Written by: Dominick A. Miserandino Photography by: Margherita Miserandino
What is there to love in Paducah? Well, flood walls, little Orphan Annie, and murals.
Paducah. Just let the name roll over your tongue. You can’t think up names like that. It just sounds like a small quaint town. But what is Paducah known for? That’s just what I was going to find out.
When we docked in Paducah, the floodwall stood about fifty feet above us. The biggest factor of this town to me, is the floodwall. It’s big, it’s in your face, and it makes it quite clear that flooding is not something that this town likes. They even have marked on it the points where the most recent floods have risen to, and the wall goes well above that.
This simply shows the towns resolve to
say, "We’ve seen floods try their best, but now this wall surpasses even that." Either that or the town’s unofficial theme, "Paducah, we’re sick of floods and it shows."
Anyway, when you pass into this walled city, you’re basically on the main street, which goes down about six blocks. All of the buildings have a 1920’s-1950s feel and the entire town has an overall feeling of being well, what else, quaint. Generally that’s my theme for this overall area, but quaint is certainly the world.
Usually when we enter a town, Margherita prefers to explore things in order. In fact, when she was handed a map of the place, she was very excited to play "connect the dots" and follow every destination number by number. It was only after she realized that one of those numbers was the Quilt Museum, that she gave up on that idea, as she had no interest in quilts.
Paducah's Broadway
We walked up and down Broadway (the main street) of Paducah, hopping in and out of antique shops here and there. When we reached the floodwall again, or were actually about two blocks away, we found ourselves right in front of the William Clark Market House Museum
We walked into the museum and one of the first people we saw was one of the employees at the museum.
"I heard that Paducah was famous for being the first at..." I paused for a dramatic effect. "First at something, darn it. I forgot what."
"Oh that’s easy" she said. "We have lots of firsts."
She didn’t realize it, but she fell right into my trap. Now she was ready to open up the deep and vast secrets of Paducah.
"Paducah was the home of Little Orphan Annie." She said
"THE Orphan Annie? Red haired girl from the comics?" I responded
"Well, she didn’t have red hair."
"Oh."
"And she had no rich Daddy Warbucks. It was actually a minister who adopted her. And she died rather young."
This was intriguing, but wouldn’t be the "pick me up" part of my story.
"No, that wasn’t the first I was thinking of." I said nodding by head back and forth while tapping my finger on my forehead.
"Oh... we were the first town in the Civil War to throw out citizens based on race. There were some Jewish residents that were thrown out by a racist general, but we fought to get them back."
Okay, this wasn’t exactly good for the marketing of the town.
"That’s a good story, but I thought there was something artistic or something like that?" I was really just reaching, but I didn’t know that it was practically psychic.
"Oh, we have one of the first flood wall murals. They tell the entire history of the town. Have you seen them? They’re located on the town-side of the flood walls."
Flood wall murals
Ah ha! We found what to see in Paducah, and it was right where we started. We said our goodbyes, ran out of the museum and went towards the Floodwall. There, on the other side of the floodwall was a series of murals telling the story of the city. There was a map, there was a night scene, and there was a civil war scene. And yes, she wasn’t lying, they were quite beautiful. My favorite wall, looked even prettier from the landside as opposed to the riverside.
How can I really go on with our day after that? I mean, how can you top that? So I’ll just say when we got back to the boat, we did do lots of fun things like a cooking demonstration and a show, and I watched the town sail away into the mist as we floated away.
