Reviewed in Cincinnatti Fiftyplus!

Dorothy Weil has written a treat of a book, a memoir called The River Home. It resonates poignantly for those whose childhood took place during the Great Depression and has additional relevance for anyone whose life has been spent in or around Cincinnati.

“This has been quite a year for me,” Weil said. “The book came out in the spring and an exhibition of my paintings and collages will be on view this summer. In a way, the writing project led into the art. The paintings can be seen as an extension of the book.”

Weil is a small, vibrant woman who prefers outsized eyeglasses and appears fully engaged in whatever is going on. “Painting Women,” is on view in the gallery at the YWCA, Walnut and 9th streets downtown through August.

Talented in several spheres, this writer/artist’s work as a documentary film producer was the subject of a September 1997 Fiftyplus! profile about her and her partner in video production, Jane Goetzman. Of the seven documentaries released by their company, TV Image Inc., more than half are directly focused on the Ohio River. “Inevitable, if you’re working with Dottie,” Goetzman told us then.

Weil’s earliest memories are of life on a riverboat, particularly a frigid winter when solid ice imprisoned the Valley Queen and “our whole world was white and happy.” Happiness, as is the case for everybody outside of fairy tales, did not always last, and the book chronicles the human tensions within a family headed by parents of vastly different backgrounds. The father came from a Kentucky hill town, “intelligent, unread, angry, half hillbilly, half man of the world,” and the mother was Cincinnati Dutch, prudent from growing up within a stolid family, but clearly imbued with a streak of adventure although she “was never prepared for living with a wild river man from the hills,” her daughter tells us.

This is a story that had to wait to be written, not only because the people who might have been hurt to read it are no longer here, but also because most of a lifetime can be put into trying to understand that lifetime’s beginning. When Weil’s father died in 1980, she realized a need to tell the stories of her parents because “the surfaces and textures of their worlds had become inner landscapes” for her brother and herself.

The first expression of her research and discoveries came in the television documentaries she and Jane began in the 1980s: “River Calling: Flatboat to Towboat” and “Fire on the Water: Ohio River Steamboats.” Eventually the book, The River Home, began to take shape.

In clean, clear prose that moves as surely as the river that is its recurrent theme, she recounts a turbulent and shifting childhood. Her eye for detail is precise and telling; she lets us see the places and people she writes about. Among other things we learn about river life.

All of us who live near a river sometimes envy those who live on it, and even though the actuality may be cramped and sometimes uncomfortable, we want to know what it’s like. For the Coomer family—Dottie, her parents, and her brother Jim—the Valley Queen provided “a tiny stateroom on the texas deck, with leaky skylights and only a small pot-bellied stove, glowing red, for heat. Daddy brought wood from the shore and kept the fire going throughout the day,” Weil writes. In summer they had to move to a small apartment in a dingy residential hotel, for the Valley Queen, with Daddy as captain, was an excursion ship featuring evening trips with dancing and gambling.

Daddy had been a river man since his teens and served on the Island Queen, the Delta Queen, and also followed that numbing quest of many men during the Depression, hunting for a job. Dottie was born the day the stock market hit bottom, Oct. 29, 1929. Her brother Jim—her best friend, closest companion and most frequent foe—was only 19 months older. The friction between their parents would make the two of them a solid unit against the world.

The story doesn’t move in straightforward chronology but makes transitions as naturally as a succession of thoughts, one thing leading to another. We learn of Dottie going to the University of Chicago and to the Art Academy, of meeting Sid Weil who would become her husband, of their children, of Dottie’s return to school for a doctorate in English, and we also learn much about the divergent backgrounds of her parents. All this goes on in and around a Cincinnati now mostly in our memories.

Pogue’s is still on its corner, Willis Music Co. has a downtown store, and people still go to Chicago on the James Whitcomb Riley.

Whenever Dottie Weil publishes a book—this is her fourth—it is wholly different from those before. The first was her dissertation, a study of the 19th-century woman writer Susanna Rowson, followed by a comic novel, “Continuing Education,” about going back to school in mid-life. This was followed with a book of poetry, “Nightside.” Next, perhaps, she will return to a dark novel, written but not sold, and see what she can do with that. Or perhaps she’ll write a “very fluffy” comic novel. She hasn’t yet decided.

Weil is also uncertain when, in her research on her family and the river, it became apparent that the story she needed to write was her own. The book has been an evolving project, worked on, put aside, and then returned to. In the same period that she’s been working on the book, she has also gone back to painting after 30 years. “I used to think when I was baking a cake, I should be painting, and when painting that I should be baking a cake,” she said by way of explanation.

Perhaps, as we get older, there is less need to bake cakes and more reason to write and paint.

Cincinnatti Fiftyplus!