Leroy Antoine Gibbs

Leroy Antoine Gibbs died in New Albany on August 29, 2026. He was seventy-two. Born there on February 3, 1954, he grew up knowing the Ohio as work and Louisville as a rumor you could see across the water. He learned a barge line before he learned a classroom. A line, he said, is a kind of promise: it has to hold or the whole story is wet. He shipped as a young deckhand when the river still felt like a second country: long tows, short nights, and a paycheck that arrived smelling of diesel. Later he stayed ashore and spent decades in a warehouse that fed the bridges, checking pallets, teaching younger men that a forklift is not a toy, and that ice on a ramp is not a story you tell afterward if you have been careful. He did not romanticize the work. He said the river was beautiful from a hill and dangerous from a deck, and that both facts could be true before breakfast. He married Denise Gibbs in 1977. They kept a house up from the floodwall and a garden they almost never finished weeding. Two daughters grew up knowing how to bait a hook and how to be quiet in a boat. Denise taught school. Leroy packed her lunches with the same seriousness he packed a toolbox. After he retired he walked the riverfront in every month except the ones when the wind made walking a kind of argument. Friends remember a dry laugh, a refusal to own more than one good coat, and a habit of showing up to help move a freezer as if that were the natural use of a Saturday. He could name the tows of his youth and would stop himself before the list became a lecture. He died in New Albany, the Indiana bank he had always claimed. The bridges still carry the work. He would have liked that the river outlasted the man.