(top row, left to right) After going their separate
ways, Oliver and Harrington were reunited at their
20 year high school class reunion. They were soon
married and had a daughter, Kathryn; Harrington
enjoys a tobacco pipe during his off time on the
Mississippi River; Capt. Harrington sits in the Viking
Queen Wheelhouse, the central command for his
boat, capable of carrying 46 loads simultaneously.
(bottom row, left to right) Gail Oliver and Herman
Harrington met at age 14 in Marshall County and
quickly became high school sweethearts; The Viking
Queen sails down the Mississippi River, loads in tow.
It will make six round trips per year from St. Louis,
Mo. to the Gulf of Mexico.
And, the closer you get to Chattanooga, the water starts to become
so clear that you can see the bottom. I still remember my very first
trip up it as a young pilot. My God.”
Despite its beauty, Harrington warns that safety is required as
there are fisherman and small boats everywhere. “You have to be
careful. People will be out with fishing boats or pleasure boats, and
you see more and more all the time - sand bars full of people. Kayaks
look like driftwood on our radar – you just never stop watching.”
On one fateful night in April 1982, Harrington and his crew were
driving a relatively small barge, only 15 loads and 2,400 horsepower,
near Perryville, Tenn., when a Jon boat shot off from the shore.
Two young kids were trying to ride the rolling waves behind the
barge. “It scares the living hell out of you. They hit that first roller,
tipped the head and the boat sank immediately,” said Harrington.
“I stopped the engines and hit the general alarm.”
There were two young brothers in the boat, but Harrington could
only see one. The other kept diving underneath the boat. “He was
like a duck. He’d dive down, come back up, dive down, come back
up. When we fished them out of the water and put blankets on them,
they told me about the Wide Wide World of Sports,” Harrington
laughed. “They’d been watching the show. Surfing came on, and they
decided to get their dad’s boat to try it out. Well, their father was
a mussel shell fisherman and had a $600 compressor in the boat.
The young man was trying to save that compressor, but it was long
gone at the bottom of the river.”
“It’s easy to laugh about it now. But I was as scared as they were at
the time. I was a first year pilot and saw somebody sink a Jon boat
behind me. It could have been much worse.”
As his knowledge and experience about life on the river expanded,
Capt. Harrington climbed up the ranks. He moved from the Tennessee River to the Ohio with ambition to end up on the lower Mississippi. “To run the lower Mississippi means job security. There’s
just a lot more responsibility down there. You carry more barges,
heavier tows and the river is tougher,” said Harrington, who carries
up to 46 barge loads in a single trip.
Harrington finally got to the lower Mississippi in 1988. With his
crew, he’s navigated the corridor, staying in constant contact by
radio with other boats. Because the river is so narrow at times, it
becomes only one-way traffic which can be especially difficult when
a barge is carrying 46 loads behind it.
As his career was on the upswing, Capt. Harrington was reunited
with his high school sweetheart at the 20-year class reunion. Both
he and Gail Oliver, by then Gail Oliver, MD, U of L class of 1984,
were separated from their first spouses and based not too far from
their old stomping grounds of Marshall County. “Once we found
each other again, we knew we had something special. And now
we’ve been together for 24 years,” Harrington said.
“We married a year after we st