Frederick Way Jr.

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Fredrick Way, Jr. (February 17, 1901- October 3, 1992) was a river pilot, captain, and author of books on the boats that ply the inland waterways. He is most noted for having captained the flat-bottom, stern paddlewheeler, the Delta Queen, from San Francisco, down the Pacific coast, through the Panama Canal, across the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to Pittsburgh in the late 1940s.

[edit] History

Frederick Way Jr. was born on February 17, 1901. Little is known of his childhood. He apparently gravitated to a life on the river early, as he obtained his pilot’s license in 1923 at the age of 22 and purchased his first river packet, the Betsy Ann, in 1925, at the age of 24. Way married Grace Morrison and resided in Sewickley, Pennsylvania for the remainder of his life.

Using the iron-hulled Betsy Ann, Way ran a packet service between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh for a number of years. Prior to Way’s purchase of the Betsy Ann, she had held the packet speed record on the Mississippi River since the 1900s, winning and retaining a set of gold-tipped elk horns. In August of 1928, Way and the Betsy Ann lost the coveted elk horns to Captain Chris Greene of the steel packet Chris Greene, in a race from Cincinnati to New Richmond.

In 1933 Way wrote a book of his experiences as a river packet captain called The Log of the Betsy Ann. The book was moderately successful, allowing Way to form the Steamboat Photo Company (SPC) in 1939. SPC gathered the largest collection of steamboat photos then known, and became the impetus for the publication of Way’s Steamboat Directory in 1944 and the formation of the Sons and Daughters of Pioneer Rivermen (SDPR), of which Way was a founding member and later a president. SDPR became the driving force behind the formation of the Ohio River Museum in Marietta, Ohio.

In 1948, at the request of his friend Tom Greene, Way captained the twenty-one year old Delta Queen from San Francisco to Pittsburgh. He wrote about the adventure of piloting the paddle wheeler down the west coast, through the Panama Canal, across the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi River to Pittsburgh in The Saga of the Delta Queen.

Between 1948 and his death on October 3, 1992 at Sewickley, Pennsylvania, Way continued to be an active writer, collector of steamboat and packet photographs, and preserver of the history of boats on inland waterways.

[edit] Bibliography

The Log of the Betsy Ann; Robert McBride Co, New York, 1933
Pilotin’ Comes Natural; Robert McBride Co, New York, 1933
The Allegheny; Farrar & Rinehart, New York, 1942 (Rivers of America Series)
The Ships & Sailing Albums Number 1, Mississippi Stern-Wheelers, Kalmbach Publishing, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 1947
The Saga of the Delta Queen; Young and Klein, Inc, Cincinnati, Ohio 1951
She Takes the Horns: Steamboat Racing on the Western Waters; The Picture Marine Publishing Company, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1953
Way's Packet Directory, 1848-1983: Passenger Steamboats of the Mississippi River System since the Advent of Photography in Mid-Continent America; Ohio University Press, 1983