by Chip Jacobs
Marcus related to that. “Go on. You got yourself a few more minutes.”
Nick guided him through the particulars of his device, including its weight, voltage, beam radius, and weather durability. Marcus next asked Nick to mark up a landscape plot plan to indicate where a dozen lamps “might be seated.” This Nick did, having already anticipated such a request.
Marcus rocked back in his chair and lit his stogie afterward. Above his tent, a whistle blew to announce the start of the morning shift. “Tell you what, though. I’m still on the fence about you. Those unlit slopes are troublesome, so I’ll pencil in your contraption as a probationary project. You get two lamps operating as advertised, and we’ll discuss adding another ten.”
“Okeydoke. I’m confident.”
“Good. I respect that quality in people who need to prove themselves.” City Hall, Marcus added, would pay for the materials out of its discretionary budget, since the lights technically weren’t part of the contract. The Mercereau Company would finance Nick’s salary.
“One more condition,” Marcus said. “If things work out, you agree to do odd jobs whenever sought. Running errands. Lending a hand on the concrete hopper. We like to think of ourselves here as a baseball team, where everybody pitches in wherever needed.”
“So long as I keep the rights to patent my lamps, I can live with that,” Nick said. “I’m a quick learner.”
“Fine,” Marcus replied. “Guess this wasn’t a complete waste of time.”
Nick’s Metal Petuninias
At the mess tent the following day, after he filled out his employment papers and requisition needs, Marcus introduced Nick to some of what he tabbed the job’s “bridge rats.” They were a rough-hewn bunch, hardened like coal miners (minus any “Black Lung cough”). No one could doubt the men’s tradecraft.
There were the two Colorado brothers (yes, Colorado, like the street), and two John’s (Visco and Moseley); there was Ed Erickson, and J. Mulaney, C. J. Johnson, and foreman R. Reynolds. The most memorable name: B. Mum. Marcus told Nick he’d meet the project’s onsite executives, lead civil engineer C. K. Allen, of the design firm of Waddell and Harrington, and F. W. Crocker from Mercereau, later.
“Try not to embarrass me with the suits,” he said. “You’re still an asterisk.”
For the next three days, Nick was all eyes and no mouth, reminding himself not to gawk too much at the bridge’s majestic contour.
Before he got rolling, the company needed to order the parts. His pint-size lamps bore no resemblance to the much larger, conventionally powered ones that’d shine from pedestrian alcoves jutting over the deck’s sides. Once installed, they’d be beauts: forty-six fluted, cast-iron lampposts, each one hung with five fishbowl-shaped globes pinched together like grapes. Equally attractive would be the inlaid benches and urn-supported balusters that’d be carved out at the end. Everything about the viaduct shouted class.
And, speaking of class, Marcus put Nick through his own, reminding him he needed to be “a student of the bridge” in case he was asked to emcee a VIP tour as one of the few college-educated grunts. “Jot this down,” he ordered, in a first-week lecture. “This is your ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ Commit the details to memory.”
Nick scribbled Marcus’s words in his trusty, moleskin notepad. “She’ll be 1,480 feet long and twenty-eight-feet wide end to end. Height: twelve to fifteen stories above the ravine’s floor. Grade east to west: 2.65 degrees. Design: eleven open-spandrel arches, nine of those parabolic. Footing gets complicated, so just say she rests on boulders and gravel capable of handling up to 166 pounds per square foot.”
Nick’s left hand was smeared with black ink before Marcus’s didactic was halfway done. This bridge, he gloated, was to engineering what the Titanic was to cruise ships (before she sank in April): “monumental.” She’d consume eleven thousand cubic yards of concrete, plus six hundred tons of reinforcing steel.
“Now for her real singularities,” Marcus said, fake shining his nails. Besides its ultra-efficient construction and striking aesthetic, which was inspired by structures in Spain, Greece, and Italy, the bridge was being curved at an unusual fifty-two-degree angle to shorten its distance over the highest section of the gorge—a design, Marcus explained, that required a heftier foundation but less expense. “They tell me she’ll be the highest and longest of its kind anyplace. You don’t need a measuring tape to recognize she’ll be a beauty queen.”
The Colorado Street Bridge’s price tag, as Nick already knew, still angered some, strong economy and all. At inception, the tab was ball-parked around $235,000—an exorbitant sum in a time the public demanded limited, penny-pinching government. It took flesh pressing and deal making by Pasadena’s Board of Trade, its proto-chamber of commerce, to goad voters in 1911 to approve a $100,000 bond issue, money matched by Los Angeles County. An additional $13,000 was being ponied up in onetime payments from the city and wealthy interests in unincorporated San Rafael Heights across the Arroyo. Pain, in other words, spread around.
“Avoid talking dollars if you’re ever around muckety-mucks,” Marcus advised. “Distract them with the bend, how she fits into the canyon hand in glove. Stay away from the other sore points, too.”
“Other sore points?” Nick asked, looking up from his notepad. “Isn’t all the controversy over its path settled? The city was trying to do right by everyone, I heard.”
“Some free counsel, Chance. Stay clear of local politics. They can be gangrenous. I’m not from here. I do know your town grew weary of watching so much blood and mayhem when people in wagons flipped over navigating those steep trails in and out of the gorge. What was the slogan used to sell the bridge: motorcars, not horses? The whole country is going to own automobiles in ten years. Harp on that.”
Marcus’s thrust, while gruffly enunciated, resonated with Nick’s conviction in progress. The lives that’d be spared by this roadway, the time economized once drivers could reach Los Angeles, the beach, and points west with a minute ride over the Arroyo more than justified the cost.
How serious was the bridge’s whip-cracking grizzly about Nick’s trivia retention? Serious enough that on Nick’s third day there, after he returned to base camp from planting small yellow flags to evaluate locations for his trial lamps, Marcus hollered at him to come over. “Rookie,” he said, standing above one of the subsurface footings that gripped the Earth like the leg of a claw-foot bathtub. “Tell me about the primary spans.”
“Two sets of parabolic ribs, squared in form, connected by tie beams. The spandrel columns on top carry transverse and longitudinal beams.”
“Not bad for someone who didn’t know a tie beam from Ty Cobb before. You got a decent memory. The road surface?”
“Nine to eleven inches.”
“Project dates?”
“Started in July. Finished by spring.”
“Almost. Gonna take a tad longer to snip the ribbon. We’re estimating summer now.”
“Okeydoke,” Nick said.
“You know what? You’re ready?”
“For what?”
“Not to be a virgin anymore.”
“Pardon, sir?”
The next day, Marcus brought Nick to meet foreman Harold Prescott, “Wink” to his friends on account of an eye twitch. Wink took him someplace he only fantasized about: onto the barebones deck.
“Stay sharp every second up here,” Wink shouted over the diesel engine churning sand, cement, and gravel into wet concrete from the eastern bank. The smoky machine spun with a cyclical racket that vibrated Nick’s boots. “Distracted people don’t last.”
Nick then followed Wink into a makeshift tunnel, which was created by the elevated trestle track for the concrete-bearing dumpcart; wood supports propped that rail high over the deck. Looking west in the slatted light beneath it, the bridge appeared to stretch into golden infinity.
“Keep
your ass put while I check on today’s pour,” Wink yelled.
“Done,” Nick shouted back, feeling official.
Stomach-curling to others, the altitude didn’t bother Nick. While Wink ventured out, vanishing into the tunnel, Nick spread his boots for stability. These coordinates sure beat gawking at the bridge from Mrs. Grover Cleveland’s mane. It also changed his perspective. Some locals, for example, compared the company’s tight orchestration to a beehive. Nick, standing where he was now, realized that was the wrong insect metaphor. It was more tantamount to an ant colony.
From his locale, he watched heavy trucks dump their gravel payloads at an outcropping close to where he performed his ostrich rodeos, during which he now wore sunglasses to infuse showbiz flair for the kids. He heard bridge rats communicating from different levels of scaffolding, truncated lingo and whistle sequences. He observed horses, grouped in teams to hoist the timbers needed to mold concrete members, nicker under the stress. When they levered up packs of rebar—long, rods inserted into the drying concrete to strengthen it—they wiggled midair, reminding Nick of giant pencil mustaches.
Lastly was the snow-globe view, for off the deck’s flanks was a breathtaking panorama. Take your pick: the Mount Lowe Railway, Busch Gardens, Los Angeles’s nubby skyline, the squiggly lines of the blue Pacific, scrub forest. You could lose yourself up here. And Nick did with his dreamy expression.
“Hey! What’d I tell you about keeping focused?” Wink hollered from twenty feet away. “Maybe I should’ve described how a cracked skull looks.”
“That’s not necessary,” Nick called back. “I’ll do better my second time. Promise.”
They lingered for another ten minutes, squatting as the dumpcart rumbled slowly overhead. After the vehicle reached the far edge of the deck, Wink described how workers raked the chunky, oatmeal-ish slush from it into a pivoting tin chute called a distribution hopper. From there the goop was funneled into wooden forms known as “falsework.” Once the concrete inside those molds dried, it birthed another structural bone. Steel-welded troughs were hauled out to transfer concrete to the lower levels.
“Time to go,” Wink said. “I’ll notify Marcus you didn’t shit yourself.”
—
“Come in, my dear Nick,” Lilly said, looking insubstantial in the foyer of her Orange Grove manor. “You must be pooped. A tall glass of lemonade should do you wonders.”
Though he’d prefer a Budweiser and a washcloth for a French shower, he said, “Count me in.”
It was Saturday, and he spent the morning tramping around the rutted hillsides, revising lamp locales for maximum sunbeam collection. That his socks now were peppered with prickly foxtails or that he tripped over a buried rock mattered little. Marcus needed to be dazzled.
After his half-day shift, he rode Mrs. Cleveland, who RG generously brought up from Cawston, for another ostrich rodeo. Today there were twenty children in attendance. This being his fifth show, he allowed little Reginald, whom he ran into earlier at the soda fountain, to arrange the hoops and small jumps he added to make the show livelier. And it was. Now he felt whooped.
Lacquered in sweat, he followed Lilly into the depths of the city’s most talked-about residence. “After me,” she said. “We’ll relax in the parlor.”
Ivy Wall was paneled and upholstered, decorated in Old World luxury with crystal chandeliers and valuable artwork. Every inch of hardwood floor was buffed flawlessly, every Persian rug priceless. Her husband’s personalized Pullman railcar was reputed to be similarly resplendent.
They passed walls hung with photographs of the imperial-bearded, barrel-chested Adolphus—doppelganger, perhaps, for the future “Rich Uncle Pennybags” on the Monopoly board. Lilly’s hubby had hooded eyes and, now, a beard that lengthened as his hair thinned. The photos showed him hobnobbing with presidents Roosevelt and Taft, the head of Harvard, even rival Frederick Pabst. In some shots, they posed with the clubbiness of poker buddies.
“It’s good to have friends in high places,” Lilly chirped, noticing Nick’s bulging eyes. “Did you know that Adolphus predicted that Andrew (as in Carnegie) and JP (think Morgan) would covet houses here after he showed them around? He was correct, though sometimes I wish he hadn’t said a peep. I wanted to keep Pasadena our secret.”
Nick, who always considered the city’s “wintering tycoons” more of a curiosity than emblematic of what spawned Pasadena’s exceptionalism, tried not hyperventilating. Every ten steps, it seemed, were fresh flowers in costly vases. How could this be, he marveled: him here weeks removed from his drunken escapades in Busch Gardens? He’d bumbled upward.
Strolling to Lilly’s parlor, they passed a side window out of which loomed another sumptuous property radiating palatial ambience. This was “The Blossoms,” which Adolphus purchased from tobacco magnate George S. Myers for a then-home sales-price record: $165,000. And what did the Busches do with it? They converted it into a guesthouse. But when you’re president of the company producing the “King of Beers,” selling more than a million barrels a year, you can spend as a king would.
Adolphus, one of twenty-two children, emigrated from Germany, entering the brewery business in his early twenties. St. Louis, home to many of America’s first-generation German immigrants, was an obvious place for him to settle. Those Germans knew their beer, and Adolphus wanted to win their loyalty. Love Lilly as he did, his marriage to her was strategic. His father-in-law was veteran brew-meister Eberhard Anheuser.
After Adolphus joined his company, he set about crafting a hard-to-make, crisp lager that’d appeal to his native countrymen and Americans alike. By the 1870s, he was making headway, partly by rewriting the rules of beer-ology. Under him, Budweiser became the first United States-produced beer to be pasteurized and distributed nationally on refrigerated railcars, which were replenished by icehouses along the tracks. Besides ensuring his product didn’t spoil, he also mastered brand marketing, product giveaways, and opened his plant to public tours.
Budweiser’s little big man was a different sort of new money tycoon, flamboyant and philanthropic, bombastic and unvindictive, except when it came to backstabbing politicians. He was unrepentant about flaunting his wealth but also enjoyed fraternizing with working stiffs. Nick recalled that a few locals carped that he’d thrown his money around to snap up excessive acreage. The majority felt otherwise, swooning for Busch Gardens, even if it sat in a city founded by teetotalers and only was open part time.
Adolphus spoke with a diminishing German accent in a booming, often blustery voice. What he rarely talked much about, though, was the myth that he bootstrapped his way to the top as an immigrant who began without two nickels to rub together. This simply wasn’t true. Even so, he deserved his place as one of the planet’s mightiest businessmen.
Something about being in Ivy Wall reminded Nick’s of an anecdote about Adolphus’s sway. Supposedly, he once abandoned guests, among them an aide-de-camp to German Kaiser Wilhelm I, at an affair here to seethe in private over what he considered President Taft’s personal betrayal of him: Taft’s decision to publicly denounce alcohol for the crime and moral decay of the American male. So pervasive was Adolphus’s clout that the Kaiser’s man couldn’t complain about being snubbed, and Taft, a jolly, hail-fellow sort, scrambled to make amends.
Not that Nick questioned Lilly about any details.
“Sit down,” she told him, pointing toward a Queen Anne chair in her sun-kissed parlor, which overlooked the upper gardens.
“You sure, Lilly? I’m gamy.”
“Nothing baking soda won’t address later. I have sons. Now, tell me: were the children amused by your larks today?”
“Yes, if their mirth was any barometer. They implored me to attempt a handstand. I was contemplating bringing my new dog next time to distract them.”
Nick’s benefactor giggled as a servant rolled in a sterling silver tray with two glasses of iced lemo
nade and finger sandwiches. Next to them, horrifically, was a crystal dish of marzipan candies. He tamped down his cowlick and swigged lemonade. “Mrs. Busch, sorry, I keep forgetting, Lilly: I cannot thank you sufficiently for helping me to line up this job. To know I’m contributing to the bridge, well, I could die happily.”
“All I did was place a call. You took it from there. But, I must confess to harboring a stealthy reason for inviting you here this afternoon. I have another favor to request; I hope it was all right passing you a note to visit me here through the (Mercereau) company.”
Here it comes; more terms. “Think nothing of it. I’m in your debt,” he said after swallowing a mouthful of cucumber sandwich. “Anything you require.”
“This won’t take more than a few hours. Have you heard of the Pasadena Perfect Committee?”
“I can’t say that I have.”
“You’re about to, then.”
The committee, she explained, was tasked with compiling the city’s application for America’s “Most Beautiful Small Town” competition, a contest loaded with entries from the Atlantic seaboard. She volunteered to be a cochairwoman and was assigned to memorialize the Arroyo’s history tracing back to Pasadena’s founding “Indiana Colony.” What she was too polite to articulate: the effort was becoming a vanity project that gobbled everybody’s time.
“See those papers?” she said, brow crinkled. “It’s my personal Alps. And that’s from the last six months.”
Across the room, Nick spied a Victorian table buckling with documents, folders, and reports three-feet high. A baby ostrich could’ve hidden behind it. Lilly pressed her chin into her beaded collar, frazzled at the sight of the paper mountain.
“Since you told me you grew up here, I was hoping you might help the assistant I retained to organize the material into a quick city history lesson. My chauffeur can drive you two, so there’d be no walking, just talking. You thrive at that.”