New Visionaries Gamble Bundle on Riverboat Casinos : Mississippi: New paddle wheelers offer truly floating crap games accompanied by calliope steam whistles.

“Steamboating’s dead,” former pilot Mark Twain decreed in 1882 when he returned to the river after an absence of 21 years--this time as a passenger aboard the Gold Dust. He saw only a handful of other packets chugging down to New Orleans.

But in the words of the cable he sent 15 years later to the Associated Press about reports of his own demise, the celebrated author’s obituary for riverboats was “greatly exaggerated.”

Now, more than a century later, shipyards all over south Louisiana, along the Mississippi Gulf Coast and as far north as Elgin, Ill., are raising ornamented smokestacks, hanging paddle wheels and affixing curlicue railings and gingerbread pilothouses on boats being launched at a frantic pace to accommodate the roll of the dice more than the roll of the river.

In Louisiana alone, 31 riverboats are either under construction or have been delivered in the last year as a result of legalized riverboat gambling along the mighty Mississippi and its tributaries. Gaming experts predict 90 or more will be afloat before the century is out.

“This is the biggest boom in riverboat building since right after the Civil War,” said Larry Hairston, senior vice president of Service Marine, watching a huge crane lift the twin smokestacks onto the purple and gold trimmed Shreveport Rose at the sprawling boatyard along the Atchafalaya River in Morgan City.

“We’re delivering eight boats a week, working two 10-hour shifts six days a week. We got six under way here now. Boats we built or converted are in Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Iowa and Illinois. Indiana will be next.

“I’ve had quite a few inquiries from overseas. The latest was from the People’s Republic of China for a 300-foot stern-wheeler on the Yangtze. Donald Trump has been here a couple of times looking around. The Donald has an application in for a boat at the foot of Canal Street in New Orleans and another in Gary, Ind.”

But gambling is not the sole reason why all of a sudden there is a demand for calliope players, frosted-glass etchers, experts in the hydraulics of paddle wheel buckets and other rare artisans who have been in decline since the J. M. White in 1878 was deemed the epitome of elegance afloat. She dazzled the river trade with monogrammed linen napery, walnut- and rosewood-paneled staterooms boasting double beds instead of bunks, two bridal suites and brass spittoons every six feet along her hurricane deck.

Just a mile or so up the river at McDermott’s yard, known worldwide for its offshore oil platforms, shipwrights are adding deck upon deck to the all-steel hull of the American Queen, the largest overnight passenger vessel to be built in an American yard since the liner United States in 1951.

“Now there’s a boat,” conceded Hairston in almost reverential awe. “She carries a price tag of upwards of $60 million, while ours go for between $12 million and $16 million.”

Inspired by the J. M. White, but almost a third again as long, the 412-foot American Queen is a genuine steamboat. Two steam engines taken from the steam dredge Kennedy, circa 1930, turn her 60-ton paddle wheel.

Her Victorian decor features gilt mirrors, marble-top tables and overstuffed chairs in staterooms opening onto promenade decks and a grand saloon including a theater with private boxes modeled after a 19th-Century opera house in a small river town.

A wide staircase under a stained-glass skylight sweeps down to a dining saloon lit by chandeliers, each in Twain’s words “an April shower of glittering glass drops.” Cap’n Mary’s Parlor, re-creating the “no cussin’ or swearin’ ” ladies lounge of the steamboat Gothic era will have “carpets soft as mush” to meet Twain’s specifications.

“There’ll be some amenities Mark Twain never dreamed of,” said Tom Carman, a naval architect and vice president of the Delta Queen Steamboat Co., which has scheduled the newcomer to join her “pure steamboat” sisters, the Delta Queen and the Mississippi Queen, in plying the Mississippi and Ohio early next year. “Like elevators, a swimming pool, telephones and climate controls in every stateroom, and an exercise room for the physically obsessed.”

Tom Norton, project manager for the American Queen, admits that “ole Horace Bixby, who taught Mark Twain the art of piloting, would be horrified to find a ‘no smoking’ sign in the dining saloon.” He confides that some on the design team are pushing for spittoons in the Boiler Room bar overlooking the paddle wheel, the last hurrah for the traditional men’s bar where ladies now will be invited to light up a cheroot.

Steamboat purists tend to look down on the gambling boats, which are powered by diesel electric engines, as a lesser marine species. But Roland Benoit of Thibodaux, the section boss in Mill Building No. 2 where the American Queen is taking form, is “grateful so many of my Cajun buddies got their jobs back in yards up and down U.S. 90 after being laid off when the oil industry went bust in 1982.”

Managing Editor Ted McManus of the Morgan City Daily Review credits riverboat building with “stabilizing our economy. When the bottom fell out of the oil business, even the shrimp boats were tied up three deep along Front Street. Unemployment was in the 12% to 13% range. Now it’s down below 7%.”

In Louisiana shipyards alone, Hairston figures, “there are now roughly 5,000 people working directly on riverboats. That’s not counting the steel, furnishings and gambling equipment made elsewhere. All that fancy fretwork and gingerbread trim is fabricated in fireproof metals at the mill by computer-controlled cutting heads. We develop our designs from pictures of famous boats like the Eclipse, the Robert E. Lee and the Mary Houston and feed them onto computer tapes.”

“From the Texas border to Mobile,” he added, “this part of the Gulf Coast is the biggest shipbuilding area in the country, accounting for something like 80% of all output. Of course that doesn’t approach the build-up in World War II, when Higgins shipyard in New Orleans employed 28,000 and turned out on an average two PT boats a day.”

Four-striper Johnny Doyle, enthroned on the tall pilot’s chair in the riverboat Star Casino on Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, observes that “it’s hard to find a yard anywhere about that’s not building a riverboat.”

Doyle finds himself in the unusual position of having at his fingertips sonar, radar, bow thrusters and all the latest navigation devices, along with a full crew of mates, engineers, oilers and able-bodied seamen aboard a brand-new boat that hasn’t gone anywhere in the last couple of months.

A few weeks after she was delivered in late October from the Bender shipyard in nearby Braithewaite, the “biggest vessel this lake has ever seen,” as Doyle calls her, suddenly halted her paddle wheel but kept the roulette wheels spinning. Divers had located a large obstruction on the lake bottom that sonar failed to detect.

Anti-gambling forces in Louisiana charged that the Star Casino’s operators were deliberately trying to circumvent state laws requiring her to cruise every three hours. It was pointed out that Twain at the wheel of the City of Memphis more than a century ago was able to navigate around hidden reefs, invisible stumps, creeping sandbars, sunken wrecks, floating islands and “sawyers,” submerged trees that bobbed up, with the technical aid of only a wheel, a whistle, a speaking tube “to cuss out the engineer” and the sounder’s tremolo call of “no-o-o bottom” or “mark twain” (two fathoms) as he heaved a lead weight on a line to gauge the river’s depth.

The obstacle down under turned out to be sunken treasure for the tax collector. In its first month of operation, the casino handed over checks for $1 million to the state and $250,000 each to the city and district levee board in taxes and boarding fees. But even while docked, the Star must periodically hustle the 1,200 gambling patrons out on deck in life jackets to meet Coast Guard abandon-ship regulations.

“On the outside, she’s pure riverboat, on the inside pure Las Vegas,” said chief operating officer Keith Wallace. At night, the boat’s magenta and gold neon lights can be seen for miles along the lakefront.

Capt. Lawrence Keeton, the leathery-faced master of the Mississippi Queen, growls that the garishly lighted gambling boats “have destroyed the charm and quiet of the river at night.

“Below Memphis, you used to cruise past dark stretches of woods and clumps of tall trees along both banks. Now along that peaceful stretch, the sky is stabbed with arc lights like a Hollywood premiere and the banks glow like a little city with those neon lights.”

Keeton further complains that the Mississippi Queen, which has no gaming aboard “except for that never-ending bridge game in the card room,” lost her “landing place at Natchez and had to move to the Louisiana side of the river to make way for the gambling boats. At Vicksburg we were pushed farther up river.”

The riverboat operators sent steamboat traditionalists farther round the bend by dispatching free buses to pick up passengers who otherwise might have browsed through the antebellum mansions.

Along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where the law doesn’t require the dockside gambling facilities even to resemble riverboats, huge boxlike casinos on barges--the largest longer than two football fields--along with a pair of riverboats have elbowed out the shrimp fleet from prime beach locations.

All casino boats must be seaworthy enough to be pushed by tugs to a safe harbor if a hurricane approaches.

“When Hurricane Andrew hit,” recalls advertising manager Cathey Riemann of the President Casino, an authentic riverboat built at the LeeVac yard in Jennings, La., “we had trouble coaxing the patrons away from the slot machines so we could hurry the boat from Biloxi into a backwater of the Intercoastal Canal.”

The romance of building 19th-Century riverboats enthralls shipyard workers accustomed to turning out oil rigs, service craft and double-skinned oil tankers.

“They say it’s the most fun they’ve had in years,” said Service Marine’s Hairston. “On their days off they bring the kids down to the yard for a picnic near the boat. On vacation they drive up to St. Louis and Joliet so they can tell the other tourists they hung the paddle wheel on that there boat.”

In the peak steamboat era just after the Civil War, when 3,000 riverboats annually called at St. Louis, the faster, more maneuverable side-wheelers far outnumbered stern-wheelers. Now the opposite is true.

“Paddle wheels on each side take away space from gaming positions,” Hairston said. “Even those starboard side windows you see on the Shreveport Rose aren’t real. They’re assembled from a fiberglass kit. The owners don’t want patrons distracted from the slot machines or blackjack tables by the scenery.”

That’s authentic Americana. In Twain’s era, passengers often couldn’t see the river for the cotton bales piled as high as the top Texas deck.

Auditions have not been scheduled yet for a virtuoso on the world’s biggest calliope now under construction for the American Queen.

“A good calliope player is harder to find than a good pilot,” Capt. Bill Menke of the Golden Rod told river historian Ben Lucien Burman. “You need the fingers of a blacksmith to handle the steam pressure on that keyboard. And you must never play ‘Home Sweet Home,’ which according to river superstition brings worse luck than having a gray mare and a preacher on board.”

Among the greats at pumping out “real river music,” Menke cited Crazy Frank Dumaine, Nelly Donnigan and band leader Fate Marabel on the Dixie Belle who in 1919 recruited teen-age trumpeter Louis Armstrong to make the run up to St. Paul, Minn.

Like the bagpipe, the calliope is not everyone’s cup of culture. What has been called “an aggravation of eight to 40 steam whistles” can be heard 10 to 12 miles away. Inventor J. C. Stoddard of Worcester, Mass., received the first patent “for an apparatus producing music by steam” on Oct. 9, 1855. Before the year was out Worcester passed an ordinance banning calliope playing within municipal limits.

“When I’ve heard enough,” confessed Capt. Keeton on the Mississippi Queen, “I got a switch up in the pilot house that cuts the infernal thing off. I can always claim it drowns out communication with the pilot on the walkie-talkie.”

Even steamboat purists sometimes have impure thoughts.