Workhorse River

THE MONONGAHELA (239 pp.)--Richard Bissell--Rinehart ($3.50).

The series of books known as Rivers of America has given rise to some rather crude jokes in the publishing trade. When the number got to 45, wags began planning volumes on creeks, rills and even smaller flows. But, at least until No. 47 turns up, the kidding will have to stop. For No. 46 is one of the best in the series. It is also one of the few instances in which the right author met the right river.

Author Bissell, 38, helps run his father's clothing factory in Dubuque, Iowa these days, but once he did an outdoor man's work: he was a river pilot. He wrote a novel about it two years ago (A Stretch on the River--TIME, July 24, 1950), and the river descriptions and river lingo rang fair and true. He writes just as effectively in The Monongahela and even gives a fair amount of his secret away: "In order to have a river in your blood, unforgettably and forever . . . you have to work on her for wages." In 1944 he piloted a diesel towboat on the Monongahela for seven months.

Nuggets & Chasers. Bissell did some library work this time and, like his fellow grubbers in the River series, passes along his share of historical nuggets, e.g., in the 1790s, there were some 1,300 stills in western Pennsylvania; no less an authority than George Washington pronounced Monongahela rye "excellent,'' etc. But what gives the book its special tang is Pilot Bissell's own experiences on the old Mon. When he reported for duty on the Coal Queen, he saw a dirty one-stacker, "a piece of marine junk." That was winter time, and he had to be persuaded not to take the first train back to the Midwest. Came spring and Pilot Bissell thought: "For me to be drawing wages for piloting a towboat under these conditions. why, that's just like paying a kid to watch the circus."

Piloting the Coal Queen, from Morgantown, W. Va. downstream (north) to Pittsburgh, took a little doing, what with pushing barges through the locks and threading through more traffic tonnage than passes through the Panama or Suez Canals. There wasn't much that didn't catch Pilot Bissell's eye, from the architecture (mostly horrendous) of the houses ashore to a little girl in a spring hat on a slate pile. He remembers the valley's favorite drink (cheap rye and a beer chaser), the variety of foreign tongues heard in saloons. "Oh, it's some wonderful valley, the Monongahela. There's more hell popping and more loud noise in any ten miles at the lower end than there is in five hundred on the Mississippi or the Congo."

Barges & Nostalgia. Good riverman that he is, Author Bissell writes with affection of the old steamboat days, when a big one like the Sprague could push as many as 60 barges loaded down with 54,000 tons of coal. He becomes nostalgic recalling that stern-wheelers in the '70s made regular trips on the highways of water between Pittsburgh and Fort Benton, Mont. But he knows that diesels are here to stay, and doesn't let his nostalgia get teary-eyed. Nor does he equate the ' Monongahela and the Coal Queen with romance. But when a stranger looked at the Queen and asked, "Ain't it a miracle what some fools will do to earn a living? Can you imagine living on a thing like that?", Bissell answered, "I can imagine it."

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