HELLO, THE BOAT

A prize winner, in more than one sense of the word. The manuscript won the $3,000 award in the 1938 Julis Ellsworth Ford Foundation Contest -- and deserved it. A grand story, against a little tapped and fascinating background of river life on the Ohio. The Doaks left Pittsburgh when the depression of 1819 caught up with them, and set out for frontier life, with a storeboat, from which they sold everything and anything in the line of dry goods and hardware, to settlers between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. There is plenty of action, plenty of humor, good times and mishaps -- and a credible picture of a very real sounding family. I liked it.