THE RIVER HOME

Although not a household name even in her hometown of Cincinnati, author and TV producer Weil (Continuing Education, 1979) offers an autobiography of wide appeal, skillfully mixing the story of her extended family with a vivid picture of an era—America from the ’30s to the ’50s—that seems increasingly exotic.

Weil’s barely literate father emerged from 1920s rural Kentucky as a riverboat worker, ultimately rising to captain of the huge Mark Twain–style boats that still plied the rivers between Pittsburgh and New Orleans. She and her brother led an idyllic life until, when she was five, the Depression wiped out the riverboat business. Suddenly, her father was just another unskilled and unemployed worker, and the next five years passed in brutal poverty. Modern readers will scratch their heads to read of families living month after month on essentially no income. Nowadays they would be homeless, but during the ’30s, they moved between relatives and shabby lodgings where, until forced to move, they paid no rent. Then they paid no rent again. In 1940, they moved back onto a riverboat, this one permanently docked in Cincinnati as a yacht club where her father lived as watchman. From the war onward, both the country and Weil’s family achieved more financial security, though not more happiness. An ill-matched pair, her educated mother resented her father’s lack of income and his eagerness to spend whatever he had. The two engaged in interminable shouting quarrels; at other times, Weil’s mother was disabled by her own depression. In between, they were dutiful parents and not abusive but dismal role models. Weil’s brother ran away to join the navy as soon as he could. And she ran away to college.

An engaging tale of growing up around the great rivers of the Midwest—and perhaps one of the last memoirs by someone brought up during the Depression.