Frederick Way Jr.
American writer
Fredrick Way Jr. (February 17, 1901 – October 3, 1992) was the youngest steamboat captain on the Ohio River and Mississippi River. He was the author of books on the boats that ply the inland waterways. He supervised the flat-bottom, stern paddlewheeler, the Delta Queen, from San Francisco, down the Pacific coast, through the Panama Canal, across the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to Pittsburgh in 1946.
Biography
He was born on February 17, 1901. Little is known of his youth. He apparently gravitated to a life on the river early, as he obtained his pilot’s license in 1923 at the age of 22 and purchased his first steamboat, the Betsy Ann, in 1925, at the age of 24. He married Grace Morrison and they resided in Sewickley, Pennsylvania.
Using the iron-hulled Betsy Ann, Way ran a packet ship between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh for a number of years. Prior to Way’s purchase of the Betsy Ann, she had held the packet ship speed record on the Mississippi River since the 1900s, winning and retaining a set of gold-tipped elk horns.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Frederick Way Jr.” as american writer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american writer. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5499004. VIAF identifies the subject as 2845331. The Library of Congress control number is n82221329. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1901, 1992, 1946 and 1923.
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This entry incorporates text from “Frederick Way Jr.” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.