first inspiration of a cavalry officer selected this battlefield July 1, 1863.

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The most famous steamboat race ever chronicled on the Upper Mississippi River was between a tortoise and a hare in 1856. And as you learned in the pages of your third-grade reader, such a race is not always a foregone conclusion.

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Even the Mississippi River seems to know when it has crossed the Mason-Dixon line. The Upper Mississippi is a Yankee protestant-work-ethic river, always busy. The lower Mississippi below Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio comes in, is a grander, more leisurely affair—a world of colonels and judges and mint juleps. No wonder that Currier and Ives chose to immortalize the steamboat race between the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee rather than between the small, plain packet boats north of St. Louis.

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Galena, Illinois, a hundred miles upriver, must be one of the more unusual small towns along the Upper Mississippi River. When Galena found herself further and further behind in the frantic race toward the twenty-first century, with wider streets, brighter lights, more super stores and mega malls, she stopped for a breather, and then began running backwards toward the nineteenth century.