Rock Island Lines Podcast

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. A local newspaper columnist, noticing the public's general indifference to the less fortunate, frequently asks, "Is anybody there; does anybody care?"

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Nearly all of us spend our lives working. Many of us are hired to fill jobs, some are offered positions; a very few are called.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. As romantic and as mythic as the Mississippi River is, the names of towns sprinkled along its banks are fairly prosaic.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Fortunately for Rock Island, there are some men who cannot bring themselves to tell each other they are sorry, in so many words. They have to do it roundabout.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Like most other idealistic young men and women, new ministers go out to their calls with visions of being good shepherds to their flocks. That was certainly true of the Reverend Michael Hummer who came to organize and pastor a Presbyterian church in Iowa City, Iowa, in 1840.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. There it is, on the first page of the scrapbook. It may be a Congregational church in Geneseo, or a Baptist church in Burlington, or the Presbyterians in Maquoketa, the small clapboard white rectangle of a building is almost identical.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. During the Golden Age of steam boating on the Upper Mississippi River, no job was more critical than that performed by the rapids pilots who were brought on board to take boats safely up or down the treacherous fourteen miles of Rock Island Rapids between LeClaire and Davenport, Iowa. The skill and knowledge of these forty to fifty men has become legendary.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Have you ever noticed how we always measure the speed of an animal against a horse? A horse can outrun a human, but a cheetah can outrun a horse, and so on. In 1836, a steamboat making a run from Rock Island upriver to Galena found out where it belonged on this scale.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Those baseball players who momentarily confused Iowa with Heaven in the movie, A Field of Dreams, were not the first to do so. A hundred years earlier, the same thought helped George W. Van Horn of Muscatine rest easy on his death bed.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Do you suppose there is something in the American air that turns our visionaries bi-focal? While English gurus sell all that they have, dress their followers in white, and climb a hill to await the second coming, our Utopianists have always kept one hand on the plow, turning a dollar or two between prayers. The Shakers danced themselves into a celibate religious frenzy, but they weren't above inventing the idea of mail order and selling seed in packages.