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A QUEEN SEP +* OCT, 1982 Page 115 IN LIMBO CHRISTINE ROHN HILSTON The one-time Queen is in limbo. She sits idle, silently waiting, waiting for a job to come her way, waiting for a reprieve from a demise at the scrapper's torch. Various possibilities have been suggested to prolong her pro- fitability and usefulness, but none has come to pass. Her owners do not wish to abandon her yet, but neither can they provide her with work. It wasn't always so. . . The grand old lady steamed proudly down the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland on the. morning of December 15, 1980. Amidst a', soft snowfall, a stream of white steam and © oil smoke drifted upward from her stack; puffs of black smoke issued from her bow thruster exhaust periodically. Her deep- throated triple chime whistle echoed through the Cleveland Flats as she blew to open the Cuyahoga River bridges. The Great Lakes Towing Company's tug Utah was on her bow; on deck, a deckhand was dogging her eighteen hatch covers. All signs pointed to a typical late-autumn passage of the steamer William P. Snyder, Jr. However, the Snyder Jr., one-time '"'Queen of the Lakes", was on a journey she would never again repeat. When, in early afternoon, she tied up on the west side of the lower Cuyahoga River at Brilliant Sign Company, the steamer William P. Snyder Jr. ceased to be an ore carrier. The 68-year old working woman was retired. To a casual observer on December 15, her clean Cleveland Cliffs paint scheme, hatch crane and one-piece hatch covers would have hidden her gray hair and arthritic joints. But a closer look at her riveted hull plating, many layers of paint, her fantail stern, her relatively small forward cabins, and her narrow smokestack advertised the Snyder Jr. as the product of an earlier era. Two days later, on December 17, the William P. Snyder, Jr. left Cleveland under her own power for Ashtabula, Ohio, where she berthed