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Page 92 The Broom at the Masthead by Gordon Bugbee Reprinted from May 29, 1982 Racing spirit is gathering in Detroit. The city's own Grand Prix auto race is just a week away. This seems a fine time for a friendly river race between Detroit's two big day steamers, the Bob-Lo excursion boats COLUMBIA and STE. CLAIRE. After all, for some years now, Kentucky Derby weekend at Louisville has featured just such a race between the Mississippi sternwheelers DELTA QUEEN and BELLE OF LOUISVILLE. And steamer racing is an old tradition in Detroit. ^ The two ^ Bob-Lo boats are the last propeller excursion steamers of their type in existence. Like the contending paddlers at Louisville, both Bob-Lo boats are registered in the National Register of Historic Places. They are also the last big excursion ships still serving an amusement park anywhere in North America, once a common turn-of-the-century phenomenon. Seventy years ago, Detroiters alone had several choices of such trips: upriver to Tashmoo Park, downriver to Sugar Island and to Bob-Lo, and across Lake Erie to Cedar Point. The park at Bob-Lo opened in 1898, created by the Detroit, Belle Isle and Windsor Ferry Co. The Company was seeing the Sunday School picnic traffic of its Belle Isle ferries drawn off by the rival White Star Line's new Tashmoo Park in the St. Clair Flats. Wooden ferries, first PLEASURE and then PROMISE, served the Bob-Lo run until COLUMBIA was built in 1902. STE. CLAIRE was added as her consort in 1910. A similar, smaller BRITANNIA of 1906 ran to Belle Isle, but she later became a tug. It's not generally known, or easily supposed, that easygoing COLUMBIA once tangled with the fastest of lake steamers. Steamer racing was popular when there weren't many other diversions to satisfy a longing for speed. It took money to keep a horse "so fast that folks must stop and stare", in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes. But everybody could enjoy a steamboat race. A local reporter said in 1879, "Every boat making any pretensions to speed has its firm supporters who know that theirs is the fastest craft on the lakes, without exception." The most famous steamboat race of all took place in 1870 on a 1,030 mile course between New Orleans and Cairo, Illinois, when ROBERT E. LEE beat NATCHEZ, averaging about 14 mph. Mark Twain wrote, "Racing was royal fun. The public always had an idea that racing was dangerous; whereas the opposite was the case, that is, after the laws were passed which restricted each boat to just so many pounds of steam to the square inch. No engineer was ever sleepy or careless when his heart was in the race".