PAT KINNEY, pat.kinney@wcfcourier.com | Posted: Sunday, June 28, 2009 12:00 am
WATERLOO - It was June 1909, 100 years ago this month. Two Waterloo brothers sailed a boat - a homemade cabin cruiser - down the Cedar, Iowa and Mississippi rivers through eastern Iowa, from Waterloo all the way to Burlington.
The latter-day Huck Finns - Allen J. "Skip" Lown, then 25, and his 15-year-old kid brother Phillip - had been building the craft, which they christened "The Watowa," since the previous summer. There also was a third companion - a faithful canine known as "Curly the dog."
The Lowns' feat may be impossible today, given the siltation on many streams in Iowa, alternating with years of flooding. But the Lowns found just about the entire stretches of the Cedar and Iowa on which they traveled to be navigable. The one exception was a dam on the Cedar in downtown Cedar Rapids. They paid a man to haul their ship around the dam on a horse-drawn dray wagon through the streets of downtown Cedar Rapids - for the princely sum of $3.50.
The Lown brothers' descendants - Phillip's son, Dick Lown, and grandson Greg, proprietor of The Great Frame Up shop near Crossroads Center, have carefully preserved photos and written and recorded audio recollections of the brothers' exploits - including Skip's 1969 memories of the journey.
Allen Lown, whose nickname "Skip" was short for "Skipper," was fascinated with boats his entire life, Dick Lown said.
"He was a bachelor and that was his hobby from the time he could pick up a saw," Dick said. "He never had any other thoughts of doing anything but building boats." In fact, his riverside cottage in the Sherwood Park area of Waterloo was designed to look like the front of a steamboat.
"Phillip and I started down the old Cedar June 23, 1909," Skip recalled in the 1969 recording. "We went to Burlington by river." They had intended to sail back up the Mississippi to Dubuque, but fighting the upstream current would have been too difficult. They shipped the craft back to Waterloo by the old Burlington, Cedar Rapids & Northern Railroad.
The "Watowa" was a square-ended craft, 6 feet wide by 16 feet long, and 2 1/2 feet deep. It had a cabin on the forward end and an awning over the stern, a 6-horsepower motor and a gasoline-fueled, gravity-stove for cooking.
The "Watowa" was one of some 45 boats Skip built between 1898 and 1960 - some for himself, some built to order for prominent local individuals like The Rath Packing Co. executive George Rath in 1927. Skip was a lifetime Rath employee. Often, he would use parts and lumber from his earlier boats for their successors.
In 1953, at age 70, Skip built the "Watowa IV" - a 28- by 8-foot cabin cruiser made of pine, mahogany and oak - for his longest trip. He sailed from Dubuque down the Mississippi to New Orleans; along the Gulf of Mexico around Florida; up the East Coast to the Hudson River in New York; across Lake Erie to Toledo, Ohio; shipped over land to St. Joseph, Mich.; and across Lake Michigan to Chicago; the Illinois River to the Mississippi; and up the Mississippi to Dubuque.
"Over 5,000 miles of good cruising water using 10 months for the trip," Skip said in his 1969 recording.
Skip died in 1976 just short of his 93rd birthday. One of his final conversations with his son, Dick, was about how he was going to rework the propeller shaft of one of his later ships, the Watowa V, so it could navigate the shallowest of waters - perhaps taking into consideration the modern siltation of many local rivers.