Louisville Magazine

APR 2017

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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24 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 4.17 THE BIT Photo by Bill Luster THE PORTRAIT One morning in 1978, 12-year-old Travis Vasconcelos said goodbye to his mother and hopped on his bike just as he always did before school. Only this time, he turned toward the river. The kid loved steamboats almost as much as he'd hated piano lessons — he was slow with sheet music but quick with his ears. First National Bank had chartered the P.A. Denny paddlewheel boat for Derby Week, and when Vasconcelos got to the landing, he walked right up to captain Don Sanders and asked if he could play the calliope, a kind of pipe organ common on steamboats. "Can you?" the captain replied. Vasconcelos could, and when he did, the woman who had chartered the boat came upstairs. "I thought you didn't have a calliope player," she told the captain. "I don't. This kid just showed up," he said. "Well, hire him." Vasconcelos, now 52, tells me this story in his apartment in the Highlands. His "River Room" is like a steamboat museum — photos, blueprints and paintings of steamboats cover the walls, and artifacts lie all about: heavy metal whistles from calliopes, old signs from steamboats, a door salvaged from a ship. The closet holds the thousands of tapes Vasconcelos has made of calliope tunes since he was a boy, melodies he learned and has played on the Belle of Louisville, including during the Great Steamboat Race, for nearly 40 years. "The beginning of my career is literally right above my head," he says, looking up at the P.A. Denny calliope keyboard he played at age 12, a gift from a friend who bought it in 2014. It hangs on an ornate golden frame like a great beast's head. Back in 1978, Vasconcelos convinced his mother to take him out of school for Derby Week so he could play that keyboard. He got $200, the first paycheck of a career playing calliopes on steamboats and, now, working at the Howard Steamboat Museum in Jeffersonville, Indiana, a fitting job for a man who peppers his speech with the names of steamboats, historical dates and tangents into the development of the calliope — the stuff he's devoted his life to. "My room basically looked like this as a kid," he says. — Dylon Jones Travis Vasconcelos, calliope player

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