Word: cincinnatis
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...industry, the Ohio continued to be a 981-mile-long showcase of nature's charms. Rising at the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers at Fort Pitt (now Pittsburgh's "Golden Triangle"), the Ohio wound through coal-rich mountains to reach the seven hills of Cincinnati, cultural center of the new West. Alive with bass and blue gill, it foamed bright white at Louisville's limestone falls, poured clean blue into the Mississippi's brown waters at Cairo (pronounced care-oh), in Illinois' Little Egypt...
...with chemicals that the citizens howled; on its best days, the river gave off the medicinal odor of phenol poured out of coke ovens. For decades the river cities and towns complained to each other about the mess coming from upstream, contributed to the mess downstream. Then a determined Cincinnati pressagent, rushing in where poets refused to paddle, launched a 25-year cleanup drive that is only now beginning to restore the Ohio's purity and beauty...
Indiana-born Pressagent Hudson Biery had always considered the Ohio one of his charity clients. In 1935 he got the backing of the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, was made chairman of a committee that set out to sell a cleanup program, shocked regional audiences and newspaper readers with crude, graphic facts. One quart in every gallon of Ohio water was raw sewage, equal to "700 dead horses floating by Cincinnati every day," he said. "We in Cincinnati can always tell when people in Pittsburgh have had asparagus for dinner...
...plan got going, Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission Director Edward J. Cleary, ex-editor of an engineering magazine, set up headquarters in Cincinnati. With his tiny staff (now eight) he set out to persuade about 1,000 basin towns and cities to build sewage-treatment plants that cost up to $150 per capita. Junior chambers of commerce, boy scouts, newspapers and other civic-minded organizations moved behind local bond-issue campaigns. Cincinnati invested $60 million; Pittsburgh's $100 million plant opened last year. With smaller cities often taking the lead, the total outlay mounted past $500 million. Today...
From that time on, in his pilgrimage to discover the truth about North and South, Allan meets all the top people. There is "the notorious Levi Coffin of Cincinnati," founder of the Underground Railroad for runaway slaves; Allan is armed with a hunting knife for killing abolitionists, but is charmed into nonaggression by the old Quaker's "thees" and "thous." Later, Allan searches out John Brown at Harpers Ferry, "to pour out his soul." Before long, he knows that "he was dealing with a lunatic or a martyr." Allan can do nothing, either, with Jefferson Davis, except stare into...