by Gay Talese
The men watched him fall, feet first for about one hundred feet. Then his body tilted forward, and Iannielli could see McKee's shirt blowing off and could see McKee's bare back, white against the dark sea, and then he saw him splash hard, more than 350 feet below, and Iannielli closed his eyes and began to weep, and then he began to slip over, too, but an Indian, Lloyd LeClaire, jumped on top of him, held him tight to the catwalk.
Not far from where Gerard McKee hit the water, two doctors sat fishing in a boat, and also nearby was a safety launch. And for the next thirty seconds, hysterical and howling men's voices, dozens of them, came echoing down from the bridge, "Hey, grab that kid, grab that kid . . . hurry, grab that kid . . ."
Even if Gerard McKee had landed within a yard of the safety boat, it would have been no use; anyone falling from that altitude is sure to die, for, even if his lungs hold out, the water is like concrete, and bodies break into many pieces when they fall that far.
The remains of Gerard McKee were taken out of the water and put into the safety launch and taken to Victory Memorial Hospital. Some of the men up on the bridge began to cry, and, slowly, all of them, more than six hundred of them, removed their hardhats and began to come down. Work was immediately suspended for the day. One young apprentice ironworker, who had never seen a death like this before, froze to the catwalk and refused to leave; he later had to be carried down by three others.
Jimmy and John McKee went home to break the news and be with their parents and Margaret, but Edward Iannielli, in a kind of daze, got into his automobile and began to drive away from the bridge, without any destination. When he saw a saloon he stopped. He sat at the bar between a few men, shaking, his lips quivering. He ordered one whiskey, then another, then three beers. In a few minutes he felt loose, and he left the bar and got into his car and began to drive up the Belt Parkway. He drove about fifty miles, then, turning around, he drove fifty miles back, seeing the bridge in the distance, now empty and quiet. He turned off the Belt Parkway and drove toward his home. His wife greeted him, very excitedly, at the door, saying that the bridge company had called, the safety officer had called, and what had happened?
Iannielli heard very little of what she was saying. That night in bed all he could hear, over and over, was "Eddie, Eddie, help me . . . help me." And again and again he saw the figure falling toward the sea, the shirt blowing up and the white back exposed. He got out of bed and walked through the house for the rest of the night.
The next day, Thursday, October 10, the investigation was begun to determine the cause of McKee's death. Work was again suspended on the bridge. But since nobody had seen how McKee had gotten off the cable, nobody knew whether he had jumped onto the catwalk and bounced off it or whether he had tripped—and they still do not know. All they knew then was that the morale of the men was shot, and Bay Corbett, business agent for Local 40, began a campaign to get the bridge company to string nets under the men on the bridge.
This had not been the first death around the bridge. On August 24, 1962, one man fell off a ladder inside a tower and died, and on July 13, 1963, another man slipped off the approach road and died. But the death of Gerard McKee was somehow different— different, perhaps, because the men had watched it, had been helpless to stop it; different, perhaps, because it had involved a very popular young man, the son of an ironworker who had himself been crippled for life.
Whatever the reason, the day of Gerard McKee's death was the blackest day on the bridge so far. And it would have made little difference for any company official to point out that the Verrazano-Narrows' safety record—just three deaths during thousands of working hours involving hundreds of men—was highly commendable.
McKee's funeral, held at the Visitation Boman Catholic Church in Bed Hook, was possibly the largest funeral ever held in the neighborhood. All the ironworkers seemed to be there, and so were the engineers and union officials. But of all the mourners, the individual who seemed to take it the worst was Gerard's father, James McKee.
"After what I've been through," he said, shaking his head, tears in his eyes, "I should know enough to keep my kids off the bridge."
CHAPTER SEVEN
STAGE IN
THE SKY
Gerard McKee's two brothers quit the bridge immediately, as their father had requested, but both were back within the month. The other ironworkers were a bit nervous when the McKees climbed up that first day back, but the brothers assured everyone that it was far more comfortable working up on the bridge, busy among the men, than remaining in the quietude of a mournful home.
Though nobody could ever have imagined it then, the death of Gerard McKee was just the beginning of a long, harsh winter— possibly the worst in Hard Nose Murphy's career. There would be a tugboat strike and a five-day ironworkers' strike to force management to put nets under the bridge; there would be freezing weather, powerful winds that would swing the bridge, careless mistakes that would result in a near disaster while the men were lifting a four-hundred-ton piece of steel; and, hovering over everything else, there would be the assassination on November 22 of President Kennedy, an event that demoralized men nowhere in the world more than it did on the bridge, where the majority of workers were of Irish ancestry.
All of this would occur while Hard Nose Murphy and the American Bridge engineers were facing their greatest challenge— the span across the sea.
If construction was to remain on schedule, permitting the bridge to open in late November of 1964, then the steel skeleton of the span would have to be linked 6,690 feet across the sky by spring— a feat that now, in the winter of 1963, seemed quite impossible.
The task would involve the hoisting off barges of sixty separate chunks of steel, each the size of a ten-room ranch house (but each weighing four hundred tons), more than 220 feet in the air. Each of these steel pieces, in addition to several smaller ones, would then be linked to the suspender ropes dangling from the cables and would finally be locked together horizontally across the water between Brooklyn and Staten Island.
If one of these pieces dropped, it would set the bridge's schedule back at least six months, for each piece was without a duplicate. The sixty larger pieces, all of them rectangular in shape, would be about twenty-eight feet high, 115 feet wide, almost as long, and would be floated to the bridge, one at a time, from the American Bridge Company's steelyard four miles up the river in New Jersey, where Benny Olson, James Braddock, and the other old champs were working. The loaded barges, pulled by tugboats, would take an hour to make the trip. Once the steel pieces were lifted off the barges by two tremendous hoisting machines on the lower traverse strut of each tower, the whole bridge would sag under the pressure of weight; for instance, the first piece, when lifted up, would pull the main cables down twenty inches. The second and third pieces would lower the cables an additional four feet six inches. The fifth and sixth pieces would pull the cables down another four feet three inches. When all the pieces were hanging, the cables would be as much as twenty-eight feet lower than before. (All this was as O. H. Ammann had designed it—in fact, his design allowed for as much as a thirty-five-foot cable defection—but he did not take into account human and mechanical frailty, this being Murphy's problem.)
Murphy's problems did not begin with the lifting of the first few steel pieces. This was conducted in the presence of a boatload of television and news cameras, and all the workers were very much on the ball. His troubles began when the initial excitement was tempered by the rote of repetition and the coming of colder weather. One freezing day a small barge holding suspender ropes was tied too tightly to the pier and sank that night when the tide came in, and the guard not only slept through this but also permitted vagrants to ransack the tool shed.
Murphy, in his shack the next morning, pounding his fist against the desk, was on the phone screaming to one of the dock supervisors. "Jes-sus Kee-rist, I'm sick of this crap! That stupidbas-tardguard just stood in that warm shanty, sleeping instead of watching. Now that guard isn't sup
posed to be sleeping where it's warm, goddammit, he's supposed to be watching, and I'm not taking any more of this crap, so you get that goddam guard up here and I'll tell that stupid bastard a thing or two . . ."
In the outer office of the shack, Murphy's male secretary, a slim, dapper, well-groomed young man named Chris Reisman, was on the switchboard answering calls with a very polite, "Good morning, American Bridge" and covering his ears to Murphy's profanity in the next room.
Male secretaries are the only sort that would survive in this atmosphere; a female secretary would probably not be safe around some of the insatiable studs who work on bridges, nor would any woman condone the language very long. But Chris Reisman, whose uncle was a riveter and whose stepfather died on a bridge six years before, worked out well as a secretary, although it took a while for the bridgemen to accustom themselves to Chris Reisman's polite telephone voice saying, "Good morning, American Bridge" (instead of "Yeah, whatyawant?"), and to his style of wearing slim, cuffless trousers, a British kneelength raincoat, and, sometimes in wet weather, high soft leather boots.
The day after Reisman had been hired by the American Bridge Company and sent to Murphy's shack on the Staten Island shore, Murphy's welcoming words were, "Well, I see we got another ass to sit around here." But soon even Murphy was impressed with twenty-three-year-old Reisman's efficiency as a secretary and his cool manner over the telephone in dealing with people Murphy was trying to avoid.
"Good morning, American Bridge . . ."
"Yeah, say, is Murphy in?"
"May I ask who's calling?"
"Wha?"
"May I ask who's calling?"
"Yeah, dis is an old friend, Willy . . . just tell 'im Willy . . ."
"May I have your last name?"
"Wha?"
"Your last name?"
"Just tell Murphy, well, maybe you can help me. Ya see, I worked on the Pan Am job with Murphy, and . . ."
"Just a minute, please," Chris cut in, then switched to Murphy on the intercom and said, "I have a Willy on the phone that worked for you . . ."
"I don't want to talk to that bastard," Murphy snapped back.
Then, back on the phone, Reisman said, "I am sorry, sir, but Mr. Murphy is not in."
"Wha?"
"I said I do not expect Mr. Murphy to be in today."
"Well, okay, I'll try tomorrow."
"Fine," said Chris Reisman, clicking him off, then picking up another call with, "Good morning, American Bridge . . ."
On Thursday, November 21, there was a hoisting engine failure, and a four-hundred-ton steel unit, which was halfway up, could not go any farther, so it dangled there all night. The next day, after the engine trouble was corrected, there was union rumbling over the failure of the bridge company to put nets under the bridge. This fight was led by Local 40's business agent, Ray Corbett, himself a onetime ironworker—he helped put up the television tower atop the Empire State—and on Monday, December 2, the men walked off the bridge because of the dispute.
The argument against nets was not so much money or the time it would take to string them up, although both of these were factors, but mainly the belief that nets were not really a safeguard against death. Nets could never be large enough to cover the whole underbelly of the bridge, the argument went, because the steel had to be lifted up into the bridge through the path of any nets. It was also felt that nets, even small ones strung here and there, and moved as the men moved, might induce a sense of false security and invite more injury than might otherwise occur.
The strike lasted from December 2 to December 6, ending with the ironworkers' unions victorious—they got their nets, small as they seemed, and Ray Corbett's strong stand was largely vindicated within the next year, when three men fell off the bridge and were saved from the water by dropping into nets. By January, with barges arriving every day with one and sometimes two four-hundred-ton steel pieces to be lifted, about half of the sixty box-shaped units were hanging from the cables, and things seemed, at least for the time being, to be under control. Each day, if the sun was out, the old bridge buffs with binoculars would shiver on the Brooklyn shoreline, watching and exchanging sage comments and occasionally chatting with the ironworkers who passed back and forth through the gate with its sign
BEER OR ANY ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES NOT PERMITTED ON THIS JOB. APPRENTICES WHO BRING ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES ON JOB FOR THE MEN WILL BE TERMINATED.
" You never drink on the bridge, right?" a man near the gate asked an Indian ironworker named Bronco Bill Martin.
"Who?"
"You."
"No, I only drink beer."
"Well, doesn't beer ruin your sense of balance?"
"I donno," Bronco Bill said. "I just go to job, drink beer, climb bridge, and I feel better on bridge than I do on ground. I can drink a dozen can of beer and still walk a straight line on that bridge."
"A dozen?"
"Yeah," he said, "easy."
A few yards away, a group of white-haired men, some of them retired engineers or construction workers, all of them now "seaside superintendents," were peering up at the bridge, listening to the grinds of the hoisting machines and the echoes of "Red" Kelly shouting instructions up through his bullhorn from a barge below the rising four-hundred-ton steel unit. It was a fascinating water show, very visual and dramatic, even for these elderly men who only saw the finale.
The show had its beginning more than an hour earlier up the river on the Jersey side. There, along the waterfront of the American Bridge Company's yard, a four-hundred-ton chunk of steel (steel that had been made in smaller sections at U.S. Steel plants in other states, and then shipped by rail to the New Jersey yard for assembly) was resting on a gigantic twin barge and was now just being pulled away by one tug, pushed by another.
The ironworkers, about seventy of them, waved from the yard to the tugs—another four hundred tons was off. The tug pilot, a thin, blond Norwegian-American named Villy Knutsen, carefully churned through New York Harbor—crisscrossing with oil tankers, ferryboats, luxury cruisers, aircraft carriers, fishing boats, driftwood, floating beer cans—squinting his pale blue eyes in the sun and splashing spray. On this day he was talking to a deckhand, Robert Guerra, telling him how he had hated the bridge when it first began. The Knutsens had been one of the families in Bay Ridge whose homes had been threatened by the approaches to the bridge. Villy Knutsen and his wife had joined the protests and signed many petitions before finally moving to Port Jefferson, Long Island.
"But I really hated that bridge then, I'll tell ya," he repeated.
"Well, don't hate it anymore," Guerra said, "it's making you a day's pay."
"Yeah," agreed Knutsen, cutting his tugboat wheel around quickly to skirt past an oncoming tanker, then swinging his head around to observe the barges still slapping the sea under the big red steel; all was well.
Forty minutes later, Knutsen was bringing his tug with its big steel caboose toward the bridge. The old men on the shore lifted their binoculars, and the ironworkers on the bridge got ready, and under one of the towers a fat pusher, with a telephone pressed to his left ear, was looking up at the crane on the tower and frowning and saying, "Hello, Eddie? Eddie? Hello, Eddie?" Eddie, the signal man on top, did not answer.
"Hello, Eddie?"
Still no answer.
"Gimme that phone," said another pusher, grabbing it.
"Hello, Eddie? Hello, Eddie?"
"Hello," came a thin voice through the static.
"Hello, Eddie?"
"No, Burt."
"Burt, this is Joe down the bottom. Eddie in the cab?"
Silence.
"Hello, Burt? Hello, Burt?" . . . "Christsakes!" the pusher with the phone shouted, holding it away from his ear and frowning at it again. Then he put it to his mouth again. "Hello, Burt? Burt, hello, Burt . . . ?"
"Yeah."
"Whatthehell's wrong, Burt?"
"You got a goddam broken splice in your hand down there."
"Well, keep talking,
Burt."
"Okay, Joe."
"Keep talking, Burt . . . keep . . ." The phone went dead again.
"Christsakes," Joe shouted. "Hello, Burt? Hello? Hellohello-hello? Nuthin'. Hello? . . . Nuthin'. Hello, Burt?"
"Hello," came the voice from the top.
"Burt?"
"No, this is Eddie."
"Keep talkin', Eddie . . ."
Finally the telephone system between the pusher on the ground and the man on top wdio controlled the movements of the crane was re-established. Soon Villy Knutsen's tug had bumped the barge into position, and the next step was to link the hauling ropes to the steel piece and prepare to hoist it from the barge up 225 feet to the span.
This whole operation would be under the direct supervision of one man, who now stepped out of a workboat onto the barge— onto the stage. He was a big, barrel-chested man of 235 pounds who stood six feet two inches, and he was very conspicuous, even from the shore, because he wore a red checkered jacket and a big brown hardhat tilted forward over his red hair and big ruddy nose, and because he carried in his right hand a yellow bullhorn through which his commands could be heard by all the men on top of the bridge. He was Jack "Red" Kelly, the number-two bridgeman, second only to Hard Nose Murphy himself.
Suddenly all the men's attention, and also the binoculars along the shore, were focused on Kelly as he carefully watched a dozen ironworkers link the heavy hoisting ropes to the four upper extremities of the steel piece as it gently rocked with the anchored barge. When the ropes had been securely bcund, the men jumped off the barge onto another barge, and so did Kelly, and then he called out, "Okay, ease now . . . up . . . UP . . ."
Slowly the hauling machines on the tower, their steel thread strung up through the cables and then down all the way to the four edges of the steel unit on the sea, began to grind and grip and finally lift the four hundred tons off the barge.
Within a few minutes, the piece was twenty feet above the barge, and Kelly was yelling, "Slack down . . ." Then, "Go ahead on seven," "Level it up," "Go ahead on seven"; and up on the bridge the signal man, phones clamped to his ears, was relaying the instructions to the men inside the hauling vehicles. Within twenty-five minutes, the unit had climbed 225 feet in the air, and the connectors on top were reaching out for it, grabbing it with their gloves, then linking it temporarily to one of the units already locked in place.