Ol' Man River: Memoirs of a Riverboat Captain

The MIGHTY Mississippi, the soul and symbol of Minnesota, has no greater champion than Bill Bowell. Decades before anyone else, he envisioned a thriving St. Paul riverfront and turned his dream of the Padelford Packet Boat Company into reality.

Bill was twenty when he volunteered for the army following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Trained as a paratrooper, he jumped into Normandy on D-Day and fought in the Battle of the Bulgeâ€"two of the war’s most decisive campaigns. Following World War II, he came home to St. Paul to get a college education, raise a family, make a small fortune in printing and plastics, and build the enormously successful Padelford Packet Boat Company. His life’s story is a model for how he and others of “the greatest generation” shaped this country.