How many kids start out this way today? Not enough, I fear.

 

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