The Jubilee

While I was looking for something else this morning, I ran across a note from my old pal Swany (a/k/a Danny Swanson). He's not much of an "online chatguy" (to use his own words), but a few years back he e-mailed me an article from the St. Paul Pioneer Press that revealed the ultimate fate of the riverboat—Jubilee II—that I worked on back in the summer of 1976.

Here’s the story:

PIONEER PRESS Posted on Tue, Dec. 09, 2003
STILLWATER: Onetime St. Croix craft sinks off Florida coast

The Jubilee, a paddleboat formerly owned by the St. Croix Boat and Packet Co. in Stillwater, sank last week in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida.

The 100-foot-long, flat-bottomed paddleboat got caught in bad weather on Wednesday and could not navigate the waves that ranged as high as 7 feet, said Petty Officer Robert Suddarth of the U.S. Coast Guard in St. Petersburg, Fla. "The seas were rough, and they were having trouble with propulsion because the paddle kept getting knocked out of the water," he said.

Coast Guard officers rescued the Jubilee's crew of four after the boat began taking on water about 65 miles northwest of Tampa, Fla. The Coast Guard had been trying to tow the Jubilee to shore, but a big wave sank the craft about 100 miles northwest of Tampa. The crew was transported by a Coast Guard cutter to Panama City, Fla.

The Jubilee was apparently headed to Virginia via the Gulf of Mexico, Suddarth said. The new owner was not available for comment.

Dickie Anderson, owner of the St. Croix Boat and Packet Co., also was not available for comment, but a spokeswoman for the company said Anderson sold the boat at the end of October. He had owned the boat, used for tourist sightseeing and cruises on the St. Croix River, for about six years.

The Jubilee was just a flat-bottomed barge, but it had real paddlewheels, driven by a pair of big Caterpillar engines. In those days she was owned by Carr Griffith and Griffith Marine, with offices in the Lumberman's Exchange building next to Downtown Hooley's. She basically worked the St. Croix River out of Stillwater, doing as many as four cruises a day, as far north as Marine-on-the-St. Croix, and as far south as Prescott, where the St. Croix runs into the Mississippi. I worked as a deckhand on her for just one summer.

Jeff Giossi and I were hired as deckhands in early spring of 1976 by Captain John Eyles, when the boat was still tied up south of Stillwater, down near the NSP plant in the "warm channel" where it had spent the winter. (The warm channel—also known as the Alan S. King Plant discharge canal—was basically the result of NSP using river water to cool parts of the electrical plant, then discharging it back into the river. Or so I was told.) For the most part, "deckhand" is what you call the janitor on a boat.

Captain John was a character and he knew it—he'd greet us every morning the same way: "Get my f***ing boat cleaned up, g*****it!" The guy used profanity the way the rest of us use punctuation—no sentence was complete without it. And by the end of the summer, I found that my own repertoire of adjectives and exclamations had narrowed considerably as well.

The Jubilee had a small crew in those days, as well. Besides us and Captain John, there was a pilot named Fred and a guy we called the chief engineer when we weren't calling him "Old Bud." He was probably in his forties or fifties, but from the vantage point of my 21 years old, that was ancient.

Fred was a younger guy—in his twenties—and as the pilot, was responsible for "driving" the boat. I knew him from working up at the Snowcrest Ski Area the year before, where he was on the snow-making crew. He wore really thick glasses, which worried us some at first, but it turned out that he was probably the most reliable guy to have at the wheel.

Old Bud was good at whatever needed doing, had a background that included an amazing range of jobs and experiences and seemed to know at least a little about everything—which he frequently would share with us.

One morning Jeff and I were talking about that and decided we'd ask him about something so esoteric that, for a change, we'd be able to stump him. After a fair amount of discussion, we settled on padlocks—how they worked, how they were made. Turns out that Bud once worked in a padlock factory, so he launched into a 20 minute description of how that was done.

We quit testing him after that, although I was always tempted to see what he knew about nuclear reactors or cold fusion.

At some point, Jeff and I started working the cruises as well—originally all we did was clean up the boat, then go out to Square Lake for a couple of hours of snorkeling until it got back. The Captain would pay us for those hours so we wouldn't spend them drinking beer. Eventually it occurred to him that there was stuff we could do on the boat, during the cruises, and he had us start coming along.

We decided that if we were going to be stewards (or something—we weren't quite sure what were going to be doing, but we figured it was a step up from deckhand), we should have uniforms of some kind. So we went out and bought white bell-bottoms, blue and white striped t-shirts and got some sort of yellow braided cord with tassels on the ends that we used as belts. We showed up in those for a cruise and Old Bud about fell into the water, he was laughing so hard. The Captain came down to see what all the merriment was about, and told us we looked like "the Ethiopian Navy." Heck, I didn't even know Ethiopia had a navy.

As it turned out, it was the belts with the tassels that they found the most comical, so we got rid of those, but wore the shirts and bell-bottoms when we went out on cruises from that point on. Later, some of our female friends were hired to serve drinks and tend the bar on evening cruises, and they basically came up with a variation of what we wore—a white skirt and the same striped T-shirt.

I recall throwing one of them—K.D. Ryan—off the top deck and into the river when we were tied up on the levee down in Stillwater. She went plunging past an open window next to the Captain's Table, screaming at the top of her voice, while Captain John was sitting there and meeting with a prospective client. We didn't get fired, but he cussed us out pretty good. The thing is, with the quantity of expletives he used in routine conversation anyway, it was hard to tell if he was mad, or just amused.

The part in the story of the Jubilee's last voyage where the article describes her taking on water reminds me of one of the more interesting cruises we had back in the summer of 1976. It was a morning cruise, a brilliant sunny day, and a fairly large group of senior citizens from a nearby nursing home were our guests. For whatever reason, Fred wasn't available to pilot the boat that morning, so Captain John decided he would. He had his pilot's license (so did Old Bud), so he was qualified to do that.

This particular cruise went south to Hudson, where the plan was to turn around and head back upriver to Stillwater. That was a typical 90 minute cruise, and to get all the way down to the I-94 Interstate Bridge, we had to go through a narrow channel where the railroad bridge crossed the river just north of there. To open the railroad bridge, a section near the middle rotated, so only one big boat a time could go through.

Certain boats get priority, so at the wheel of a recreational boat, Captain John had to get out of the way to let them through. He headed over toward one of the islands in the middle of the river and promptly ran the Jubilee aground, nose first onto the sandy beach.

There's a right way and a wrong way to get out of a predicament like that with a sternwheeler. The wrong way is to throw both paddlewheels into full reverse, because doing so kicks water from the wheels back into the engine room. And if you keep doing it, that can be a lot of water, enough to flood the engine room entirely and start pouring out onto the lower deck. And of course that's what Captain John did.

We had quite a few seniors down there because that deck was enclosed, and they found it more comfortable than the open upper deck. At least half a dozen of them were in wheelchairs and had no choice about where to sit anyway, since there was no way for them to reach the upper deck in their chairs. And none of them were comforted by the sight of water pouring across the floor after feeling the jolt of us hitting the beach.

The natural question was, "Are we sinking?" Jeff and I assured them that we were not—that the root of the problem was that we had already encountered the bottom, and the water was a result of the paddlewheels in full reverse. But it was still a little unsettling for everyone.

By that time, Old Bud was cussing under his breath and heading up to the pilot house to take over. Captain John came down to the lower deck where he addressed the increasingly restive crowd. He said, "Open up the bar, boys—drinks are on the house!" And with that, everyone settled down while Jeff and I got out the wet-dry vacuum and started cleaning up the water.

It was a great summer, though. Jeff and I would get down to the boat at 7:30 or 8 AM so we could have it in shape in time for a 9 AM cruise, and sometimes the mist would still be rising off the water as the sun cleared the hill on the Wisconsin side. There's a rhythm to the river that gets inside of you. On board the Jubilee it was always there, kind of whispering in the background and gently rolling the deck beneath your feet. Some nights we didn't head back up the hill until nearly midnight, and the work could be hard. But it was the best "office" I ever worked in, and now it's at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

That August I went to work in the bookstore at Lakewood Community College, where I'd be for the next 12 years.

Like so much from my old hometown, the Jubilee only exists in memory now, but even after 30 years, those memories have stayed with me.

UPDATE: I was poking around in my archives and found another version of one of the stories I posted in this entry. Check here to read it: http://blog.myspace.com/mluebker