Born in 1925, David Kasch has lived in North Portland most of his life. He worked as a riverboat and tugboat pilot on the Willamette and Columbia Rivers.

Oral History

Interviewer: Michelle Mantzouranis
Narrator: David Kasch
Date: August 14, 2000
Place: Portland, Oregon
Transcription by George Winston Weatheroy
Edited by Donna Sinclair

MM: This is MM Mantzouranis from Portland State University. Today is August 14th, 2000 and I am interviewing DK Kasch at his residency in North Portland Oregon.

Can you tell me where you were born?

DK: I was born in Portland, Oregon, yeah.

MM: And what year was that?

DK: ’25. 1925.

MM: So you lived in North Portland prior to the building of Vanport?

DK: Oh, before it was ever built of course, yeah.

MM: Can you describe a little about the area then, or what it look like?

DK: Portland wasn’t as big as it is now. It was a town, it wasn’t a city ..(laughter) I was born out in southeast Portland, but I lived in the North end most of my life, grew up right down here by Roosevelt High School, went to Roosevelt High School. Went into the Navy when I was 17, got out right after the war, almost four years, and came back and lived — that’s when when we first lived down at University halls, when we first got married. That’s right over here by Columbia park. They were OK. They were pretty good little apartments you know. That’s the only public housing I lived in. When we first got married. So, and then we lived in Parkrose a while, but came back here. This has always been the handiest part of Portland. I was working for Shavers and the towboats. It was a lot handier to..Shavers’ right across the river on the west side. So, wound up back here.

MM: So were you in the war, or when you were in the Navy, were you in the war?

DK: Yes.

MM: The whole time?

DK: Yes. yeah. ’42-46.

MM: So you witnessed the Vanport flood when you lived at University housing?

DK: Yeah, we lived up there during the flood, yeah.

MM: Could you tell me a little…

DK: We lived in the University Homes on the hill above that. In fact, you could practically see Vanport from where we lived, so…

MM: Could you tell me a little about what you saw?…during the flood? Can you describe a little bit for me?

DK: Well, there was lots of water and a lot of congestion. But, I never got close to it. I could see it from where the apartment was. We never went down there. The thing about the ��48 flood was that the Willamette River was just a pond. The Columbia River was the one that was running. This was all Columbia river water. And so, the Willamette here was a pond. . . Now the little flood that we had, little flood, we had in December, what? three years ago? Whenever it was?

MM: Um-hum.

DK: Now, that was the Willamette river. And that’s the one that raised hell. That did a lot of damage. So…and…we, of course I retired by then and we’ve got the steamer Portland down there, and … we had to take it out of there, which was quite a deal. That’s the fastest that boat ever went.

MM: What was that?

DK: The Steamer Portland. That’s a sternwheeler that belongs to the museum. And we restored it, and we operate it.

MM: Where do you operate it at? On the Columbia?

DK: Columbia and Willamette, yeah. yeah. Yeah, I’m a skipper on it. . . .

And since we put it back together, the museum guys, Jack Taylor, another skipper and I, we, take turns running it. We’re going to take it to Cascade Locks next month, which will be quite a trip. So anyway, the Portland was almost ready to go in the junk pile. In fact Schnitzer had offered, I think it was sixteen thousand dollars for it, for scrap see. So several of us, Jack Taylor and another skipper and I and several others, we put a few bucks in a pot and started working on it. And it was all gutted out. The house was off it. Everything. And we started working on it. Went in… We got a grant from Fred Meyer trust. And then, put it together, and then… the Port of Portland kicked in a little bit and we got it going pretty good. And so.. . then the Port gave us the boat, so it belongs to [the] Oregon Maritime Center and Museum right now. . . .

MM: Did you have any connection to the Portland before you started restoring it or ..how did that…?

DK: Well, yeah. Jack and I have been on the river ever since the war, and we know a few people. In fact, see I was the skipper on the Sternwheeler Portland. . . Shaver Transportation operated the boat, but it belonged to the Port of Portland which is a state entity. So when I was a skipper at Shaver, I ran all the other towboats, but I ran the Portland for about three years. In fact, I went in the Columbia River Pilots from the Portland.

But Shaver’s was kind of a wild company. I was a regular skipper on the Portland, but we didn’t didn’t work on the Portland all the time. We worked on whatever boat was available or whenever they needed somebody. . . So, anyway, Portland was quite something — to run it. . .

Then I was elected into the pilots in January ’66. I was in the Columbia River Pilots for 25 years, and then I was on the ships from Astoria, Portland, everywhere in between. . . But then I retired when I was 65. I didn’t have to, but I did. And when was that? 1990, 10 years ago, yeah, OK. And I’m still on the Portland, only I have a deck hand now, you see. . . (laughing) yeah..what else you got?

MM: Uhm..you said you were elected into the Pilots? What?

DK: Well, the Pilots are kind of a strange entity in a way. Different, not strange but different. There are so many pilots and of course you have to be qualified. You have to have your Master’s license and pilot age and a radar endorsement and physical things, and I had a tanker man’s ticket and an A.B. ticket and a bunch of junk. Everything is regulated by the Coast Guard, but the Pilots are an association.

And you are not working for anybody. I said “elected” because they vote to take you in as another partner. . . They cast a ballot and then you do a kind of apprenticeship. You ride with another pilot for so long, and then you are limited to the type of ship you can take for the first year or so. . . [Talks about the rules for Columbia River Pilots]

MM: Could you describe exactly what a Sternwheeler is? Because I am not familiar with that.

DK: Let me see. I’ve got to show you a picture of a Sternwheeler I’ve been on. The first one I was on was the old Steamer Jean. A paddle-wheeler.

DK: I was the deckhand on the Jean, and the Henderson. I’m sure I was on another one there. I was skipper on the Portland, which is still operating, but I decked on her too — a long time ago. Let me get a picture of her, so you know what I’m talking about. (narrator reaches for a stack of pictures). . . That’s the Portland. That’s the sternwheel, or the wheel. This is one of the best pictures I have ever seen of the Portland. This is the Dallas. Taken from in the river. And Mt. Hood, and I think that’s a fantastic picture. You have a lot of pictures of the Portland, like that. . . look there, ’64. That’s when I was skipper on her. That’s me incidentally on it. I’m still kind of skinny then. A bunch of pictures here. There’s the wheel. That’s the other skipper, him and I. We made this name board. My son designed it, and we made it. It’s wooden, two inch plank and stuff.. That’s the steering engine, steam’s steering gear, that’s some of the guys, the skipper on the Columbia Gorge. We had a race see — there is Queen of the West. Now that’s the one in here. It’s driven by a couple of Mercedes engines, diesel engines, same as the Columbia Gorge. They’re. . . driven by a diesel engine, but the Portland is original and it’s a steam engine. They are all steam. This is when she was a working boat.

This is what we did. We made up to the ships and that’s all she was — to assist the ships around. We made up solid to them and got them down through the bridges and so forth. This is right up town here. Here is a pretty good picture of her. And we had a whole bunch of boats, bunch of river boats. Now these boats, at the time Portland was built, she was the only boat around that could really do the job. Now they have towboats like this one, and this one, and this one, all tractor tugs that can do three times [as much] as my old boat can do but. . . (Still going through pictures).

Those are kind of neat. Get them all together. And these are the big modern boats you know. Like this boat is a big barge boat, upper river barge boat. And this is too. But these are the new tractor boats and they can just do anything. 3600 horsepower and the Portland had 1800. This is George Shaver. He owns the Shaver transportation company. That’s the guy that I worked for. They were just tying up, see. Just above the Burnside Bridge. And the Hawthorne. These are all barges. Barges and ship boats now. Here’s some of the old boats. Some of the smaller boats that I used to run. (short pause as he is looking through pictures) This is my boat. This is my boat. (laughing) Well the Maureen, I forgot about her. Clear water. Big barge boats. Beautiful big boats. This is another company. I used to be a deckhand on that one. Western. They’re no longer in business. And there is a new boat. And there is a weird one.(laughing) And that was the first boat I was on. The Jean. That’s a Sternwheeler. That was a (inaudible, “slug”?)ship we called it.

MM: Why did you call it that?

DK: Oh it was a bow and arrow thing. It was just hard work, they never did anything easy. . . This is one of the most famous tugs on the West coast. This is strictly an ocean boat . Built in 1889. And it’s still . . . Faust in Seattle has got that boat. They don’t run it of course. But they take it out, they have a race or something in Puget Sound every year. And they crank that boat up every year. That was a neat boat.

MM: So how far up the Columbia would you run the Portland?

DK: We never did run up the river as a working boat. Vancouver was about it, or Vancouver shipyards maybe. Most of the work was right here in the harbor. All the dry dock work, all the ships with no power. We towed ships between Astoria and here and Vancouver and Longview and St Helens and all these places.

MM: Would the Portland tow the ships?

DK: The Portland, yeah. Like that one picture, we would make up to the ship. . .We would put out 6 big inch and quarter lines and make up fast to that ship. We were the power. . .

MM: So, you worked on the Columbia river though for a while, or?

DK: Columbia and Willamette all the time — a long time

MM: Could you tell me just a little more detail about exactly what you did, or some of the experiences?

DK: What we did? (Pause) On the Jean, the one I just showed you, the first tugboat I was on just after the war, we mostly towed logs with it, and we towed out of the lower river down there. Crown Zellerbach at that time had big log storages. And we towed from there to Astoria, Blind Slough, the lower river, to Camas, Washington. With the big paper mill in Camas. It’s no longer Crown Zellerbach , it’s James River, that’s what it is. That’s the name of it. But, we mostly towed up from the lower river, the storages down there to Camas and then all the places in between. Log rafts. Big log rafts. Big bundle rafts. We towed two rafts at a time, big deep rafts.

We would tow a raft up to Camas — we would take empty barges down, paper barges, hog fuel barges, a kind of sawdust they burned up there, and then the boom sticks that the rafts are made of. They make the rafts by running the boomsticks around them, and then all the logs in the middle, and a lot to do to keep them together. And so that’s how we’d get back down the stream — dropped them off at different places, Wauna, St. Helens, and then the boomsticks down to the rafting grounds.

. . . It was like a dream, like I said, a bow and arrow boat. And we did everything the hard way, and it was hard work, but when you’d get a tow together, then you had some time, then what you did, you maintained the boat, you see. Then with the Jean, we towed a few ships with it.

For a long time after the war, there was a lot of lay up. The Navy had a big lay up base in Tonguepoint. Maritime Administration had a big lay up fleet. Stuff that had been laid up from the war. The Maritime Administration was — most of them were Liberty Ships. Some of them were C-2’s and C-4’s. I remember there was half a dozen hospital ships in that fleet. Some of them went for scrap, up here at Zeidel’s. A lot of them went for scrap. For a long time they stored grain in them. They didn’t have anyplace to store their grain, you know. We’d tow a ship up, we’d load it with grain, we towed it back, and it layed up down there in Astoria at Toungepoint. And everybody said it was crazy — they tell me that the grain would be in some of those ships for a couple years. And they said it was better when they took it out, than what it was when it went in. You wouldn’t think so, but it was dry, no problem.

But we towed a lot of ships. Well, I started at Western and I worked for a few other companies, smaller companies. Then I went to work for Shaver’s. At Shavers’ we towed everything. Everything. I mean ships, barges, and we launched them and all kinds of stuff. That’s why Shaver’s was kind of interesting. I worked there the most. And then I went skipper there. We did lot of stuff there at Shaver’s, until I went into Pilots.

I went to work for — at that time — it’s gone now — a Sand and Gravel lot. You know, the ready-mix outfits. I had a tug called the Valiant. Cruise street, just below John’s Landing, that was a big sand and gravel outfit. And so I was on that boat with sand and gravel barges. Vancouver, up and down, just in the harbor. Most boring [job] I ever had in my life, so I quit, went back to Shaver’s. . . moving ships. . .

MM: Why was that the most interesting one, the moving of the ships?

DK: Well, ship-assist work, yeah, moving ships around.

MM: And you liked that better then the other one?

DK: Well, sometimes it gets kind of wild. It’s different. All of it different. . .

[End Side A, Begin Side B, Tape 1 of 1]

MM: You were saying before that, it can get kind of wild? What about it makes it, I mean, about moving the ships, what can happen?

DK: Oh, on ship-assist work?

MM: Yeah.

DK: Well, a lot of it. We used to tow on a ship from Terminal 4, or down through the bridges, that was the worst. Or the wildest, and the most dangerous. We’d tool backwards once in a while and you’d be out here and there was a good chance of denting the boat, and it was kind of dangerous. I never have, but it has happened. It’s all different — times you have a lot of current. You’ve got wind, you’ve got the bridges, you got the ships, they’re all different. So, it gets wild, it’s wild. Now it’s a little bit different, but it’s still the same thing, because of course they’ve got such nice boats now. Geez. Big tractor tugs they called them. Sneider put powers in their boats and they can do just about anything now. Some of those old slabs, they couldn’t do much with them, and it was pretty easy to get in trouble with them.

And some of those engines weren’t that good either. They wouldn’t always start. That’s why I said it got wild. Sometimes. . . It’s about 90% boredom , and 10% sheer terror you see, and wild. . . But, geez, I haven’t been on the boats for, well god, it’s been about — well I went into the pilots and there you start all over again, you see. You’re not driving boats anymore. You’re driving ships. It’s still basically the same. It’s still the navigation, it’s still all that.

And it’s different people involved — like the ships now, probably, 95% of the ships here are foreign ships. There is the tankers, they’re really the only U.S. ships that call here. There is a few car ships, and a few towboats that are U.S., but the rest of them are foreign flag ships. So we had quite a language thing there, and the ships are so big that — just take a look at Swan Island down there. The biggest ships we have are eleven hundred feet long, eleven hundred by 178 foot beam. . . ( laughter ) They’re big ships, yeah. But even though regular ships are 600 feet, 700 feet,you know, a lot of them, the panimex ships were too big to go through the Panama canal. The Panama Canal is 1000 feet long by a 110 feet wide, and some of the ships are too big to go through there. . .But like I said fortunately they got some good towboats now. Boy they got some fantastic tugs. I never got to run any of those. I played with them. They never come along until after I was in the pilots. We had some pretty good looking little towboats, like in those pictures, but they weren’t good enough for the big ships — there wasn’t enough there. I had one [towboat], Captain George, that had 800-horse-power, which was about as good as it came at that time. . . I liked that boat. I had that boat for quite a while. So, anyway that’s what I meant by kinda wild sometimes. I never sank a boat or I never rolled one over or anything , I came awfully close (laughter), broke a few lungs , crashed a few times , but I’m still here.

MM: Can you tell me about some of the crashes? Or what happened?

DK: Some I’d rather not talk about, but I had a tug called the Chinook that was a good boat, but it had an engine in it that wasn’t reliable called a direct reversible engine. And you didn’t know whether it was going to back-up or not. So , I come into the dock with it at about three o’clock one morning, and it wouldn’t start. I went through the rock at the tailors moorage. I took out all the lighting, the water lines, what else was it, the walk, and three pile dolphin, crashed. It was pretty funny. It wasn’t funny then, but it is now . So I broke the waterline, probably a two inch line, so we got a big geyser going there, took out all the power for the whole moorage, a few sparks you know . And the walk crashed �? boom, bang, boom, bang — and then the next day or so I saw the owner of the company George Shaver, and we were talking about that. I had filled out an accident report and everything . The only thing he said about it was the engine was a coup of vessimer [?] and we hated it. And I said, “God, that damn engine.”

What really burned me up, is he said, “We just had the power driver here yesterday.” (laughing) That’s all he said. It sure cost me a few thousand dollars. A whole bunch of thousand dollars (laughing). Well anyway, Shavers was an interesting place, you know, hard work. You worked all kinds of hours and you didn’t know what kind of hours they were, and you went everywhere; you’d grab a barge or something, take it to Astoria or somewhere. Or take it up river.

I didn’t really run up river that much. John Day dam wasn’t finished yet. But when they were working on it, I had this Captain George and I took I don’t know how many barge loads of equipment up there. And brought a whole lot of it back too, and that was kind of a wild one because I really wasn’t a regular upper river man, you see. Everything else and anything else, but not like these guys that run up the river. They’re strictly barges. They have a big barge boat, and they’re running, they’re running to Idaho now, you know. . . But anyway, I’ve got a single screw boat and the locks up there, the dams, hard job. Wild, tough job. I had a regular run up there to Bonneville, above Bonneville, Cascade Locks. But we were hauling — it was a big rock barge. And I had this Captain George which is a single crew boat. All the other boats, twin crew, and they can do a lot of things with them. That was a tough job. Took them to Astoria. Astoria to Cascade Locks and back.

So, anyway. But then the pilots and the ships, that’s completely different, you know, I mean as far as the work goes. It’s the river and you got to know the river and you got to be able to do the work. And then you are on the towboats for a long time and then you go into the Pilots, if you’re lucky, and then you start over again, you see.(laughing). . . . But that was a top of the line job, the Pilots. And it paid a little better too. So…the boys are doing pretty good now. Yeah, of course they give me a little bit of that now, they give me a percentage of it — I was 25 years in there. But that’s nice. So, everytime there’s a ship goes by, I get part of it, you see. So I like to see a lot of ships go by. (laughing), which I can do right here, you know. We had the oil docks right across the river here. I watch the tankers here and other things, but then the dry docks are right here at Swan Island, but most of the shipping is down below now — Terminal Six, over by Vancouver — and all the container ships are down there.

The container ships now are so big, more than 3000 containers, 3000 boxes on those things, man oh man. But they’re big hop ships, see and they call them post-batten-axe ships. They’re bigger than the canal, they’re deeper. They’re good ships, they are all good ships, but they tear things up. That’s one of the Pilots biggest concerns is your swell, and your displacement of water. Everything along the river. The banks, the fishermen, any insulation along the river — you are dragging, you are moving so much water, can really cause some some damage. So you really have to slow down in a lot of places and you really have to be careful. You could drown people, and then there are sailboats. That’s some damage. That’s terrible. and then there are these powerboats. There is a class of yacht that’s about 35-foot yacht. Nice boats, real nice boats. But they go to some different kind of school because, I don’t know who teaches them. They got power squadrons, and stuff and I swear, they do some strange things that scare the hell out of you.

Here’s a bad one. I’m bringing a Russian ship up the river one night. Late one night. Seems like it was about midnight or something. And there’s one of these yachts — it was a 34-footer, I remember. Had 6 people aboard. So I’m coming up and here is this boat up ahead of me, going up river, and I’m watching him because he doesn’t know where he is going. And so I’m coming up, blowing some whistles, and I hold over thick and he will get over there. I’m moving along, maybe 15 knots or so. And all of a sudden, I come up, I pulled over as far as I could. Then this boat, this yacht, I figure, Well, OK, I’m OK, I’m going to get by him without him doing anything crazy. And then he disappears. Then I see him coming down the side of the ship. I thought i missed him — that will take some years off — but then I get by him. But I didn’t miss him, I hit him, or he hit me. Just alongside, but then I passed him, and then he was on the radio and I figured he was getting on me, and I realized he was talking to me on the radio.

Oh, it was a horrible situation, So, I anchored the ship. This is unheard of, but I anchored the ship. Can’t do it anyplace, but I did it there. I got the crew to put the lifeboat over and we went over to this boat, and had hit them, or, they had hit me, actually. They ran into me is what they did, and there was a little moorage up there a couple miles. . . I had to lead them up there with the ship yet, you see. This is the craziest thing you ever heard of. And I got them inside there, I told them what to do, and they got inside there and they got tied up to this place. And so then we take it back. In the meantime, I called the Coast Guard and they met us, and it took a while. But I saved those guys lives, and did all that, and then they sued me. And that’s a kind of a strain on a person. To have to look at a lawsuit. The Coast Guard and a lawsuit. And the whole bit. And the Russians paid them off. Paid them off. It was their fault but the judge says, well I know it’s their fault. They ran into your ship, but nevertheless, you’re the expert and you have to watch out for those people. . .

MM: And this incident happened up on the Columbia River?

DK: Well, it was down about 8 miles below Longview. Yep, crazy. But I went through the Pilot commission and the Coast Guard and then the courts. It was 2 years fighting that thing. Boy, sweating it, you know. Because if they take my license away from me I don’t have a job anymore. Now I’m 40 plus years old and It would kind of be tough to go back as a deckhand, wouldn’t it? (laughing) Yeah , That’s a worry. . .

MM: So what initially got you interested in working on the water?

DK: What?

MM: What initially got you interested..In being on the water so much, or being in that profession?

DK: Well, I been around, I grew up here, in the water, swam in it, had a small boat. It was a kayak. Home-made kayak. Fished it. Navy, South Pacific, boats. Ran a Landing craft. And then, right after the war, there were some kind of lean periods, right after the war. And so I had the first job on the old Jean there, and then it was pretty slim, and I didn’t have a steady job. So I had butchered a little bit, before the war, so I went back to butchering for a awhile until I could get my foot back in the door. Took me quite a while, to get it in there, you know.

And then afterwards there was some lean times. Korea had come along. They broke out a lot of ships during the Korean war. During WWII and the layup ships. Then things picked up for a while. But then there were recession periods. I was kind of lucky on the boats. But I had been around long enough on the boats. Things went to pot. Shaver’s was kind of funny. They didn’t lay anybody off. They’d starve you off, but they would lay you off, not really. And they would work the guys just long enough so the guys couldn’t collect unemployment insurance, one or two days a week. . . I was kind of luckly because at that time, I had worked at Western, and I had been around a little bit, and a lot of these guys at Shaver’s, were kind of limited. Shaver’s used to have a lot of small boats that just ran to Oregon City. And it’s just about all those guys could do. Well, I’d worked for a couple of other companies and we did this, and this, and this, and we’d go on to sea and everything, and so I did a little better than some of those people. I had my foot in the door, and you kind of build a reputation, “he’s a good man,” or something, and it makes a lot of difference. It makes a lot of difference all the way through. Whether you work hard, and all that good stuff.

So then I built a house on the river. I built this house. I’ve been here 23 years. But I lived in a couple of other houses around here. In fact this street right here, this little lane back here…Did you have any trouble finding it?

MM: No.

DK: O.K. We used to call it Pilot Road, because there are seven houses on this lane and four of us were pilots. I got the last of them, I bought the lot, and we built the house. So this is Pilot Road. But I’m the only one left. It’s kind of a neat place to live. And it’s easy to get to places. Downtown and everything. Although there is more traffic so it’s not so good anymore. Like down here on Greeley, Adidas bought Kaiser Permanente Hospital, and they gutted it out. And it’s going to be their corporate headquarters. And that’s about 700 or 800 employees. So it’s not going to be so peaceful around here anymore. And there is more and more all the time. Swan Island is built up. This end of town was kind of forgotten, this north end down here, for a long time, but they’re building condos and apartments all over the place. So there goes our tranquillity, and more traffic. Still better then Barbur Blvd. or Interstate 5.

Up there every place is built up, but geez, out Airport Way, holy mackeral. Have you

been out that way?. . . Oh man…You go by there once in a while and all of a sudden, “Hey, that hotel wasn’t there last week,” you know.(laughing) The big Travelers or a big whatever, Sheraton, a 15 story hotel. I swear it wasn’t there last week. (laughing)

But anyway, the river you know, most of the docks and things are all moved, down here. Terminal Six and over there, so it looks pretty quiet, but the only thing up above anymore is, well, there are two green docks, then the old Permamente, which they call, it’s cement now, what do they call it? Got a new name now — Glacier. I got to keep up with the names you know, they change names on you all the time. But the Terminal One, in fact, they sold that to the Port of Portland, Terminal One. From the lower part of Terminal one by the Fremont Bridge, downstream from the Fremont Bridge. . . We had the Portland up there when we got it, we built the Portland there. . . [at Terminal One] [Interview Ends]

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