Midtown Marina & River Supply sits on the west edge of Davenport’s river district, a few blocks from the levee, and Jim Hayes has been fixing outboard motors there since Ronald Reagan was in his first term.
You’ll find him most mornings behind the service counter, coffee in a dented thermos, reading glasses perched somewhere they’re not supposed to be — usually on top of his head. The shop smells like two-stroke oil and rubber gasket compound, and the shelves run floor to ceiling with parts bins, most of them labeled in Jim’s handwriting. He knows where everything is. He’s had to, because the inventory system lives mostly in his head.
Jim grew up two miles from here, fishing the sloughs off Credit Island before the floods of ’93 rearranged the landscape. He bought the shop in his early thirties from a man named Doerr who wanted to move to Arizona. Jim has not moved to Arizona. He has, however, rebuilt roughly four thousand engines in that time, by his own rough estimate. His son Tyler came on about twelve years ago and handles most of the fiberglass work now; Jim still won’t let anybody else touch a carburetor.
What makes Midtown worth visiting — even if you don’t own a boat — is that it functions as an unofficial clearinghouse for river knowledge on the Iowa side of the Mississippi. Walk in with a question about current conditions between Locks 14 and 15, and Jim will tell you what he heard from the barge operators last Tuesday. Ask about the best ramp access for a canoe and he’ll draw you a rough map on the back of a receipt. He doesn’t charge for any of this. He figures if he helps you get on the water safely, you’ll bring the boat in when something breaks.
The shop carries a solid selection of river gear: PFDs, anchor line, navigation lights, bilge pumps, trolling motor parts, and a modest rack of fishing tackle stocked toward what actually works on the Mississippi — jigs and slip sinkers, mostly, nothing too fancy. Prices are fair and marked clearly. Jim has no patience for the upsell.
If you come in during the shoulder seasons — late April or early October — you might catch him with actual time to talk. Summer is different. Summer he’s buried, running a two-week backlog on repairs from May through August. He takes walk-ins but will tell you straight how long the wait is. He doesn’t oversell turnaround times, which is why the same customers have been coming back for decades.
Tyler occasionally floats the idea of a website. Jim has not acted on this suggestion with any urgency. The phone number is in the book — the actual phone book, which Jim still considers a functional technology — and word of mouth has served well enough since 1984.
There’s a certain kind of Davenport institution that doesn’t announce itself. Midtown Marina is that. It’s a working shop run by a person who knows exactly what he’s doing, in a city where the river is always a little closer to daily life than newcomers expect. If you spend any time on the water around here, you’ll eventually end up at Jim’s counter. Most people do.
