The Bridge (6 page)
Authors: Gay Talese
After the towers had been finished in the winter of 1962, the cable spinning would begin—and with it the mistakes, the cursing,
the sweat, the death that Murphy had anticipated.
The spinning began in March of 1963. Six hundred men were up on the job, but Benny Olson, who had been the best cable-man
in America for thirty years, was not among them. He had been grounded. And though he had fumed, fretted, and cursed for three
days after he'd gotten the news, it did not help. He was sixty-six years old—too old to be climbing catwalks six hundred feet
in the sky, and too slow to be dodging those spinning wheels and snapping wires.
So he was sent four miles up the river to the bridge company's steelyard near Bayonne, New Jersey, where he was made supervisor
of a big tool shed and was given some punks to order around. But each day Olson would gaze down the river and see the towers
in the distance, and he could sense the sounds, the sights, the familiar sensation that pervades a bridge just before the
men begin to string steel thread across the sea. And Benny Olson knew, as did most others, that he had taught the cable experts
most of what they knew and had inspired new techniques in the task, and everybody knew, too, that Benny Olson, at sixty-six,
was now a legend securely spun into the lore and links of dozens of big bridges between Staten Island and San Francisco.
He was a skinny little man. He weighed about 135 pounds, stood five feet six inches; he was nearly bald on the top of his
head, though some strands grew long and loose down the back of his neck, and he had tiny blue eyes, rimmed with steel glasses,
and a long nose. Everybody referred to him as "Benny the Mouse." In his long career he had been a pusher, a walkin' boss,
and a superintendent. He compensated for his tiny stature by cutting big men down to size, insulting them endlessly and ruthlessly
as he demanded perfection and speed on each cable-spinning job. At the slightest provocation he would fire anyone. He would
fire his own brother. In fact, he had. On a bridge in Poughkeepsie in 1928, his brother, Ted, did not jump fast enough to
one of Benny Olson's commands, and that was all for Ted.
"Now look, you idiots," Olson then told the other men on the bridge, "things around here will be done my way, hear? Or else
Til kick the rest of you the hell off, too, hear?"
Very few men would ever talk back to Benny Olson in those days because, first, they respected him as a bridgeman, as a quick-handed
artist who was faster than anybody at pulling wires from a moving wheel and at inspiring a spinning gang to emulate him, and
also because Olson, when enraged, was wholly unpredictable and possibly dangerous.
In Philadelphia one day, shortly after he had purchased a new car and was sitting in it at an intersection waiting for the
red light to change, a jalopy filled with Negro teenagers came screeching up from behind and banged into the rear bumper of
Olson's new car. Quickly, but without saying a word, Olson got out of his car and reached in the back seat for the axe he
knew was there. Then he walked back to the boys' car and, still without saying a word, he lifted the axe into the air with
both hands and then sent it crashing down upon the fender of the jalopy, chopping off a headlight. Two more fast swings and
he had sliced off the other headlight and put a big incision in the middle of the hood. Finally he chopped off a chunk of
the aerial with a wide sweep of his axe, and then he turned and walked back to his car and drove slowly away. The boys just
sat in their jalopy. They were paralyzed with fear, stunned with disbelief.
Olson was in Philadelphia then because the Walt Whitman Bridge was going up, and the punks hired to work on that bridge were
incessantly tormented by Olson, especially the larger ones, and particularly one six-foot two-inch, 235-pound Italian apprentice
named Dominick. Every time Benny Olson saw him, he would call him "a dumb bastard" or, at best, a "big, stupid ox."
Just the mere sight of Olson walking down the catwalk would terrorize Dominick, for he was a very high-strung and emotional
type, and Olson could get him so nervous and shaky that he could barely light a cigarette. One day, after Olson had hurled
five minutes' worth of abuse at Dominick, the big Italian, turning red, lunged toward Olson and grabbed him by the scrawny
neck. Then Dominick lifted Olson into the air, carried him toward the edge of the catwalk, and held him out over the river.
"You leetle preek," Dominick screamed, "now I throw you off."
Four other bridgemen rushed up from behind, held Dominick's arms, pulled him back and tried to calm him. Olson, after he'd
been let loose, said nothing. He just rubbed his neck and smoothed out his shirt. A moment later he turned and walked idly
up the catwalk, but after he had gotten about fifty feet away, Benny Olson suddenly turned and, with a wild flare of fury,
yelled to Dominick, "You know, you really are a big, dumb stupid bastard." Then he turned again and continued calmly up the
catwalk.
Finally, a few punks on the Walt Whitman Bridge decided to get revenge on Benny Olson. One way to irritate him, they decided,
was to stop the spinning wheels, which they could do merely by clicking one of the several turn-off switches installed along
the catwalk— placed there in case an accident to one of the men or some flaw in the wiring demanded an instant halt.
So this they did—and, at first, Olson was perplexed. He would be standing on one end of the bridge with everything going smoothly,
then, suddenly, a wheel would stop at the other end.
"Hey, what the hell's the matter with that wheel?" he'd yell, but nobody knew. So he would run toward it, running the full
length of the catwalk, puffing and panting all the way. Just before he would reach the wheel, however, it would begin to move
again—a punk at the other end of the bridge would have flipped the switch back on. This conspiracy went on for hours sometimes,
and the game became known as "Keeping the Wheel from Benny." And at 3 A.M. a few punks in a saloon would telephone Benny Olson
at his hotel and shout, "Who's got the wheel, Benny?"—and then hang up.
Benny Olson responded without humor, and all day on the bridge he would chase the wheel like a crazy chimpanzee—until, suddenly,
he came up with an idea that would stop the game. With help from an engineer, he created an electrical switchboard with red
lights on top, each light connected with one of the turn-off switches strung along the bridge. So now if any punk turned off
a switch he would give away his location. Olson also appointed a loyal bridge worker to do nothing but watch the switchboard,
and this bridgeman was officially called the "tattletale." If the wheel should stop, all Benny Olson had to do was pick up
the telephone and say, "Who's got the wheel, Tattletale?" The tattletale would give the precise switch that had been flipped
off, and Olson, knowing who was working nearest that spot, could easily fix the blame. But this invention did more than just
put an end to the game; it also created a new job in bridge building—the tattletale—and on every big bridge that has been
built since the Walt Whitman Bridge, there has been a bridge worker assigned to do nothing but watch the switchboard and keep
track of the location of the wheels during the cable-spinning phase of construction. There was a tattletale on the Verrazano-Narrows
Bridge, too, but he did little work, for, without Benny Olson to irritate, the demonic spirit had died—there was just no point
anymore to "Keeping the Wheel from Benny." And besides, the men involved in spinning the cables on the Verrazano were very
serious, very competitive men with no time for games. All they wanted, in the spring of 1963, was to get the catwalks strung
up between the towers and the anchorages, and then to get the spinning wheels rolling back and forth across the bridge as
quickly and as often as possible. The number of trips that the wheels would make between the anchorages during the daily work-shift
of each gang would be recorded in Hard Nose Murphy's office— and it would be a matter of pride for each gang to try to set
a daily mark that other gangs could not equal.
Before the spinning could begin, however, the men would have to build a platform on which to stand. This platform would be
the two catwalks, each made of wire mesh, each twenty feet wide, each resembling a long thin road of spider web or a mile-long
hammock. The catwalks would each be held up by twelve horizontal pieces of wire rope, each rope a little more than two inches
thick, each more than a mile long. The difficult trick, of course, would be in getting the first of these ropes over the towers
of the bridge—a feat that on smaller bridges was accomplished by shooting the rope across with a bow and arrow or, in the
case of Charles Ellet's pedestrian bridge, by paying a boy five dollars to fly a rope across Niagara on the end of a kite.
But with the Verrazano, the first rope would be dragged across the water by barge, then, as the Coast Guard temporarily stopped
all ship movements, the two ends of the rope would be hoisted out of the water by the derricks on top of the two towers, more
than four thousand feet apart. The other ropes would be hoisted up the same way. Then all would be fastened between the towers,
and from the towers back to the anchorages on the extremities of the bridge, following the same "sag" lines that the cables
would later follow. When this was done, the catwalk sections would be hauled up. Each catwalk section, as it was lifted, would
be folded up like an accordion, but once it had arrived high up on the tower, the bridgemen standing on platforms clamped
to the sides of the tower would hook the catwalk sections onto the horizontal ropes, and then shove or kick the catwalk sections
forward down the sloping ropes. The catwalks would glide on under the impetus of their own weight and unfurl—as a rolled-up
rug might unfurl if pushed down the steep aisle of a movie theatre.
Once all the catwalk sections glided, bumper to bumper, in place, they would be linked end to end, and would be further stiffened
by crossbeams. A handrail wire "banister" would also be strung across the catwalks, as would several wooden cross planks to
give the men better footing in places where the catwalk was quite steep.
After the two catwalks were in place, another set of wires would be strung above each catwalk, about fifteen feet above, and
these upper wires would be the "traveling ropes" that would pull the wheels back and forth, powered by diesel engines mounted
atop the anchorages.
Four spinning wheels, each forty-eight inches in diameter and weighing a few hundred pounds apiece, would run simultaneously
along the bridge—two wheels atop each of the two catwalks. Each wheel, being double-grooved, would carry two wires at once,
and each wheel would take perhaps twelve minutes to cross the entire bridge, averaging eight miles per hour, although it could
be speeded up to thirteen miles an hour downhill. As the wheels passed overhead, the men would grab the wires and clamp them
down into the specified hooks and pulleys along the catwalk; when a wheel arrived at the anchorage, the men there would remove
the wire, hook it in place, reload the wheel and send it back as quickly as possible in the opposite direction.
After the wheel had carried 428 wires across the bridge, the wires would be bound in a strand, and when the wheel had carried
across 26,018 wires—or sixty-one strands—they would be squeezed together by hydraulic jacks into a cylindrical shape. This
would be a cable. Each cable—there would be four cables on the Verrazano— would be a yard thick, 7,205 feet long, and would
contain 36,000 miles of pencil-thin wire. The four cables, collectively, would weigh 38,290 tons. From each cable would later
be hung, vertically, 262 suspender ropes—some ropes as long as 447 feet—and they would hold the deck more than two hundred
feet above the water, holding it high enough so that no matter how hot and limp the cables got in summer the deck would always
be high enough for the Queen Mary to easily pass beneath.
From the very first day that the wheels began to roll— March 7, 1963—there was fierce competition between the two gangs working
alongside one another on the two catwalks. This rivalry existed both between the gangs on the early-morning shift as well
as the gangs on the late-afternoon shift. The goal of each gang, of course, was to get its two wheels back and forth across
the bridge more times than the other gang's wheels. The result was that the cable-spinning operation turned into a kind of
horse race or, better yet, a dog race. The catwalks became a noisy arena lined with screaming, fist-waving men, all of them
looking up and shouting at their wheels—wheels that became mechanical rabbits.
"Com'on, you mother, move your ass," they yelled as their wheel skimmed overhead, grinding away and carrying the wire to the
other end. "Move it, com'on, move it!" And from the other catwalk, there came the same desperate urgings, the same wild-eyed
competition and anger when their wheel—their star, their hope— would drag behind the other gang's wheel.
The men from one end of the catwalk to the other were all in rhythm with their wheels, all quick at pulling down the wire,
all glancing sideways to study the relative position of the other gang's wheels, all hoping that the diesel engines propelling
their wheels would not conk out, all very angry if their men standing on the anchorages were too slow at reloading their wheel
once it had completed the journey across. It was in such competition as this that Benny Olson had excelled in his younger
days. He used to stand on the catwalk in front of an anchorage inspiring his gang, screaming insults at those too slow at
pulling down the wire, or too sluggish at reloading the wheel, or too casual about the competition. Olson was like a deck
master hovering over a shipload of slave oarsmen.
On Wednesday, June 19, to the astonishment of the engineers who kept the "score" in Hard Nose Murphy's office, one gang had
moved its wheels back and forth across the bridge fifty times. Then, on June 26, a second gang also registered fifty trips.
Two days later, in the heat of battle, one of the wheels suddenly broke loose from its moorings and came bouncing down onto
the catwalk, skipping toward a bridgeman named John Newberry. He froze with fright. If it hit him, it might knock him off
the bridge; if he jumped out of its path too far, he might lose his balance and fall off himself. So he held his position,
waiting to see how it jumped. Fortunately, the wheel skimmed by him, he turned slightly like a matador making a pass, and
then it stopped dead a few yards down the catwalk. He breathed relief, but his gang was angry because now their daily total
was ruined. The other gang would win.