Pete Story

In the late 1960's Pete was a young river pilot working for my dad. Pete grew up in the Memphis area and told good stories. I knew that Pete had family in the area so we looked up his name in the local phone book on the chance that he might have settled in the area. Sure enough there was a listing for Pete and Barbara Story. I called the number still not sure that this could be the same Pete Story I knew when I was 13 years old. a man answered and I explained who I was and the purpose of my call. Well I hit the jackpot. Pete invited us over for a visit so we drove to his place. Pete and Barbara have a 37 acre place in the rural area about 10 miles north of Metropolis. It sits high on a bluff which was once the river bank of the Ohio River. Very pretty place.

Pete's father was a commercial fisherman. The family lived on a houseboat. When Pete's father grew tired of a place he just moved the houseboat to a new location. By the time I met Pete the houseboat was tied up to the Atchafalya River bank in Butte Larose, Louisiana. Pete's family were the model used by an author for her 1957 book Houseboat Girl. The following excerpt is from a website about the author, Lois Lenski.

Lenski's interest in writing about a family living in a houseboat on the Mississippi River may have stemmed from her research in Arkansas for Cotton in My Sack. When writing her regional novels, Lenski usually focused on the experiences of one family, and often used real people as the models for her characters. For help in finding a family to write about, Lenski contacted Harlan Hubbard, the author of the the 1953 novel Shantyboat. While researching his own book, Hubbard met Henry and Lou Story and their children, and thought they would be an ideal family for Lenski's purposes.
During the summer of 1954 Lenski spent six weeks with the Story family. The Storys had four children: Peggy, Irene, Pete, and Debbie. In Houseboat Girl, the Story family was transformed into the Foster family, and Irene was the inspiration for the novel's main character Patsy Foster. In her Foreward to Houseboat Girl, Lenski writes that she "was able to see them [the Story family] almost daily on their houseboat." Lenski goes on to say that she "ate meals with the family, went out on the river with the children in their johnboats, took notes and made many sketches, helped to sell fish to the cotton pickers, and learned by firsthand experience all the intricacies of trotline and hoop-net fishing." http://www.library.ilstu.edu/page/666

We had a great visit with Pete and Barbara and hope to see them again.