Matt Bracken, former SEAL and author of several books, has written about his sense of connection to the Francis Scott Key Bridge disaster. He helped to build several bridges in that area during the 1970's as a teenager. I found his description of the hard work involved very impressive.
I worked on the 95 and 395 "flyover" bridges over the same river ... I was at the bottom working down in a cofferdam. My working area looked like the artist's rendition on top. Square, with a barge and crane by it. The bottom working area looked like in the photo, but we were not near anything and did not have a foot bridge. We were out in the middle of the river. We were brought to the barge on work boats, and lowered down into the bottom of the river bed in a "man basket." We jack hammered the bed rock to make about 100 holes in a pattern, put dynamite into them, covered it all with a giant steel mesh blanket, (lowered by the crane), then we got far away. The steel blanket would fly up into the air above the cofferdam but it contained all the rocks and rubble.
Then we'd go back down and put all the rocks into an empty cement bucket lowered down to us by the crane. Anything too big to lift by hand had a steel wire choker put around it for the crane to lift out and put on other barges for removal. When all the rocks and boulders were out, we did the jack hammering again. We'd have to change the jackhammer drill bits for longer ones as we went down. 2', 4', 6'. That was heavy work. It took several men to lift the jackhammers out of the holes with the long bits on them.
The dust and noise was unbelievable. Just yellow foam earplugs. Pumps on the barge running 24/7 to keep the river out because the cofferdam's interlocking steel planks were not watertight. When we had a new pattern of 100 or or so holes, all drilled to the same level depth, we did another demolition charge with dynamite the size of paper towel tubes down each hole. I eagerly worked with the demo-man as his assistant, nobody else wanted to be near cases and cases of dynamite! Before I was ever a SEAL, I had personally put blasting caps into probably a thousand dynamite charges, about 100 per "shot."
The wires were wrapped around the charges and that's how we lowered them down each hole, by their blasting cap wires. Pea gravel was poured down each hole to "tamp" the explosions for maximum power. Then they were all wired together for one big blast. I was alone at the bottom of the cofferdam with the demo man for all of that charge preparation and placement and wiring. All the other older construction workers wanted nothing to do with demo, but I loved it! Then the crane would lift us up and we'd be taken far away. I would be standing next to the demo guy, and I got to push the button a few times. BOOM! Then repeat the process deep down into bedrock under the Patapsco River with jackhammers. Those supporting piers are STRONG. I think of the 395 as "my bridge."
Always very high decibels. Giant pumps running, and a half-dozen jackhammers going all the time down in a steel box! Injuries like cuts were wrapped in pieces of t-shirt and duct tape until the end of your work day. The workers were very tough men. West Virginia hillbillies, Vietnam vets and ex-convicts. Working with them down in the cofferdam and on other Baltimore mega-construction jobs in the 1970s gave me the confidence to become a SEAL. Other summers I also worked on big highway and land construction projects down in Dundalk, but working at the bottom of the Patapsco River stands out in my mind above them all.
I think I was 16 or 17 at the time. I was a card-carrying member of International Union of Laborers. If you said you were 18, and looked like you could work, you were good to go. In those days, driver licenses and union cards were not laminated, and did not have photos on them. I showed up for my first construction job with a beat-up hard hat, a dirty tool belt and dirty work boots and was hired at a construction trailer in the pre-dawn dark. My dad and J had told me what to do and say and it worked. I was hired and never looked back. I was making $ 5.50 an hour when the minimum wage was about $ 1.50. I was making triple what my high school friends made at pizza joints.
J also worked the big concrete pours high up on the 40-story Transamerica Tower in downtown Baltimore. I did nothing even close to that. We never worked the same jobs, but for all of them, we took several buses in the dark in our hardhats and work boots with our tool belts to get to the jobs, and we came home filthy. But everybody on the buses had great respect and deference for construction workers back then. We were "the hard hats" who were visibly building up Baltimore and the whole port area month by month and year by year!
There's more at the link.
Thing is, Mr. Bracken and I are very close in age, and we both left school earlier than usual and immediately started hard work in different fields. (I enlisted in the military very shortly after I turned 17, and was in the field before I turned 18.) We learned early and often that we could count on nobody but ourselves to make our way in life, and that hard work - sometimes brutally hard work - was part of that. There was precious little cosseting or cuddling by touchy-feely workmates and colleagues. You did your job, and carried your share of the weight, or you were "dealt with". (You needn't ask me how I know this!)
Nowadays, if you had someone of that age start such a difficult, dangerous occupation as Mr. Bracken's, or enlist in the military at a younger-than-usual age, the Karens of this world would scream their heads off about child labor abuse, or undue pressure on unformed minds, or something else ridiculous. They ignore the reality that not so long ago, people in their mid-teens were already embarked on their careers, often married, sometimes about to give birth to their first child. Life was like that back then. Your life expectancy wasn't great to begin with, so you got on with living as early and as hard as you could. (US life expectancy at birth in 1900 was only about 48 years.)
I don't think Mr. Bracken or myself suffered any harm through being "kicked out of the nest" younger than usual, or having to work hard to make our way. I daresay it did us good. How many youngsters of today get the same opportunity, or learn the same life lessons, as we did? And is the younger generation today any better for that?
Peter
18 comments:
I got a set of luggage for my 18th birthday, took the hint. All through high school i had 2 jobs, one working at my parents business, that was in exchange for room and board and $5 a week in spending money. Hotel and restaurant, cleaning rooms, doing sheets in the laundry, waiting tables or washing dishes in the kitchen.
My other job was at a video store (80's), my job was each morning go in early clean the place, make popcorn in the machine and then take all the videos out of the drop box and reshelve them. The adult videos in the black cases had to be washed with bleach and water to remove residue from cases left on by people watching them. That one paid $2.75 at first but later i got a raise to $4.25.
Not as exciting as working on bridges but i learned hard work between them both.
Exile1981
I spent every long holiday and vacation working on the farms owned by my mothers family. My sister was exempt and got to stay home and spend the summer in camp or on trips with friends. The money I earned went towards my clothes for the year and most of the extra went into the family budget. Not that my parents were poor, they both worked good jobs and spent money like water.
The experience taught me to work hard and realize that no one can build you up or tear you down as much as family. Also some people see their boys as a threat or disposable. Made me skeptical of authority at a young age.
Good times, Matt. You need to skip the next fiction, and write autobiographically for a change. Seriously. Thanks for posting it, Peter.
The past is truly another country.
Older brother signed up for the Marines in January of his senior year in high school (1965), along with his partner in crime. He and his friend knew they weren't "college material" (couple of mostly harmless miscreant D+ average screw-ups, for a certainty), but the USMC had a "Buddy Program", where they guaranteed you and your buddy would get the same duty station after your MOS school.
In March of '65, LBJ came on TV and said "I'm sending the Marines to Da Nang". They looked at each other and asked, "Where in the h#(( is 'Da Nang'?"
June of '65 they shipped out to boot camp, both of them at the ripe old age of 17.
By November of '65, with older brother just a couple of months into his 18th year, they got their same duty station.
Da Nang.
Brother's buddy had pulled aircrew/door gunner on a Huey.
Older brother had pulled generator repair as a school job.
He figured, "Great, I'll be fixing generators, in the rear, with the gear, far far away from the war."
Natzsofast, Guido. Not in the Marines.
The only place they had generators was where it was too far from civilization to have power.
Like itty bitty fire bases all over I Corps. Khe Sanh. The Rockpile. Camp Carroll. Con Thien. And another dozen nameless high points all pointing towards the DMZ. And all well within artillery and rocket range of North Vietnam.
And the only reason generators crapped out thataway was because Charlie had shot or blown them up the night before.
So every other day, he'd trot out to the flight line with a tool bag and some spares, find his buddy, and hitch a ride on his buddy's bird to some pile of sandbags shelled to crap the day before, and fix a generator or three in 100°+ steaming jungle heat.
Then, because the grunts and cannon cockers considered him a REMF, they voluntold him to pull night security so one more grunt from the firebase could sack out all night.
So 24 hours of continuous duty.
(cont.)
(cont.)
Some nights, nothing but shadows.
Other nights, sappers in the wire, and rockets around your hole.
Fun times. He did six and a half months on the front lines out of thirteen like that.
Come sunup, catch another chopper back to Da Nang, sleep, and maybe get shelled, mortared, and rocketed, and sappers in the wire there that night too.
Next day, get up, head to another firebase and do it all over again.
Rotated back a year later (buddy made it home too), having made his stripes just beyond 19 years old, in time to catch a rare and an unusually violent thunderstorm in SoCal.
Came running out of his bedroom yelling "Incoming!", ready to pile out the back door and take cover in the yard, before he realized he was home in the world.
'bout scared my parents half to death.
Nobody had named it PTSD yet.
There probably weren't 20 kids in his high school class of several hundred who could relate, at that point, in late '66/early '67.
Dad had it worse. Grew up in South Chicago during Capone and Prohibition. Saw his younger brother electrocuted climbing on a pole that had the power lines for the streetcars.
Graduated high school Class of '29. Right into the Great Depression four months later. Worked any job he could get all over the country as the sole support of his mother. After fifteen years of doing that, got drafted into the Army in 1943. At age 32, FFS. Met my mom while in the service, got married, raised three boys, kept food on the table and roof over our heads, non-stop for the next 35 years.
I wasn't bright enough to work all that out for myself (dad never talked about it) until I was sitting on Okinawa, 8000 miles from home, with 20,000 of my closest friends in the 3rd MarDiv, with a lot of thinking time on my hands nights and weekends. Baby brother was riding a vismod Sheridan tank for the OPFOR at NTC by then.
Write the same story in 2015, and it's probably less than 5 kids out of a thousand. And probably 900 snowflakes.
Not to worry, though. Hard times are coming around again.
Gonna be interesting, in a Chinese curse kind of way.
But the generation coming up - at least, the ones who make it out the other side - are gonna be hard as diamonds.
I painted bridges for 44 years.
The increase in the average life span doesn't mean what a lot of people think it means. Plenty of people a hundred or two hundred or even a thousand years ago lived well into what we now consider to be retirement age. The primary driver of increase in the "average lifespan" is the reduction in infant and childhood mortality. The second, closely related to but separate from the first, is the understanding of personal and community hygiene to greatly reduce pathogenic illness, and especially communicable illness. In short, dying young, and especially very young, has a very outsized impact on the "average" and anybody that made it past their early teens had a reasonable expectation of living almost as long as most people do now.
I don't think people are waiting later in life to do certain things has anything to do with expected lifespan, it is largely a result of relentless propaganda promoted in the past 50 or so years that personal fulfillment is the highest possible calling. This goes along with the idea that people need schooling well into their 20's, at tremendous financial cost, to accomplish anything worthwhile with their lives. It's a scam, all the way around.
Meanwhile, having children and starting a family have been placed far down on the "coolness" list. The dissipation of the family building block in our culture is a direct result of this, and dotGov playing nanny is not a coincidence.
Luckily, some of the younger generation right now are waking up to this and not playing the game. This gives me hope for the future.
Started working in sawmills at age 14, construction work at age 18, joined the Army for a 4-year hitch when 21 and retired 33 years later as a bird Colonel having accomplished more than I ever dreamed. Learned a lot from many folks. Retired white collar but far more comfortable with blue collar folks. -B
Chopped firewood, mowed the neighbor's yard, and weeded and picked vegetables in the summers when I was in school. We canned what we needed, and sold the rest for 5 cents a pound less than the grocery store. Dropped out after my freshman year of college to join the Army, because that's the only thing I ever really wanted to do. Got my first set of brand new clothes in Basic.
For one summer during I had basically the same job as Bracken except that we were on land and blasting a square hole down 90 feet so a boring machine could be dropped in to drill a mile long tunnel. The crews were on a 24 hour schedule so approximately every 12 hours we were able to drill out the holes, set up the charges, blast about 6 feet of rock and then muck out the debris for the next crew.
It was some of the hardest work I've ever done in my life but also the most satisfying. I was making at the time what seemed like really good money compared to the jobs all my friends had. I also loved working with explosives - there's a science and art to it and there's something deeply primal about creating holes in the earth according to your will.
As a college kid I was at the bottom of the hierarchy since I knew almost nothing pertinent to the job and was considered soft. But I accepted this, tried my best, and wasn't afraid to ask dumb questions. Your status in the crew was based on your years of experience and actual skills. I came to have great respect for the most of the guys I worked with. They may have been from podunk Tennessee with an 8th grade education and the occasional criminal record but they weren't stupid - and they knew how to get things done whether welding up a jig, building a shed out of spare wood, fixing and operating equipment, planning and setting off a blast, and generally doing whatever needed to be done to keep the job on schedule. And they worked damn hard and the best guys made more money than many white collar jobs. A lot of the guys worked 12 hour days, 6 days a week straight through the job, saved their money and then would take a few months off before the next job.
My last years of construction showed the hard work was being accepted by Mexicans. It was convenient for many, and parents breathed a sigh of relief, when their children found an easier path, and the entire United States took another step toward dependence.
I went right to work after High school on a Tug in the Baton Rouge harbor. After two years of part time college, part time tug boat work got hired by a chem plant near the Mississippi River. Did that 12 hour shift work for 18 years and had enough. Met the perfect woman and moved to Dallas and worked in air conditioning biz. After a few years started my own shop. Got both my kids out of college, one finished the other quit early and started flight lessons with my new windfall. Graduated flight school. Moved back to Bayou country and got super lucky. I found work as a commercial pilot and in a few years ran my own company and retired from aviation in 20 years.
Working hard at every job I had got me plenty of breaks in the “real” world and earned me a great retirement and a full sense of accomplishment
Jim from down the Bayou
Grew up on the family farm. Dairy farm, to be specific. Do you know what time cows wake up? I started carrying a pocket knife to the barn at 2 years old. I would cut the strings on a haybale and carry the individual batts of hay to different pens of calves.
By the time I started school I was up and working for an hour before coming inside, getting a shower and breakfast before the bus got there. Started driving tractors at age 7 because my legs finally got long enough to reach the pedals. By age 12 I was driving the farm truck 5 miles to the feedstore. Town cop was a friend of my Dad from way back when. Dad arranged a "discussion" the first day I drove to the feedstore, with him in the truck with me. Mr. Officer made certain to let me know he'd be watching. I politely informed him he would get no trouble from me since putting me in jail was only the second worst thing he could do to me. He took the bait and asked what in my opinion was the worst thing he could do? I responded that would be letting me out after Dad showed up. He nodded and told Dad that he had raised me right.
So yeah, I grew up in a environment where machines and animals that can easily crush, maim, kill and dismember you were a constant reason to pay attention to my surroundings. It also provided a great reason to pay attention to details, as those often were the difference between finishing a job safely or needing medical attention.
And I wholeheartedly agree that being raised in that environment made me a better man.
We truly are a 'different' generation... Sigh...
As a junior in high school I washed dishes at a surf and turf restaurant and bar 5 nights a week. The bar tenders would feed us drinks during our shift. We were paid less than minimum wage, but it put gas in the fuel tank. Then senior year I started taking flying lessons at the local airport. After a month or so the airport flight school (FBO) hired me as a “line boy.” I’d take care of the rental planes. Keep them clean, fuel them up and tie them down. The best part was I taxied the planes around to fuel them and tie them down at the end of the day. I worked 7 days a week at that job my senior year in 1982. Years later I’m at work looking at the mandatory labor law poster and see that folks under 18 are prohibited from fueling planes etc. What a shame the government coddles kids the way they do today.
Good luck finding anyone willing to do that kind of work these days. They are very few and very far between. And we can blame that ugly fact on a nanny state that makes it possible for far too many able bodied people to exist without working hard to earn that existence.
Matt Bracken’s books are awesome. Sounds like he had a good prep for being a SEAL.
We have some tough years coming in the USA. Probably just about the time I retire by choice or by reality.
Looxury.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE
Heh
The life expectancy was artificially lowered by infant and child mortality. If you survived to 18, you'd probably live to 60+. And this is the reality for industrious young people today: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/KJG032gnomo
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