First I have to give you some background on my family. My
dad was a family doctor in a small Illinois town. Our house was on
the Illinois River, and my dad, an avid sailor, had a gaff-rigged 37
foot ketch. Dad had bought it from one of his patients,
who had built it. This sailboat was called
the Shiloh because it had been “a hell of a battle to build.”
The Illinois River was not an ideal place to sail such a vessel,
and we got stuck in the mud nearly every time we tried. Dad would then get out
of the boat to haul it out of the mud, looking very much like Humphrey Bogart
in “The African Queen.”
My father was always coming up with ideas for adventures
that we five Johnson kids noticed didn’t seem to occur to other kids’ dads .
But the greatest adventure he ever dreamed up involved attacking a
Viking ship on the high seas of the Illinois River off the coast of
Chillicothe, Illinois.
It was August, 1966, and a department store in St. Louis
wanted to promote the fact it was going to start selling Scandinavian
products. As a publicity stunt, they
found a half-sized replica of a real Viking boat, and hired a crew of men from
Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. The newspapers told how they were going to
sail down from Chicago to St. Louis on the Illinois River. This was so long
ago that the press release for this event was not xeroxed. Not e-mailed. Not scanned. Not posted online.
As an introduction, I am now scanning and
posting said press release online. Right here, right now:
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