COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:

The Pride of Newport. Know what that is? Probably not. How about the Reuben E. Lee? Of course you do. It’s the big paddlewheel riverboat at East Coast Highway and Bayside Drive. Been there forever, wonderfully out of place, which is what makes it special.

Over the years, it has played host to more big nights out, birthday dinners, bachelor parties, weddings, anniversaries and miscellaneous special occasions than anyone could ever remember. In the ‘70s it became a red-hot nightspot for everything from Dixieland to the Carpenters to Skiles and Henderson — two very funny guys who made very funny sounds.

Through it all, it has been a local icon, a landmark and the ruler of all it surveys, everything between Dover and Bayside anyway.

Can’t you just see it — plying the waters of the Mississippi, working its way from St. Louis to the Big Easy, loaded to the rails with gamblers, fancy women and cargo of every description? If you can, you have a vivid imagination.

In real life, Reuben E. Lee never got closer to the Mississippi or any other river than where it stands today. In fact, don’t tell anyone this, but it isn’t really a boat. It’s a floating restaurant, built on a barge in 1963.

Designer Bill Bluroch and restaurateur John McIntosh wanted as realistic a Mississippi stern-wheeler as possible, and they got pretty darn close. The materials and construction are authentic, but the thing would last about six minutes on the Mississippi. It would also drift around like the Kon Tiki since it doesn’t have an engine and the paddlewheel is also not real, but that’s a separate issue. By the way, it has a twin sister in San Diego, which closed as a restaurant in 2003.

Reuben E. Lee is in the autumn of its years, more like the Dec. 20 of its years, because the folks who have called it home for the last 10 years, the Newport Harbor Nautical Museum, are weighing anchor and moving to the new and improved Balboa Fun Zone.

Restaurateur McIntosh donated the boat to the museum in 1995 for the very reasonable sum of $1, and the group is now searching the seven seas for a buyer. Early returns do not look good. If you line up all the people who might be interested in a 40-year old faux riverboat that can’t stay where it is and would be very hard to move, the line is not long. Life can be a cruel when you’re water logged, worn and long in the tooth.

First Argus, now Reuben E. Lee.

But it all got me thinking, which isn’t easy. What were the real riverboats like? The golden age of stern-wheeler steamships was the 19th century. To Mark Twain — real name Samuel Langhorne Clemens — and his real and imaginary friends, rivers were what interstate highways are to us.

On the Ohio, the Missouri and the Mississippi, you could traverse most of the country. By the 1830s you could boogie from St. Louis to New Orleans in less than two weeks, and the boats just kept getting faster and faster. Riverboats carried every sort of cargo you can imagine, and some you can’t. Lots of passengers and, yes, a few gamblers, low-lifes and girls you wouldn’t take home to your mother, but not nearly as many as writers and filmmakers over the years would have you believe.

From the Missouri Republican, a St. Louis newspaper, in 1835: “Every steamboat that arrives at our wharves is crowded with passengers. Some of the Louisville boats bringing three hundred at a time. Many of these remain with us.”

OK, reporters were dull in 1835, but riverboat races were a major-league big deal, the NASCAR races of the time. On June 30, 1870, two stern-wheelers, Natchez and Robert E. Lee (sound familiar?), set out on a 1,200-mile dash from New Orleans to St. Louis, with 10,000 people on the docks whooping and hollering and waving their arms when the starting gun went off. Five days later, on July 4, the Bobby Lee steamed into St. Louis with even more people on the docks whooping and hollering and waving their arms.

There wasn’t a lot to do in those days. No cable.

Some aspects of riverboats were not quite as romantic — like the fact that they had an annoying tendency to be floating bombs. When a boiler the size of a house blows up, which they did, a lot, it tends to take everything and everyone within a quarter of a mile with it.

The most deadly maritime accident in American history? If you said the Titanic, and the 1,523 souls who perished with it, you were close. The most deadly was the unplanned launch of the steamboat Sultana on April 27, 1865, at the close of the Civil War. In one of the hardest hard-luck stories ever told, 2,400 passengers were crammed onto the Sultana that day — most of them Union prisoners of war who were being sent home from hellholes like Andersonville prison. Just after leaving Natchez, Sultana exploded in a horrific blast that killed about 1,700 of the 2,400 on board.

Hopefully, Reuben E. Lee will meet with a kinder, quieter end. But if you’re a fan, you better get down there and smile and snap a few pix because like they say at the IRS, you just don’t know what you got till it’s gone.

There you have it, everything you always wanted to know about riverboats and probably a whole lot more.

Wait, that’s not true. In the 1950s series “Yancy Derringer,” Jock Mahoney played Yancy. Who played his Indian sidekick? X Brands. Seriously. Who played the captain in “Riverboat?” Darren McGavin. Who played Ben Frazer? Burt Reynolds.

That’s enough. Ahoy, matey.

I gotta go.