Word: rivering
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Possibly due to River's absence, the showstarted more than half an hour behind schedule
...bygone days the job would have been not just daunting but preposterous. River towns still treasure tales of binging, brawling and murder among flatboatmen whose godlessness was a point of pride. The stereotype is outdated: massive consolidation hit the freight-barge business in the 1980s, and large firms like the Ingram Barge Co., which owns the Grainger, imposed large-firm professionalism: no drinking or smoking on board and a zero-tolerance drug policy enforced with random testing. Even a crew bent on mayhem would have trouble scheduling it. The tows run 24 hours a day, and for the length...
...respond. Boarding the Grainger at the Robert C. Byrd lock in West Virginia, he forgoes preaching in favor of hearing the crew's news and distributing the prayer schedule of the institute's tiny Paducah, Ky., chapel: the boatmen can join in as their work shifts and the river permit. When one deckhand stabbed another in Paducah in November, and a pilot fell off a tow in Greenville last month, Wilkinson visited the survivors "to let people know someone is concerned when things happen on the river...
They appear to get the message. "That sell you have, that's a good sell," says Grainger captain Billy Burkett, as his boat eases past the mouth of the Kanawha River. He wears a Hawaiian shirt and a faded tattoo of a bird on his arm. "You try and convert people, they'll just back away. But this little place here is our city and our town, and every city needs a parson, and you're ours...
Thank you for the kind mention of us as street performers in your piece on PBS's program about music along the Mississippi River [TELEVISION, Jan. 11]. However, we do not play just for "spare change," as your story stated. We want your money, honey! Throw us a dollar or throw us a five; help keep us alive! Or if you can afford plenty, give us a 20! We are winners of awards in New Orleans. Also, we play fairs and festivals all over the world. And here you can't even get coffee for spare change anymore. DAVID LEONARD...