Clear Sailing for "Ma"

In 1894 an Ohio River captain named Gordon C. Greene doubled his packet fleet by building the Argand. His wife, a country storekeeper's daughter who learned to steer a boat on her honeymoon, took out a master's license, got behind the Argand's wheel, started it splashing up & down the Ohio.

She was a good pilot. Soon the toughest roustabouts stopped feeling strange about taking orders from a woman who stood 5 feet 2. When the first winter settled down over the Ohio, she had churned up a clean profit of $2,500, proving she could handle money as well as boats. From that time on. Captain Mary Greene--the only licensed woman navigator on U. S. inland waterways--was the First Lady of the Ohio.

No Tugboat Annie in manner or language, little Captain "Ma" got her orders obeyed without profanity, spent her leisure embroidering and reading in her cabin. She took time out to bear two sons (one of whom died in boyhood), bore another on a steamer held fast in an ice gorge. She brought up the boys in her cabin, slipping easily from singing lullabies to snapping orders to her crew.

Once Ma Greene steered the Argand through a cyclone to safe harbor. Once she quieted her passengers' panic when the swell of her boat exploded 40 quarts of nitroglycerin in a yawl tied to shore, caving in the boat's bulkheads and smashing cabin windows. Another time, with one of her sons in her arms, she barked orders that got her boat safely untangled after it had collided with another in a windstorm.

By World War I, Captain Ma and Captain Gordon had built up their Greene Line Steamers into a fleet of eleven boats in which they rode high on the war's shipping boom. But when depression came Captain Gordon was dead and Ma's two sons, grown to captains themselves, wanted to give up the business. Ma vetoed them. Instead of quitting she bought out the Greene Line's only competitor on the Louisville-Cincinnati run, waited patiently for better shipping weather.

Last week Ma Greene--now silver-haired, plump and 72--knew that she had pointed the Greene Line's prow in the right direction. Packets and towboats pushing long lines of barges were carrying more traffic (chiefly coal, oil, steel) over the Ohio than in the golden river days made famous by Mark Twain. There was less romance but more business (19,680,176 tons in the first nine months of 1940). The Greene Line got its share. No longer active as a pilot, Ma Greene now serves as symbol and occasional hostess for the line, lets her two sons run things. Last week they announced that the line had set an all-time record last year by carrying 102,438 tons (up 10% from 1939, 19.5% from 1938). No profit figures were disclosed, but river men knew Ma Greene's line had enjoyed clear sailing.

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A Westinghouse survey of its South American consumers revealed that 1) housewives commonly install electric refrigerators in their parlors; 2) sales of improved electric fans slumped because South Americans like the loud hum of the old models.

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