Shippingport Island

Memories of a Town Gone-By

BARDSTOWN WOMAN RECALLS TRAGEDY AND TRIUMPH LIVING ON SHIPPINGPORT

Writeup by Elijah Humble for the Portland Anchor Newspaper (Vol. 49, No. 11-12)

Responding to our recent calls for oral history participants in relation to our historical series on Shippingport Island, 80-year-old Linda Kramer emerged from Bardstown to relay her journey from the banks of Shippingport to Portland, then to Pleasure Ridge Park and later Bardstown. She and her stalwart husband Al were married at St. Cecilia’s 62 years ago, and they both joined us at the Portland Museum earlier this summer to share their story.

Linda moved to Shippingport when she was four years old, in 1948. Her father, Charles Bierbaum, had died in World War II, and she remembered living on 18th Street and Northwestern Parkway in Portland, near a vinegar factory and beer joint with her stepfather, Lawrence Alvey, and mother, Virginia Kuchenbrod Alvey.

Her stepfather found a favorable living situation on Shippingport, through a network of easy living fishermen, who constituted an isolated community of tradesmen without steady employment, living in trailers and on houseboats. She said people would trade things like painting a house in exchange for fixing somebody’s boat, and then having fish fries and partying well into the night on the river.

Was Shippingport a community of fishermen? “It mainly was, yes,” she said. “Fishermen, bums and drunks, sorry but that’s what it was. There was a lot of rabbit and squirrel hunting, we ate it all the time. It was an outdoorsmen’s playground.”

She adds, “it wasn’t Mayberry, but everybody was nice and friendly. I don’t recall any fights with all the drinking; everybody looked out for each other.”

The unforgiving Ohio River remained a dominating factor with its relentless regular rainfall.

“All the houses were elevated and often flooded out,” Linda said. “Every spring, at least twice a year. The outhouse would get flooded, and we’d have to ‘go’ on the side of the steps. We did have running water, but not hot water. We did have electricity but lots of people didn’t have running water. On hot days we’d play under the house, it was nice and cool.”

There was a water pump in a central location on the island, and some families would have to constantly haul buckets of water back and forth. Linda said her family shared a portable metal tub which was placed in the kitchen, and everyone took turns at bathtime. When they were done, they would dump the leftover water directly through a window into a garden next to the house.

Life on Shippingport

When it comes to providing details about her childhood on Shippingport, Linda had an amazing memory and naturally dramatic flair (she has also acted in five movies with Bloomfield-based director John Coulter). Her many recollections included a long walk to the Dolfinger school across the canal in Portland, as well as many other attractions and chores.

“We didn’t have heat, so we had an old wagon, and would take it across the bridge on 26th Street over to Portland,” she said. “There was Reed bookstore, across from Shaheen’s, and a gas station. We’d pull that little wagon with two big cans of kerosene! Us little kids, eight and ten years old (referring to her older brother, Charles Jr., or ‘Bootsie’). We took it all the way back, over the bridge, under the viaduct. My mother would say, ‘on the way home, if you see any pieces of coal, pick it up so we can use it, put it in your pocket’. We were that poor.”

At that time, in contrast to the bustling riverfront that was Shippingport during the 1820s, with the towering Tarascon Mill and the finest steamboats on the Ohio, in the 1950s there were no open businesses. No grocery store, post office or bank; no police or fire station. Nobody ventured into the wooded area beyond the handful of residential blocks that made up the island; no sign of life at the location of the fabled Elm Tree Garden entertainment emporium of the mid- to late-1800s, which sat across from former 18th Street bridge. And most surprising of all, given Louisville’s dedicated tradition of spirits, there were no bars or liquor stores on Shippingport.

“Just the fish house,” Linda said. “Mr. Lamb sold fish out of this big case, closed in glass. He laid ice in it, laid fish on it, and people came in and picked out what they wanted. They were very nice people, he and his son.”
There were, however, many deliveries made to the residents of Shippingport, including milk and ice. “The ice man had a big truck, and there were squares with five, ten, fifteen or twenty blocks, depending on how many pieces you wanted, and he’d cut off the blocks. There was also an egg man. People had chickens but dogs would eat them. An insurance man also came around, as well as the mailman. There were plenty of deliveries, just nothing established on island.”

She also recalled grocery deliveries to house from the “Donaldson man”, which was a baking company that had a rich history in Louisville and Portland, some who apparently employed horse-drawn wagons well into the 1950s. Linda said they mostly bought bread but treats like cakes and donuts were also for sale. Speaking of sweets, she and Bootsie would take a dime to the Neff Pharmacy and split a butter rum candy for five cents and give the other half to the church she dedicatedly frequented, Portland Christian.

Portland Flavor

Portland had more action as far as culture and entertainment. “I rode my bike everywhere,” Linda said. “We’d go to the Ideal Theater on Market Street and 23rd. That was a long distance for little kids. We’d sit on each others’ handlebars. And on 22nd and Portland Avenue was the Norman Theater. They’d say, ‘be sure to keep your feet up!’ You’d see rats running through aisles. But we didn’t care, rats ran through our house.”
Due to the fishing trade economy on Shippingport, individual fishermen would arrive with boats tied to cars. They would need bait, and young Linda figured out how to hustle money to go to the movies, by putting coffee grounds in the ground with rags. “Put it in the ground, you got worms a week later,” she said. “I sold them for 25 cents a can, using soup cans I had saved. I’d get 20 or 30 worms per cans. A quarter was a lot of money. That was a movie and popcorn. They’d play westerns…you could see two movies, the news, two cartoons for 10 cents. I went to a 12 o’clock movie and wouldn’t get home until 6 o’clock. It was a full days’ entertainment.”

Linda recalled their party line phone system, in which phone lines between neighbors were shared. “If it rang twice, it was ours,” she said. “Three times, somebody else. You could pick it up, hear conversations.”
The mythic unofficial mayor of Shippingport, William “Cap” Zurlinden was still a strong presence on the island, as he would be until the very end in 1958. He owned much of the remaining property on the island and was Linda’s family’s landlord. As a lifelong resident of the island and veteran of multiple floods, he remained seemingly – yet understandably — bitter about Shippingport’s impending fate.

“He was a very distant man, not very friendly,” Linda said. “Acted like he was king of the island. He was a big guy, sat on big rocking chair, hollering at kids, on the concrete base in front of their nice, big three-story house.”
It was the main house on the island and used to also be the site of a general store, which had closed by the time Linda moved there. “I remember being eight years old peeking in there, and you could see old food still on the shelves, and thinking about all that food, wishing he would open that store!”

Bootsie

But it’s not the unique local flavor of that Linda remembers most about Shippingport. “The reason we moved…it was a Thursday afternoon, spring break 1953,” she said, no doubt having played the scene over in her mind thousands of times. “My brother Bootsie and his friend Sonny Cook, who lived next to Mr. Lamb’s fish house, they were going down the hill. I said, ‘where you guys going?’. But I was the little sister, they ignored me. I was a real tomboy, so I sat at a tree on the hill waiting. And then I saw Sonny come running, and I said ‘where’s Bootise?’ He just looked at me, didn’t say anything, kept running to our house and told my mother: ‘Bootsie fell into the river!’ I said ‘oh my gosh’, and she starts screaming, tells me to run down to the fish house and get some of the men. My stepdad was gone somewhere.”

“There was a dirt street with holes in it, but I ran down and told men, and came back to the house,” Linda continued. “People saw what happened. Bootsie saw a fish on bank of the river, reached over on a branch, but it broke, and he fell in. Well that just changed my life, changed all our lives I still feel it to this day.”

After that, her family moved to Portland near the Roosevelt school, which she attended and where the next phase of her life began, followed by reuniting with Dolfinger friends at Shawnee High School, to meeting and marrying Al (an alum of Flaget Academy) and moving to Pleasure Ridge Park for 40 years. They’ve been in Bardstown for 20 years, proudly accumulating a family of four children and seven grandchildren. Her younger stepbrothers Danny and Larry were born on Shippingport Island.

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