She definitely doesn`t care to be called Tugboat Annie.
The name is Teddi Inman.
On the other hand, ”My crews at times have called me a lot worse.”
That she has crews-plural-indicates that life has gotten better on the river for Inman and her husband, Merle, doing business as Inman Marine near this Calhoun County hamlet on the Mississippi River northwest of St. Louis.
There was a time 30 years ago when the Inmans` river tugboat business was down to $43 in cash, and Teddi, a Northwestern University graduate who gave up her career as a commercial artist, a fancy convertible, a sailboat and an airplane for Ol` Man River, wondered whether she had erred.
Today the family business has three tugs in operation-two at Batchtown and one across the county at Hardin on the Illinois River. Grain is moving, which means the nearby elevators at Hardin and Winfield, Mo., need tugs to move barges. The towboating business at Lock & Dam 25 just to the north has been brisk in recent years as increased barge traffic on the Mississippi River needs help getting through the lock.
Since the Inmans went into business 31 years ago, traffic passing through that lock has quadrupled and exceeds in tonnage total waterborne traffic handled by Chicago.
That is the only port in the nation where the Great Lakes has a navigable connection to the Mississippi River system, and because lake traffic has been declining, Chicago is looking increasingly to its two canal links to the river-the Sanitary and Ship Canal and the Cal-Sag Channel-to sustain its declining maritime industry.
The Illinois International Port District, as Chicago`s port agency is called, a couple of years ago arranged for a shipment of grain to New Orleans on special barges loaded on oceangoing ships. Also, the U.S. Maritime Administration has floated the idea of a a coast-river barge route from South America to Chicago. The idea is called ”Avenue of the Americas.”
U.S. trade with Mexico is approaching $100 billion a year and rapidly nearing that with Japan, the nation`s second-largest trading partner behind Canada. But 80 percent of that tonnage to and from Mexico is handled by truck at a higher cost than could be done by barge.
The proposed barge route would use the Gulf Coast of Mexico, the Gulf intercoastal waterway in Texas, the Mississippi River system and the Great Lakes.
Robert L. Gardner, president and general manager of Conticarriers & Terminals in Chicago, a subsidiary of Continental Grain, said the idea is not that radical. His firm in recent years has moved barges as far south as Argentina by loading them onto floating drydocks.
”Latin America is a big growth area for water transportation,” said Gardner. ”Mexico is the focus of a lot of people right now, and there is a lot of talk about growth in the maritime system between the U.S. and Mexico.” ”Once we get the idea across that the Mississippi River is the back door to the Great Lakes, we`ll have a big enough crack in the door that we can stick our foot in,” said Anthony G. Ianello, executive director of the port district.
That is a substantial change for Chicago, which in the 19th Century took Mississippi River traffic away from St. Louis and New Orleans by sending it via railroads or the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal to New York. The Civil War ruined New Orleans, and the railroads centered in Chicago put inland river steamboat traffic out of business.
Congress dealt with the death of the riverboat industry in World War I, when the railroads couldn`t handle all the traffic, and approved millions of dollars in expenditures to build a system of locks and dams on the Ohio, upper Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. It was completed on the eve of World War II. The Illinois Waterway was finished in 1933, and the first traffic on it, from St. Louis to Chicago, was the tug Turnbull, which pushed two barges of freight.
Merle Inman grew up on the Mississippi and remembers what it was like when construction began on a dam there. ”All the (tug) boats were wood then. In the winter they pulled them onshore to protect them because the river was free-flowing, and when the ice (pack) broke it was dangerous,” he said. By then Mississippi River steamboats had been replaced by squat, coal-burning towboats pushing chains of barges.
Chicago and Illinois had protected their inland connection by replacing the obsolete Illinois-Michigan Canal with the Sanitary and Ship Canal, completed in 1900, to reverse the flow of the Chicago River to carry the city`s sewage downstream instead of into Lake Michigan and to provide barge access to Chicago. The Cal-Sag was added in 1922 as a second sewage-diversion route and shortcut for barges to connect Chicago`s growing port on the Calumet River with the Illinois Waterway.
The other half of Washington`s program to reincarnate river traffic was the creation by Congress of a federally owned and operated barge system. Federal Barge Lines, as the system became known, is considered by historians as possibly the most successful maritime-subsidy program in the nation`s history. The program began in 1918 with five secondhand towboats and a hastily assembled fleet of 28 barges. By the time the government sold the line to a private operator in 1953, the Mississippi system`s revitalized private barge industry had an estimated 2,100 towboats pushing 42.4 million tons of traffic on 8,400 barges.
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A vestige of the now defunct Federal Barge Lines is tied up along a sandstone bluff on the Inmans` 200-acre spread near Batchtown. It is the towboat America, stripped of its engines and machinery and awaiting sale to entrepreneurs for riverboat gambling. When built in 1958, the America and its sister the United States were the two most powerful towboats on the Mississippi-9,000-horsepower giants.
”When I started working the rivers, the boat I was on was 1,250 horsepower, and to see a 2,300-horsepower boat on the lower river
(Mississippi) was phenomenal,” said Conticarrier`s Gardner, a former towboat pilot. ”Building boats that size (9,000 horsepower) shocked the industry.”
Now it is not unusual to see 10,000-horsepower towboats on the Mississippi south of Cairo, Ill., pushing 30 to 35 barges, each loaded with 1,500 tons of grain. Northbound, the tows can handle as many as 72 barges because they are easier to maneuver and stop against the current. Because there are locks, tows on northern tributaries usually are limited to 15 barges, and the towboats are smaller.
”We ship 30 percent of all petroleum, petroleum products and chemicals in the United States,” said Joe Farrell, president of the American Waterway Operators, the industry`s trade organization. ”Barges ship close to 25 percent of the coal.” They also handle more than half of all grain bound for export.
However, there is some indication the barge industry may have peaked unless new markets such as Latin America can be developed.
In the 1970s, when America was selling huge grain surpluses to the Soviet Union, ”We had more business than we had barges or elevators,” Gardner said. ”We didn`t have enough shipyards to build new barges.”
In Batchtown, Merle Inman got around the problem of the skyrocketing cost of tugboats by building his own. ”We worked on it part-time when we weren`t out on the river. It took me four years and one month on the first one,” he said. ”But I had it paid for the day it was launched.”
The big companies were not as flexible. By 1981 they were paying $334,000 apiece for new covered hopper barges for the grain trade. Today the same vessels fetch only $235,000 in a glutted market, Gardner said.
”In the 1970s, if you couldn`t make any money on the river there was something wrong,” he said. So the industry ordered additional barges to handle the grain trade before President Jimmy Carter imposed a grain embargo over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. ”The barge industry found itself in a hell of a mess. A lot of investors who bought into the industry for tax advantages lost a lot of money.”
Farrell said the inland fleet, which peaked at 5,100 tow vessels and 36,000 barges, has dropped to 4,500 towboats and tugs and 30,000 barges and is in considerably better financial shape. The grain fleet continues to produce red ink because of a soft overseas market, Gardner said.
”This is not a high-growth industry. This is blue-collar America. We`re not pretty, but we`re good at what we do. Huckleberry Finn is history,”
Farrell said.
”The industry has been consolidating,” added Inman, noting a trend since the U.S. Supreme Court in 1984 reversed 72 years of federal policy to allow railroads to acquire barge lines so CSX Corp. could buy American Commercial Barge Line Co., the largest barge operator on the rivers. ”I can name three towing companies that collectively operate what used to be 15 companies,” he said.
”That`s good and bad. I hate to see the little ones go out of business, but the big ones pay their bills.”