PILOT HOUSE
BY CHARLES C. SHAW

The following article is from a Monday, September 7, 1936 Pittsburgh newspaper.

A 78-year-old man, his silvery white hair flowing to his shoulders, goes to his back porch, waves his handkerchief to the passing boat, then gazes wistfully for a few moments at the river.

That whistled signal is the rivermen's tribute to the "Patriarch of the Mississippi," Calvin Leonard Blazier, retired these past five years after almost 60 years as a captain and pilot from the headwaters of the Monongahela to the Gulf of Mexico.

Cal Blazier was in his early teens when he first whent on the river, a river on which his ancestors had worked even before the days of steamboats. His father, his uncle and his mother's father had floated cargo down the Mississippi and brought their powerless craft back with the aid of long sticks, with which they shoved their boats, or by "cordelling," that is, tying lines to trees, heaving on the ropes and tying them again to trees further up the river.

It was the decade following the Great War that young Cal decided to follow the life of his forbears and take a berth as a deckhand on one of the high and narrow steamboats that plied the inland waters. On his sixteenth birthday, he sat on the warf at New Orleans, having completed his first trip all the way down the river on the "Smoky City," a huge, ornate boat that later was later destroyed by a hurricane near Baton Rouge.

From then until the time of his retirement, Captain Blazer made countless trips down the treacherous "Ol' Man Ribber" and the tributary Ohio, battling flood waters breaking through ice and following the channels that shift from one side of the river to the other.

His "greatest event," however, was reserved until the last years of his river career, when he took a million dollar tow from Pittsburgh to New Orleans at the height of the disastrous Mississippi River flood of a dozen years ago and landed it without a dollar's loss or injury to any of the crew.

The all-steel "City of Pittsburgh," one of the largest presents-day towboats, rode out of Pittsburgh with the beginning of the flood that year, with Captain Blazer and his superiors not dreaming of the dangers that were to follow. It was not until the boat was flagged by United States Engineers at Paduach, Ky., that the captain realized that what was expected to be only a seasonal rise was turning into a flood.

Twelve days at Paduach, and the waters were still rising. Then Captain Blazer was told to proceed to Memphis. Landing at the Tennessee harbor, he delivered several large barges and followed instructions to continue down the river "with great caution."

On that leg of the trip, he encountered the fully fury of the raging waters.

The river, where levees had broken, was as much as 50 miles wide dotted with floating buildings that had been swept from their foundations. There were no people in sight, those who had escaped death having miraculously managed to find safety when the flood struck.

Part of the river was guided into racing currents, some water formed into motionless lakes, other swirled about the dangerous eddies.

"We followed the usual procedure," Captain Blazier said. "We went down as if the river was normal, and we made it."

More than the disaster and the tragedy, one sight above all impressed the veteran riverman.

"I have read in the Bible," he remarked, "that the lion shall lie down with the lamb. Well, I saw it. "

"There was a high mound jutting through the water behind a broken levee. Water surrounded the mound for miles in all directions. And standing motionless on that hill were deer, bears, cattle, chickens and numerous small animals, all forgetful of their instinctive enmities, mindful only of the common safety that mound provided them."

Cal Blazier had prepared for that great test of his ability by diligent study that acquainted him with every bend in the rivers, with every shoal, with every current. He studied reports every year, he learned of the changing channels, he found out before every trip what banks had caved in.

He met his first emergency and conquered it when he was 21. Returning on the "Alice Brown" from Memphis, where he had gone as a striker (apprentice) pilot, he was informed that the regular pilot's license expired at Louisville and that another was to come on board there. But when the "Alice Brown" landed at Louisville, there was no pilot there.

The late Captain John H. Dippold called the young striker pilot and informed him:

"You're going to pilot the 'Alice Brown,' Cal. We need a man, and you're the one. Come on up into town and we'll get your license."

Young Cal began to protest that he was inexperienced; his protest was to no avail. He got his license after authorities realized he knew the river, and he took the boat back to Pittsburgh.

About a year later he obtained his captain's license as the result of another emergency. He had returned to Pittsburgh from Cincinnati on the "Alarm" to find Captain Lou Blair, of the steamer "Jim Brown" desperately ill. Jim Brown, one of the owners of the boat, was the one to summon the young pilot this time to tell him almost the same thing as Captain Dippold had the year before:

"We have to have a captain for the 'Jim Brown,' and you're the one, Cal. Lets go up to the customs house, and we get your license."

Cal Blazier had both his captain's and pilot's licenses then, but he knew there was much to learn about the river. And he set out to learn everything he could.

In those days, there were no locks in the lower Ohio, and when the dry seasons came, the water, unimpeded by dams which hold it back today, ran out, leaving the river almost dry. Navigation was at a standstill until heavy rains came and the channels filled again.

So when the water got low, young Captain Blazier would get into a skiff and row down the river. At places there would be only trickles of water and there he would study the bottom of the river, searching out the shoals and viewing the irregularities of contour with which every skilled pilot must be familiar.

Those studies during the dry seasons and his constant alertness to the geography of the river during normal water were responsible for his obtaining a license to pilot a boat from the headwaters of the Monongahela to the mouth of the Mississippi at New Orleans, a distance of more than 2000 miles, when he was only 33.

He piloted "down to New Orleans" eight years, then went pilot of the "Sprague," the world's largest towboat which established a record in 1907 by taking a tow covering nearly seven acres of water and containing 67,307 tons of coal to New Orleans. A year later, Captain Blazier landed 62,000 tons at the southern port, almost as much as the record tow.

The "Sprague," which is still in service in Southern waters, was owned by the Pittsburgh Coal Co., for whom Captain Blazier piloted until the company abandoned the lower river trade after a tropical storm destroyed practically all the company's property at New Orleans. The captain remained with Pittsburgh Coal a short time longer, then went to Carnegie Steel Co. when Carnegie entered river transportation just after America's entrance to the World War.

For several years, the sight of Captain Blazier's flowing white hair was missing from the Mississippi as he commanded and piloted boats for Carnegie Steel in the Monongahela River.

We regret the last three paragraphs of the story have the right column missing - we will print when we find a copy with the missing info.

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