The lunchtime crowd at Jim's
Steak House digs in, munching
huge roast beef sandwiches and
sipping iced teas or foamy home-
brewed drafts

They gaze out the three-wall
picture windows at a hairpin of
the Cuyahoga, famed flammable
river of story and song.

Looking across at the imposing
gray ramparts of the Terminal
Tower and Higbee's Department
Store, it's hard to imagine the
bygone day when Cleveland
had no skyscrapers.

Back then, contented cattle
(ancestors to those served
up here as sizzling steaks and
burgers) grazed along there
very river banks.

That's when my grandfather,
an unlucky tugboat captain with
a parted towline, lost control of
a lake freighter they were taking
up the river to Republic Steel.

The freighter got loose and
ran aground at Collision Bend,
right across from where Jim's sits
now, killing a cow that was too
stupid to get out of the way.

It's the only case on record
of accidental bovicide by so
massive and unwieldy an object.

And poor Grandfather was
known forever after as
the man who killed a cow
with a steamboat.