Reviewed in Ohio History
Volume 113, Winter-Spring 2004
In this honest and clearly written memoir, Dorethy Weil tells the story of how her family struggled to survive the Great Depression while living and working on and along the Ohio and Missouri rivers and how the river experience shaped her life. In the process, she reflects on how family conflicts brought confusion and how familial love trumped the troubled relationships. Much of the family conflict she attributed to a clash of cultures between her father, who hailed from the Kentucky hills, and her mother, a well-bred Cincinnati girl. Along the way, she relates specific incidents in her life to very large historical themes.
An established novelist, documentary script-writer, and director, the author reconstructs dialogue between her family members based upon recollections and reminiscences which plausibly capture the essence of the family conflicts. Throughout she relies upon oral histories from veterans of life on the river, her mother’s scrapbooks, recollections of close and distant family members, and notes taken when conversations “were still ringing clearly in my ear” (p. xi). The result is a highly readable and masterly detailed book that should satisfy the historian as well as the general reader.
The hard times of the depression era are revealed through vignettes of childhood traumas and family crises, as well as the strategies used to cope with these events. Evictions from apartments, losses of jobs, the loss of pets, repossessed cars, and temporary friends were all part of “our nomadic life” (p. 42). When her father failed at various sales jobs “he turned once again to the river” (p. 29)—from Omaha (where Weil was born) to Cincinnati. The Coomer family’s limited diet, shabby clothing, and family quarrel all reflect well the working class struggles during the hardscrabble depression years. Dorothy’s struggles in school, her mother’s softening the hard edges that her children had to deal with, and the frustration emitted by her father in various ways are all woven together in the narrative.
Social historians will find Weil’s gradual awakening to the problems of racism and class in the era during and after World War II to be rewarding reading, especially the way she dealt with these issues in grade school in Cincinnati’s East End, living at the Cincinnati Yacht Club, at Withrow High School, and at the University of Chicago, which she attended on scholarship. The desolate existence in the new suburban tracts of the 1950s for a newly married, intelligent, and talented woman is depicted in a painfully honest and courageous way.
After the death of her father Weil, like her father so often did, returned to the river in the 1980’s. She wrote and co-produced “TV IMAGE,” a series of award-winning television documentaries about life on the Ohio River. She also used Cincinnati, a river city, as the source of and backdrop for more of her creative activities as an artist and writer. Her documentary Beautiful River: Rediscovering the Ohio was part of the 1992 multimedia Always the River project.
—James E. Cebula, University of Cincinnati
Ohio History
Volume 113
Winter/Spring 2004
