Pop's Bridge by Eve Bunting

Author:Eve Bunting [Bunting, Eve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

My mother raises her eyebrows and Charlie says, "Hey, where...?" But I just watch as the two pieces fit in, so perfectly, so smoothly.

"Team effort," my pop says.

We raise our glasses of sarsaparilla to celebrate the laborers and riveters, the carpenters and the painters and the men who worked together to build the most beautiful bridge in the world.

* * *

A Note from the Author

The Golden Gate is the stretch of water between San Francisco and Marin County in California. Before 1933 the only way to cross this part of the San Francisco Bay was by ferry. A bridge was needed.

But how could one be built? The span is more than a mile wide. The water is deep and treacherous, with strong tides rushing in and out of the Golden Gate each day. Winds of up to eighty miles per hour roar in from the Pacific Ocean and can churn up fifty-foot waves. What bridge could be long enough and strong enough to overcome these obstacles? And what would happen to the bridge and to the traffic on it if an earthquake hit? The terrible 1906 San Francisco earthquake was still a recent memory.

An engineer named Joseph Baermann Strauss claimed that a suspension bridge could be built and that he was the man to build it. He estimated the cost would be $35 million. That was another obstacle. Where would the money come from?

Despite his many critics, Joseph Strauss was unshakeable. He drew up the plans. He persisted. He had the know-how. And in the end, people listened and believed.

The money was raised by taxes and the sale of bonds. Strauss agreed that if bids for construction costs went above his estimate, the deal was off. He knew the dream that he'd worked on for years was close to becoming a reality.

Jobs for laborers on the bridge went only to local workers. More than a thousand men worked on the bridge from its beginning in January 1933 to its completion in April 1937. Some lost their lives. Although Robert, Charlie, and their families are fictional, the tragic accident in this story really happened.

The suspension bridge was flexible enough to survive the force of the winds. Its great towers and cables were strong enough to carry the traffic that would cross its roadway. It was limber enough so the towers would sway without breaking and the cables would stretch without snapping if there was an earthquake. A quake did jolt the bridge during construction. One of the towers swayed sixteen feet toward the ocean and sixteen feet back toward the bay. It righted itself and remained secure and standing.

When the Golden Gate Bridge was finished, there was more than a million dollars left over. What a triumph! In May 1937, the "impossible bridge" was finally open. The city of San Francisco—and the world—celebrated.

Less than a year later, Joseph Baermann Strauss, the man everyone called the practical dreamer, died. He had once been asked how long he expected his beautiful bridge to last.

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