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by Kenneth McCutchan Old-timers had many tales to tell about the colorful, bizarre characters that inhabited the Evansville riverfront during the bustling heydays of steamboating. In many ways, the riverfront was a rough and rowdy place.
Hunky Dory was a fat, old woman who sat on the wharf boat, winter and summer, with a basket of apples on her lap. In cold weather she had a charcoal brazier to warm her hands. When asked if her apples were good, she replied, "They bin all hunky dory."
Schoene Wilhelm supposedly had once been a Prussian soldier in Germany. On days when the weather was good, he would march up and down Water Street.
He had a dark mustache, heavily waxed and extended. His threadbare clothes were always clean, but his trousers never quite reached his shoe tops. He wore a battered plug hat and carried a cane. If someone greeted him with, "Hello, Schoene," He would snap to rigid attention, throw his cane over his shoulder and salute. Folks always said that Wilhelm was a little "teched" in the head.
Andre Roquett, son of a French immigrant cobbler, was a chimney sweep. He wore a tall pointed cap and always had a soot-smudged face. As he pushed a little cart around that carried the tools of his trade, he would cry out "Chimney sweep" in French. Everybody knew him, and he had as much work as he cared to do because in those days almost every house was heated with coal-burning grates. But there were many days when he seemed more inclined to hang around the wharf than work at his trade.
If he could collect an audience and a few coins, he would dance a little jig and sing dirty French songs for the amusement of the crowd.
One of the really disreputable characters was a woman known as Mina Craghead, who plied her trade in a place called Barefoot Alley behind the old St. Cloud Hotel on Water Street. She was always in trouble with the police, not only for prostitution, but also for drunkenness, robbery and assault and battery.
Then there was Onions. Onions was a bouncer and general utility man at Adam Marsch's saloon. He got his nickname from the fact that he seemed to subsist mainly on a diet of onions and whiskey. But he was honest as the day is long, and Marsch trusted him even with the cash drawer.
The saloon was never locked, and in the winter, Onions would let the old tramps and river rats come in at night to sleep on the floor around the stove.
One of Onion's friends was Puss Urbs. Police arrested her so many times they finally gave up and left her alone. Beneath her frowzy, drunken façade there shone a bit of sweetness that suggested that she had once known better times.
One day Onions disappeared, and nobody knew what had happened to him. One wag quipped, "Oh, he probably took a drink of water by mistake, and it killed him."
