By
Don Corrigan
While John Shoulberg calls the land-locked St. Louis
suburb of Rock Hill his home, his thoughts are never very far away from the
muddy waters of Old Man River.
That’s because Shoulberg is editor of the weekly
“Riverman’s Bible,” otherwise known as the Waterways Journal. When Shoulberg
joined the Journal’s operation in 1991, he became part of a river tradition
that’s more than a century old.
“When this paper started in St. Louis in 1887, its
reporters were writing about steamboat packets carrying cargo from city to
city,” says Shoulberg. “In fact, one of the things I really like about the
Journal is the view of the Mississippi from the windows where I work in
downtown St. Louis on 4th Street.”
This year [1998] Shoulberg has had an unusual amount of
river activity to cover. There have been runaway barges, a tow pilots’ strike,
a runaway President Casino, industry mergers. In addition, Shoulberg has
dredged up a few in-depth stories of his own on navigation and environmental
issues.
“This spring has been really busy for me. Between
covering the pilots’ strike and the runaway barges, I was running for alderman
in Rock Hill,” notes Shoulberg, who lost the city election by only a couple
votes.
“The pilots’ strike has been a big story and it’s been
hard on everybody, but especially the crews,” Shoulberg continues. “I have a
lot of respect for the folks who work on the river. You have to be away from
your family for 30 days at a time. It’s back-breaking work and it can be
dangerous.
“We’re writing about casualties on the river – sometimes
fatalities – at least once a month,” the Waterways Journal editor adds. “But
things are getting safer. There have been major improvements. And there’s
nothing quite like river work.”
As a trade magazine, circulation for the weekly Waterways
Journal is relatively small at 5,000. Among the select group of advertisers are
barge operators, naval architects, marine engineers, port captains, river
surveyors, pilots, mates and crusty, old river buffs.
“James Swift is our river historian, and he writes a
regular column that really appeals to the river buffs,” says Shoulberg. “I
really like reading his column because he knows so much about old boats and
what used to happen on the river.”
In covering the nation’s inland waterways system,
Shoulberg keeps in contact with river correspondents in Houston, Portland, New
Orleans and Washington, D.C. The weekly’s publication day is Monday, so Friday
is the crunch day when all the deadlines have to be met.
Tow
Industry Partisan
Shoulberg readily admits that as a Waterways Journal
writer, he has become a loyal champion of the barge industry. Forget all of
those odes to objectivity mouthed by traditional journalists. Shoulberg is on
board with the barge industry.
“I’m certainly a tow industry partisan, especially in our
fights with the competition – the railroads and the trucking industry,”
Shoulberg notes. “I consider myself to be an environmentalist and this method
of moving cargo is certainly the most environmentally sound.
“A barge can carry 1,500 tons of cargo compared to 100
tons for a rail car and about 20 tons for a truck trailer,” says Shoulberg. “We
also use fuel much more efficiently. We can go about 500 miles on the fuel it
takes for a truck to go 50 miles or a train 200 miles.”
Shoulberg also is a partisan of the river., and he
believes that river towns should pay more homage to the winding waterways that
often brought them into existence. Old St. Louis is no exception.
“Cincinnati is a good example of a town that is more
conscious about its riverfront and its river heritage,” says Shoulberg. “They
have a much more elaborate riverfront area that is much more accessible.
“I attended a celebration of boats and steamboats on the
riverfront in Cincinnati called ‘Tall Stacks.’ I got to ride on the Old Belle
of St. Louis to get to Cincinnati and it was quite enjoyable. It was very
serene just watching the river banks go by,” Shoulberg recalls.
Shoulberg concedes that St. Louis has some real
challenges to make its riverfront more user-friendly. A swift river current, a
close industrial area and adjacent highway patterns put St. Louis in a tougher
position to use its riverfront as compared to the Ohio River city of Cincinnati.
Route
to Waterways
Shoulberg’s career route to the Waterways Journal
included several newspaper stops along the way. He graduated from North Central
College in Naperville, Ill., in 1982 with a degree in economics, but his
attraction to journalism soon had him writing stories for Times newspapers.
He joined the Suburban Journals in 1986 where he worked
as a reporter and copy editor. In 1990, he went to work for Ralph Ingersoll’s
short-lived, “laptop” daily, the St. Louis Sun.
“I got to see what it was like to have your newspaper
crash,” recalls Shoulberg. “Our computers were always freezing up and going
down. But on April 25, 1990, they froze and didn’t come back up, and Ralph
Ingersoll was in the newsroom telling us we were out of business.
“I was putting a headline on a Patrick Buchanan column at
the time, so I’ve always blamed him for the Sun going out of business,”
Shoulberg laughs. After some months of odd jobs and free-lance writing,
Shoulberg found his way to the Waterways Journal.
“I was hired by Jack Sampson, who was editor of the
Journal at the time,” says Shoulberg. “He’d been editor for 22 years. The paper
is 112 years old, and I’m only the 10th editor in its history.
People stay here. It’s a very comfortable place to work.
“I miss newspaper work a little bit, but not the hours,”
adds Shoulberg. “I remember working a brutal all-night shift for the Journals.
It’s great to have an 8 to 4:30 job and to have time with my wife and three
boys.”
Shoulberg uses his spare time to act as a Cub Scout
leader and to run with the St. Louis Track Club. And he continues to dabble in
politics in land-locked Rock Hill.
(Originally
published in the St. Louis Journalism Review 7/1998).