I grew up on the Upper River -- on the banks of the Mississippi about 200 miles above St. Louis, on the Illinois side, in Quincy. Quincy is east of and across the river from West Quincy. About 20 miles downstream on the Missouri side is the sleepy little town of Hannibal, best known as the hometown of Bill Lear, who invented the Learjet and other stuff, and some obscure 19th Century riverboat pilot who went on to be a flop in the writing biz.

Anyway, I wanted to tell you all about the Winter and Spring of '54 or mebbe it was '55 or possibly '56 -- backaways, anyway, around there. I was just a young snot, but I remember it like it was yesterday.

Cold. It was gosh-darned cold. And snowy. The snow was so deep that it made our daily walks to and from school a real trial.

School was only about four blocks from home, and no, it wasn't uphill both ways. It was only uphill in the direction we had to walk. Otherwise is was your normal uphill and downhill and flat sort of walk. And the snow that year did NOT come up to our head. It came up way over our heads and so we just tunneled our way to and from. Had to tunnel both ways because as we tunneled we'd throw the snow behind us.

Anyway, it was cold that winter. We weren't wealthy and only had one winter coat for the four of us kids. I'd wear it on Monday, the next brother would wear it Tuesday, the next youngest on Thursday, and Friday my sister would wear it (Wednesday we let a poor family use it). When it wasn't your turn to wear The Coat you tucked some coals from the furnace into your overshoes and at least your feet were warm all the way to school. Coming back you tunneled as fast as you could, your feet wrapped up in old newspapers from the school library. When we got home we would read the news from each other's feet. We called them "foot notes" and that was where we learned that the Prussians had beat the French in the war.

Whenever a house would burn the Fire Department didn't hurry. That winter was so cold that any flames just froze solid. The firefighters would just chop them off at the base, toss the flames in their firetruck, and stack them up on top of the frozen river. And it was frozen! Clear to the bottom, even the bottomless holes where the giant catfish lived. All the fire was stacked that way: house fires, chimney fires, fire buckets, all the fire. And it was safe as houses, as we used to say, because it was all stacked up nice and neat on the ice.

Problem was, next Spring the flames thawed out and thawed the river water too fast. Turned it all to steam, which caused a blanket of fog to cover a good portion of Western Illinois, Eastern Missouri, and Southeastern Iowa plumb till August, when the heat evaporated all the steam.

Those flames also dried up the River from Lock and Dam 20 down by Hannibal clear up to Lock and Dam 22 near Keokuk. Smoked all the fish, too. Folks had so much smoked carp, catfish, spoonbill, sturgeon, perch, bass, and minnows that they were still eating it year later. You can still buy smoked fish there, because all you had to do was walk out and gather it up and stack it up in your basement or root cellar.

Having the River dusty dry for all those miles caused problems for the riverboats and barge traffic, lemme tell ya. Shipping was backed up clear to Memphis in the South and LaCrosse in the North. Of course, they couldn't see where they'd be going anyway because of the fog, but they were getting pretty angry about it.

Finally, a little trickle of a creek started running down the river channel. Wasn't much, and it stunk. Turned out it was runoff from Henry Schmuckle's pig farm up on Rock Creek, down in the bottoms west of Mendon. A bunch of brave souls decided to try to take some diptheria vaccine up that trickle to Meyer, on the Illinois side. They rowed and made it just in time, too. As they plied their oars the runoff they were floating in was beaten to a froth. Some smart guy went out with buckets and gathered up that foam, molded it into cups and stuff, varnished it to keep it hard, and sold it. He called it "Sty row foam" and you can still buy stuff made from it today.