Mackinac Bridge workers recall the highs and the lows… and tell tall tales
Date Posted: October 26 2007
The following article with comments by Mackinac Bridge workers was published by The Building Tradesman in 1997 for the bridge's 40th anniversary, and is reprinted here as we mark the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Mighty Mac.
On the edge
One day in the fall of 1957, as work on the bridge was wrapping up, 21-year-old iron worker Joe Oldeck went to work the usual way - a tugboat took him and other workers to the base of the bridge. Then came an arduous 550-foot walk up the catwalk.
"The fog was blowing down below, and you really couldn't see much," said Joe. "Then, halfway up the catwalk, we cleared the fog. It was almost as if you could walk on the clouds. It was just beautiful, it was really something."
Forty years later, Joe is recently retired and has gained a new appreciation for what he did in the three months he worked on the bridge.
"I didn't realize the significance or the value of working on the bridge at the time, I guess you get a little perspective with age," he said. "My dad was a pipe fitter, and he told me at the time, 'you don't know how lucky you are. I wish I could work on it.' As I look back on that time, it was exciting and challenging working on the edge. I never worked tied off. There was danger walking that line but it was extremely exciting. Now, as I look at it through the eyes of a person who is 61 years old, I can look back and say...'whew.' "
Oldeck remembers lunch hour 550 feet in the air in the dead of night. One of his co-workers dropped a thermos to the deck below. "It just seemed like it took forever to hear the sound of it hitting," he said. "You have to wait for it to hit, then you had to wait for the sound to come back up to you." Apparently, the thermos only hit iron, and not a hard hat.
Blowin' in the wind
Omar Breyer, now 82, was the first painter to put a coat of paint on the bridge. He said he didn't particularly want the work in October 1955, preferring to take a break from a busy period in his life to fish the Sturgeon River. But the money was good - $4.50 per hour - and after he thought it over he put down his fishing pole and picked up his paint brush for contractor J.I. Hass.
Breyer remembers the first spot he painted with the lead-based red primer - it was approximately 43 feet up on Pier 18. He used countless brushes - all with four-inch by four-inch bristles - before he climbed off the bridge for the last time in 1960. No sprayers or even rollers were used, Omar said. Today, the maintenance schedule for the Big Mac calls for it to be painted almost continuously, from one end to the other and back again.
Breyer was nicknamed "The Dobber," because that's what he painted on his hard hat. He said the paint came to the bridge site in 50-gallon drums, and he and other painters carried it to their work site in five-gallon buckets, one in each hand. "It got a little difficult walking up the cables," he said. "But I was young and pretty strong, and I guess I had a pretty good sense of balance.
"I fell a couple of times, and I got scared a couple of times, but I grew to enjoy the work."
Scared? What happened, we asked Omar.
"Well, on the port side of one of the towers, we missed a section about 400 feet up, so I had to go way up in a block and tackle with a seat suspended from it. I didn't like going up in that seat, and it got worse when the wind started blowing. The wind got ahold of me and blew me out from the tower about 15 feet, then it spun me around and around. Oh, I was afraid.
"My biggest fear was that it would blow me back against the tower against my back, but I was lucky, I went back in feet first, and I was able to hang on. I remember that I smoked an entire three-inch cigar while I was trying to get my line unraveled. I eventually got the job done."
A friend dies
Working on the caissons was the first Mackinac Bridge-related job of iron worker Ellsworth "Elly" Stewart, 74. He started working in the straits in 1954, and says he was the first certified welder to work on the bridge. He struck up a friendship and ate lunch every day with his best friend on the project, James LeSarge.
On Oct. 10, 1954, "I talked to him 15 minutes before he died," Elly said.
He explained that he was part of a welding crew, while LeSarge was in a "fitting gang." Fitting gangs picked up 21-ton sections of caissons off of barges. LeSarge was using a ratchet while aligning a stationary section and a new section, when an inch-and-a-quarter bolt snapped. He fell 40 feet off the platform he was working on, and his head hit several steel braces before he hit the water.
"I went to his funeral, and I realized that I was working on that bridge when three people were killed," Elly said. "I could have gone back to work, but after Jim's death, I lost all interest." He went on to a long career in iron working, but never again on the Mackinac Bridge.
'It was a job'
Some people have fond memories of their work on the Mackinac Bridge. To others, it was just a job. Iron worker Robert Williams, 69, worked on the span from 1954-56. He worked as a riveter, on the caissons, and on assembling wire.
"It was very interesting work, and I am proud to have worked on it," he said. "But I'm not very sentimental about it; it was a job. I don't think about it too often, or go to Mackinac to look at it. About the only time I go near the bridge is to go over it."
Riveting punk impressed
John Guertin, 65, is retired out of Boilermakers Local 169. But in April 1956, he had gained a pretty good welding elbow and went to work on the bridge as an iron worker.
"I was a punk on a riveting gang," he said. "I needed the money, that's why I went to work on the bridge." He recalls that he made good money in those days, working five-nines, and his W-2 makes it official: the U.S Steel, American Bridge Division paid him $1,972.18 in 1956.
Guertin said he has fond memories of working on the bridge, despite the fact that he previously had never worked higher than 30 feet off the ground. On the Big Mac, he grew accustomed to getting rivets where they needed to go while working on a scaffold 250 feet above sea level. Only once does he remember dropping any rivets. "They were brought up in 50 gallon barrels, and one time, there were too many rivets, and about 50 were dumped on the men below. Boy were they mad."
He acknowledges being highly impressed with the Big Mac. "In the beginning, there was just nothing there, three years later there was a bridge," Guertin said. "You look at the bridge today and realize the enormity of the job."
'Top-notch' men
"One thing about the Mackinac Bridge," said Mike Gleason, 68, who worked on the bridge from 1954-55, "there were nothing but top-notch men on the job, If they weren't doing the job, they were gone the next day. I made some life-long friends on that job. And American Bridge really took care of us. They got us all the top-notch equipment that we needed.
Gleason bolted iron on the north and south approaches to the bridge. He remembers taking his young son Shorty out onto a girder near the Mackinaw City shore, and taking a picture of the lad about 20 feet in the air. "I took a little chance, but he hung on," his dad said. "He couldn't have been too scared, he followed in my footsteps."
Boss' perspective
One of seven American Bridge superintendents on the Mackinac Bridge job was John "Reds" Kelly, 78, who started as a rigger in the East Coast shipyards in 1939 and got his Iron Workers book out of Wilmington, Del. in 1947.
Just before he came to the Mackinac, Kelly worked on the Walt Whitman Bridge in Philadelphia.
"American Bridge was a very good company to work for," he said. "They came out with all the safety equipment before any other company, and they came out with it before OSHA even existed. They supplied the men with hard hats, safety belts, and tools that were designed to improve safety."
One of those tools, he said, was a spud wrench that had a tapered point on the back end. The point allowed iron workers to align iron by sticking the end into bolt holes. With the other end of the wrench, of course, they tightened bolts. This was in an era when the term "ergonomics" hadn't been invented.
On the Mac, one of the seven bridges he worked on during his career, Kelly was the erection superintendent of cable and stiffening trusses. He said there was pressure in his possession, which rolled downhill from Art Drilling, American Bridge's senior superintendent. "He caught all the flak from the home office and passed it on to us," Kelly remembered.
He brings a superintendent's perspective to another memory. While he expressed regret at the death of two workers who were killed as they were setting up the catwalk, Kelly said that it was striking how cautious workers became afterward.
"People got to thinking," he said, "and they started pussyfooting around. It was a couple of weeks before they would go flat out again."
Kelly looks back fondly on his days working the Mackinac.
"Every bridge has its share of problems, but I would have to say that the Mackinac was my favorite bridge to work on," said Kelly. "It was a very interesting job, and oh, the characters who worked on that bridge, they were something. Plus it was such beautiful country."
Paving the way
For all the people who worked with danger as a constant companion on the bridge, probably just as many had mundane jobs. One of those jobs was performed by William Tembreull, now 68, of Operating Engineers Local 324. A month before the bridge opened in the fall of 1957, Bob worked as a blacktop paver for the approach roads on either side of the bridge. He worked for long-defunct Thornton Construction.
"It didn't make much difference to me that we were working near the bridge, I just went where they sent me," Tembruell said. "They sent myself and three rollers to get the job done, and it was just that, it was a job."
Tembruell became a crane operator after that, and retired in 1991.
An ill wind
Retired iron worker Bill Babinchak, 66, still remembers the wind that howled through the Straits of Mackinac.
"I ran rivet crews, and I was a supervisor," he said. "I worked on the bridge from 1954-56. It was all tough work. I worked handrail detail on the top of the towers. The heights either bother you or they don't, and working up there never really bothered me.
"The one thing I seem to remember most is the wind. After you go up so high it was just constant. Sometimes you could lean into it, and that helped a little. But that wind screwed up a lot of schedules."
On windy days, some crews were delayed 45 minutes or longer waiting for a ferry boat to take them off the bridge. "We'd have 60 or 70 men coming off the towers waiting for the waves to settle down so they could get the boat close enough," Babinchak said. "Those times in particular the men and I didn't like that wind."
A helpful tug
Iron worker Richard Brown went on vacation in June, 1956, camping with his pregnant wife and two children in a trailer at Mackinac State Park, and didn't go home until the fall.
"I knew the bridge was being built nearby and I figured I'd stop by the union hall to learn about the job," Brown said. "Well, the guy at the union hall was on the phone with the contractor, who told him he needed a man. I had my iron worker card on me, and right then and there they sent me out to the south end of the first pier sticking bolts.
"I stayed until school started for the kids. My wife and kids didn't mind, it was a long vacation for them."
Brown, 69, tells the story of a fellow worker who "was trying to get out of someone else's way," when he lost his balance and fell from the deck of the bridge.
"He was only three or four feet from me when he fell, and we weren't tied off at that time," said Brown. "I saw an air hose that supplied a pneumatic gun looped right below us, and I saw he was falling toward a diagonal (a piece of iron). So I pulled on that air hose, and he fell into it and it changed his direction just enough so that he only brushed the iron, and he fell maybe 80 feet into the water."
Brown said the worker drifted in the Straits for a while before being picked up by a nearby boat. He escaped the ordeal with only a broken leg.
"I don't know, I may have saved the man's life," Brown said. "Everything happened so fast. No one else was looking at me, and I never talked to anybody about what happened. I never met the worker who fell."
After that mishap, the contractor had rescue boats permanently stationed below the bridge, Brown said.
His highlight
Iron worker Ray Daley, 74, did a little bit of everything in working "all the way through" construction of the bridge.
He was on crews that assembled caissons in Alpena, and then help sink the 200-foot deep anchors until they hit bedrock below 90 feet of mud and 90 feet of water. Daley connected iron on Tower 20 then spun cable.
"The money was good and there was plenty of overtime," he said. "It was a beautiful job. The were lots of good men from all over he country. Working on that bridge was the highlight of my life as an iron worker."
The first and last
Tens of thousands of rivets are stuck in the Mackinac Bridge. Here are the stories of the first and the last.
Jim Sweeney, now 72, was boss of a rivet gang - the first rivet gang to work on the bridge. And when it came time to drive the first rivet on the bridge, he acknowledges pulling rank. "The rivet boss has an argument that he should be the first," he said with a smile. And first he was. "I wasn't about to let anybody else have the honor."
In August 1956, iron worker John Tisron drove the last rivet on the south side.
"I was working on the bridge, and just about everybody else and all the tools had been sent back," Tisron said, when a call came over the radio to place 28 rivets on some expansion joints. He went out to take care of the job, and when they got to the last rivet, a fellow worker said "let John do it."
Forty years later, with a gleam in his eye, Tisron said, "I knew that bridge, and I knew it was the last rivet. Hell yeah, I enjoyed driving that last one."
Water under bridge
According to iron worker Jim Burwell, 71, working on the bridge "was probably the best experience I ever had." And one of the stories he related, about water under the bridge at the Straits of Mackinac, was one of the best we heard.
He said the water in the Straits in 1957 "tasted fine," and he and his fellow workers were aware of this, because it was a primary, albeit distant, source of refreshment. Carrying drinking water up to the bridge was just another burden for workers, so some got in the habit of tying lines to buckets and dipping them into the water far below.
Men dipped their buckets, even if fog obscured their view of the water. On more than one occasion, Burwell said, "you'd hear 'bang, bang,' and you knew the bucket hit a ship below. Sound traveled really good. Oh, the cussing and swearing you heard down below - you couldn't print what they said. One time, a bucket broke out a ship's pilot house windows, and they wrote to American Bridge, complaining about it."
American Bridge, Burwell said, directed workers not to use this method to get drinking water any more. No doubt, that directive was thereafter obeyed to the letter.
Pizza and history
J.C. Stillwell, 69, long ago gave up his spud wrench in favor of a spatula. He owns the Mama Mia restaurant in Mackinaw City and also operates the Mackinac Bridge Museum upstairs in his building.
"I thought it would be a good idea to preserve the heritage of the bridge," he said. The museum boasts air wrenches, air guns, spud wrenches, a diving suit and a ceiling full of hard hats of the men who worked on the bridge.
"I'm proud to be a union iron worker, and I'm very proud to have worked on the bridge," he said. "I figured if someone doesn't do something, people are going to forget what it took to build the bridge."
Educating inspectors
On the parts of the Mackinac Bridge where iron worker Stanley Jacher and his welding crew worked, he can certify that the job was done right.
He was a welding foreman on a crew of 60. "I went to school to learn to weld - that's why I was the welding boss," Jacher said. "When we were finished with an area, and the state inspectors came over, they'd look at the welds and ask me questions about how things were done. They knew everything out of a book, but not out in the real world."
Jacher worked on the bridge from 1954-57.
"We had people from every local in the country," he said. "My crew had to do good work. If I had somebody on my crew who was no good, we'd shift 'em someplace else."
'Touch the stars'
Ron Zielke spent a grand total of four months as an iron worker. They were spent working on the Mackinac Bridge in the summer and fall of 1956. "It was the best job I ever had in my life," he said. "It was certainly the one with the most fresh air."
Zielke worked as a punk, or the equivalent of an apprentice. Much of his time was spent spinning wire, a job which turned .197 inch diameter wire into the 2 1/2 foot main cables that support the deck of the span. "It was a tricky job," he said. "As the wheel was going up and down the towers, it had to be straight, and you had to maintain the proper tension. We were always fighting the wind."
Working 10-hour shifts meant that Zielke and other iron workers were sometimes up on the bridge in the black of night. He said he will never forget some of those nights.
"When I was on top of a tower on a clear night, it was almost as if you could touch the stars," he said. "The sky was so beautiful."
Zielke also worked as a communications man, passing along telephone messages from the land-based crews to foremen on the job. His wooden shack was perched between the east and west main cables about 200 feet above the water.
"I remember my last day on the job very clearly," he said. "One day in the fall, it was either October 5th or 6th, a strong, cold wind came out of the northwest. The snow felt like somebody had thrown bunch of needles in my face. I felt the catwalk swinging wide, and I thought, 'I'm getting out of here.' I headed home to see my wife and kids in Battle Creek."
Before he became an iron worker, Zielke had worked on the Grand Trunk Railroad, but was let go due to a steel strike at the time. "I heard they needed people at the bridge, and I had to feed my family," he said.
A perfect fit
The Mackinac Bridge was built without the aid of today's laser sites and computers. Construction proceeded from both the St. Ignace and Mackinaw City ends of the bridge, and met in the middle of the straits. Iron worker Jim Parker, who was on the crew that bolted in the section that connected the center ends of the bridge, said it's amazing how well Steinman's engineers did their work.
"When we got to the last section in the middle, no one could believe it," he said. "We figured it would be close, but it was perfect. They put the last section into place, and they just stuck the pins in there, there was no adjustment necessary. It just showed how sharp those engineers were."
Adjustment, Parker said, came from 500-ton water jacks that were used to keep the span plumb.
Now 64, Parker said he worked on the bridge for two years pulling wire in Sault Ste. Marie and as a bolter until the iron workers' work was complete.
"The main thing people ask you when they find out you worked on the bridge was how you got along with the heights," Parker said. "They don't understand that when you're working, you're concentrating on your job, not on how high you are."
Ups and downs
Most iron workers got used to taking the catwalk up to 552-foot towers when they started their shift. But not everybody had to take the walk.
Dan Horan of Fenton, now 72, was an apprentice working on the bridge and was given the job of working the construction elevator on Tower 19. The elevator started just about 12 feet above the water line and went all the way to the top.
"I took workers to and from their jobs, and in between, I transported equipment," Horan said. "I served people all and up and down the tower. It was a helluva way to break in, but I got to know all kinds of people that I wouldn't have met otherwise."
Horan said his elevator was suspended below a cable, which was moved up and down by an operating engineer. "I didn't want the job, but I got comfortable with it," he said.
"The one guy who sticks out in my mind was an old man in a rivet gang," Horan added. "I had regular places where I would stop, but this old man had me stop at his platform. He told me to open the cage, move out of the way, then he jumped in! It was only a three or four foot jump between his platform and the cab, but I couldn't believe it. I told him, 'you scared the hell out of me!' because I didn't know what he was going to do."
Horan said the old riveter took the risk in order to save a 40-foot walk up a ladder.
He operated the elevator for about a year - "I had enough of it" - and went on to work on a riveting gang.
'Bridge-man's' perspective
There are legendary stories about how Mackinac Bridge workers could gratify their vices, especially in St. Ignace. There are tales of all-night card games, drinking away paychecks and the ready availability of women of ill-repute.
There is truth to many of the tales - but iron worker Clifford Mumby suggests that much if it is myth that gets better with the telling and re-telling. He worked on the bridge in 1956-57.
"People who have written about the bridge have used the most colorful people to make their point that iron workers were hell-raisers," said Mumby. "They talked to the hardest drinkers and gamblers, and people come away with the impression that that's how everybody was. It made good copy, but most of us just did our job, and went home at the end of the day."
Mumby wrapped wire, worked on the approaches, and helped install the catwalk during his time on the bridge. The Grand Blanc resident sounds like a classic "boomer" - moving from job to job for American Bridge all over the country. "We've moved 41 times during the 46 years we've been married," he said. "We raised three daughters out of a trailer. And you know what? I'd go back in a minute if it weren't for my wife. She wants me home."
The 69-year-old retiree said all iron workers aren't created equally.
"There's a difference between and iron worker and a bridge-man," he said. "There's a certain cameraderie among bridge-men. You know your life depends on the other people who are up there with you every day. They truly are your brothers, and I've stayed close with a lot of them."
Mumby said there's an unspoken bond among bridge-men. "It was dangerous work, and some days you just had the feeling that it wasn't your day. You could walk off and no one would say anything. It happened to me once: One morning I got that feeling, and I told the boss that today wasn't the day. He said 'OK' and that was the end of it."
Operator and sailor
Fred Thompson, 72, operated his share of machinery as an operating engineer, working atop good old Mother Earth. During his stint working on the bridge, he also got his sea legs back.
Operators needed a platform for their cranes, and barges provided the base during a portion of the construction process. Thompson operated deck winches on the corners of the barges that tightened and slackened cable, which stabilized the barges. "We were sailors," the Afton resident said. "But I was used to it, because I was a sailor in World War II."
The barges were big and inherently stable, he said, "but when the seas got rough, we would let loose and ride it out. Even when the water was calm, we had to constantly keep on the controls. You had to stay on the ball; you couldn't goof off."
Thompson, a Local 324 retiree, remembers working on the construction of the first of the two massive caissons that were constructed in Alpena. "I worked on it most of the summer, and I guess because I was pretty familiar with it, they asked me and another guy to ride it to the straits."
He explained that the metal caissons were hollow, double-walled cylinders that were about 116 feet from side to side and 40 feet long. They floated - and he and his co-worker spent two and a half days "aboard the caisson" being towed to the bridge site, ever alert with flashlights on the inside of the shell, looking for leaks.
"No it never leaked," Thompson said. The first caisson, tapered at the lower end, was sunk and filled with concrete. It was rocked back and forth so it sunk deeper and deeper into the bedrock. The main towers were eventually placed atop the caissons.
From an operator who knows the structure inside out comes this assessment: "It's a great bridge - very well designed."
Moon over Mackinac
There were hundreds of talented machinery operators who worked on the bridge - and there were dozens of other talented tug boat operators who worked under it.
The tugs brought men and supplies to and from the bridge site from St. Ignace and Mackinaw City. One of the men who took the tugs every day was iron worker Dick DeMara, now 68, who worked on the bridge from 1956-57.
"I have a lot of respect for those tug captains," DeMara said, who took the tug to the bridge on 15-20 minute cruises from St. Ignace. "We had our share of rough water, and lake freighters were always coming through, but I never remember any close calls."
DeMara remembers that workers needed a little coordination when they jumped off the bobbing boats onto a level area of concrete at the base of the bridge's anchor piers. Bad weather, he said, often meant that the tugs couldn't safely dock at the south pier, so workers would have to make the long walk up and down the catwalk in order to get to the north pier. The straits in that area were more stable because of the presence of a causeway that jutted out from the shore.
Nature, or more accurately the call of nature, also affected the day-to-day behavior of the bridge-men. For many months, there were no bathrooms or porta-johns available to workers as the bridge was being assembled.
"When I think back in it, this was probably the funniest thing I remember," DeMara said. "Before we had porta-johns, guys who had to go would just let their ass hang out over the rail. You were out on the bridge, what were you going to do? There were getting to be a lot of sightseeing boats around down below, who didn't like a little poop in the eye, and we were getting a lot of complaints about all that mooning.
"You had to think before you went. You had to be looking all the time, and you had to go with the wind, and it could get really cold in the winter."
Eventually, as the superstructure went up, American Bridge brought up some porta-johns, and the workers could go about their business in private.
A heavy lifter
Some 42,000 miles of wire were woven into the 24.5-inch main cables that support the Mackinac Bridge. Total weight: 11,840 tons.
"And I was there for every inch," said Bob Lynch, 66, an operating engineer who worked on the bridge in 1956. Lynch operated a stiff leg derrick on the south anchorage pier, picking up 25-ton reels of cable off of barges.
After Lynch placed the reels atop the anchor piers, iron workers used turnbuckles to splice the ends of the wire together as they formed the cables. Lynch also spent a period of time running a derrick on the south tower to set up the catwalk.
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"I wanted to go work on the bridge because I thought it would be a wonderful, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of history," Lynch said. "You knew they were only going to build one Mackinac Bridge. The work was certainly different than work on land, and it was very interesting."
Thank God & Local 324
Dean Cote read about our intention to publish this section, and asked us to mention his father Ray Cote, who died 13 years ago, and uncle Lezore Cote.
All worked as operating engineers.
"My dad worked from start to finish on the bridge," said Dean, 56, "and he worked as a master mechanic doing repair work on all the equipment. Building the bridge was the first really large union job in the U.P., and my dad was really happy about that. He was very proud of being a union member. When we said grace, we would thank Jesus Christ and Local 324, and I can't remember which one came first."
A native of St. Ignace, and himself a Local 324 member, Cote said when the bridge workers first came to town, "they weren't welcome. After all, the bridge was going to lay people off. A lot of people depended on the ferries to make a living. But they turned around when they saw him much money the workers were putting into the community. If you couldn't get a job when the bridge was being built, you were lazy."
End of the road
News accounts say that delays due to the weather put the construction of the bridge behind schedule toward the end of the project. Bridge operators said even if it meant installation of a temporary wood deck, that bridge was going to be open Nov. 1.
Iron worker Bill Nichols worked on the Mackinac Bridge in 1957, the year that the span opened. He was part of crews that performed the final projects, including the installation of the guardrails and the steel road grating. He was around when the last section of road was put into place, and wood was never used.
"Toward the end, there really wasn't a lot of pressure to get it done," said Nichols, 71. "I can honestly say that I loved every minute of working on the bridge. I first got my card as an iron worker on the bridge, and I worked around a lot of hard workers. And it was there that I decided that that's what I wanted to do with the rest of my life."
Nichols said there was a fair element of danger installing the guard rails - "there was nothing there to keep you from going over" - but all in all, his last few months on the bridge "was a gravy job."
"I remember setting the last piece of grating," he said, "and we didn't do much to mark the occasion, except we topped it out by going to the bar."
Hairy first day
Iron worker Don Horne's first day working on the Mackinac Bridge featured a not-so-fine how-do-you-do.
"My first day on the job there were about 20 of us who were in an elevator going up the north tower to our worksites," said Horn, 67. "When we were about 300 feet up, the wind got ahold of us and blew the cab out of the guide pullies. There were guide pullies on each side and, one suspended in the center which moved it up and down. We were swinging like a pendulum.
"We grabbed for the cables and finally got us back in the cable and we all got safely onto the tower. People who say they weren't scared working on that bridge are lying. One guy who was in that elevator wanted down. He had it."
Horn worked on the job for four months as an iron worker, mostly spinning cable.
"I never fooled around, you had to watch yourself and your partner," Horn said. "It really was a safe job, and I'm proud to have been a part of it. It's so majestic - it looks as good today as the day they finished."
Defying death
Meet Norman Kirchoff, the self-proclaimed highest man on the Mackinac Bridge. He explained that he also cheated death four times.
On Nov. 26, 1956, a storm was brewing in the straits, and American Bridge decided to pack it in for the season, said Kirchoff, 67. But someone had to secure the boom on the derrick attached 552 feet at the top of Tower 19, then place an airplane beacon light at the very top, more than 600 feet above the straits.
Kirchoff, an iron worker, volunteered for the duty, and took the hazardous climb up the derrick's mast. He got the job done, made it down in one piece, and today figures no one has ever been higher on the bridge.
On another occasion, the iron worker found himself at the top of the tower, throwing heavy rope down the catwalk. The catwalk was connected to the top of the tower, but there was a temporary four-foot gap in between, and a big drop awaited anyone who made a miss-step. Part of the rope caught on his bullpin (a metal rod used to adjust iron that was in his toolbelt) and he fell forward toward the four-foot gap. His forward momentum barely placed his toes on the top edge of the catwalk, and he tumbled head over heels into the fencing.
"If I had leaned backward, I would have fallen 552 feet," he said. "I got up off the catwalk and I immediately threw that bullpin into the straits. I hated that thing."
On yet another occasion, when the catwalk was unsecured below, a strong gust of wind blew the walkway out at a 45-degree angle. Kirchoff slid towards the edge, and grabbed for the lower wire guardrail. Unfortunately, there was slack in the wire cable, and Kirchoff dangled below the catwalk, holding on by one, gloved hand.
"How did I get up? Very carefully," said Kirchoff. "I hooked my foot up and caught the edge of the catwalk, and pulled myself up.
"Sure, those incidents scared the hell out of me. But I was young, I was only 26 at the time. I figured there was a job that needed to be done and I was going to do it."
Helpful hard hat
Hard hats were a required piece of safety equipment on the Mackinac Bridge project. Looking back, iron worker Clarence Kraft was glad he wore one when he worked on the bridge in 1955.
Kraft was working on Pier 19 when he reached into a 55-gallon drum for a rivet. Then, as Kraft put it, "something almost erased my mind." Someone above had dropped a rivet, and it fell about 250 feet, striking him on his hard hat at the back of his head.
"I was headfirst in the drum, up to my armpits, and that rivet knocked me out cold," Kraft said. "My hard hat shattered like a windshield, and it put me in the hospital for two weeks." He was then given light duty for a while, working on the boats. Later, he worked on the structural steel under the roadbed.
Kraft still has the hard hat that probably saved his life. "I have no lasting effects from getting hit," he said. "And I still have wonderful, great memories of working on that job."
'Some good men'
For operating engineer Duane MacGregor, 74, working on the Mackinac Bridge meant terrific heights, which "I wasn't crazy about." It also meant working in the wind - "sometimes it blew so hard, and you just had to lean into it. To be honest, sometimes I was scared."
MacGregor started on the project in June 1955 and stayed until the project was complete in 1957. He worked on deck engines and winches on the barges, and also ran a hoist and set suspension cable. After working on the Mighty Mac, he spent the rest of his career as an operator working on dry land. Besides the heights, he said, "there never was any dust in the middle of the water."
"I took the walk over the bridge on Labor Day this year, and one thing that I was thinking about was the beautiful view. The other thing I thought about were the guys I worked with. There were some characters, they could make you laugh and they could make you cry. There were some good men who worked on that bridge."
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AN IRON WORKER truly walks the path of the straight and narrow. (Photo courtesy MDOT Photography Unit) |
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RIVERTERS EMERGE from an opening in a tower. (Photo courtesy MDOT Photography Unit) |