eBook - ePub
Building the Golden Gate Bridge
A Workers' Oral History
Harvey Schwartz
This is a test
Share book
- 195 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Building the Golden Gate Bridge
A Workers' Oral History
Harvey Schwartz
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
Silver Award Winner, 2016 Nautilus Book Award in Young Adult (YA) Non-Fiction Moving beyond the familiar accounts of politics and the achievements of celebrity engineers and designers, Building the Golden Gate Bridge is the first book to primarily feature the voices of the workers themselves. This is the story of survivors who vividly recall the hardships, hazards, and victories of constructing the landmark span during the Great Depression. Labor historian Harvey Schwartz has compiled oral histories of nine workers who helped build the celebrated bridge. Their powerful recollections chronicle the technical details of construction, the grueling physical conditions they endured, the small pleasures they enjoyed, and the gruesome accidents some workers suffered. The result is an evocation of working-class life and culture in a bygone era. Most of the bridge builders were men of European descent, many of them the sons of immigrants. Schwartz also interviewed women: two nurses who cared for the injured and tolerated their antics, the wife of one 1930s builder, and an African American ironworker who toiled on the bridge in later years. These powerful stories are accompanied by stunning photographs of the bridge under construction. An homage to both the American worker and the quintessential San Francisco landmark, Building the Golden Gate Bridge expands our understanding of Depression-era labor and California history and makes a unique contribution to the literature of this iconic span.
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoās features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youāll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weāve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Building the Golden Gate Bridge an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Building the Golden Gate Bridge by Harvey Schwartz in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
1
Fred Divita
FIELD ENGINEER
You could hear the riveting hammers going and the compressors going. Just noise. And here I am, a country hick, just coming in. Iād never been on a job like that in my life. Iām going up this elevator, up, up, up, getting more scared as we get up there.
The son of Italian immigrants, Fred Divita was born in 1911 in the town of Fairfax, in Marin County, California. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1934 with a degree in engineering. The only job Divita could find during the Great Depression was as a paint scraper on the Golden Gate Bridge. Later he labored on the San FranciscoāOakland Bay Bridge construction project. He returned to the Golden Gate as a field engineer in 1936 and supervised the installation of chief engineer Joseph Straussās innovative safety net. When the net was no longer needed, Divita found other employment on the Golden Gate Bridge until its completion in 1937. In later years he pursued a career as a construction engineer. I interviewed Divita in San Anselmo, California, on March 15, 1987.
ā ā ā
I was commuting to Cal from San Francisco during 1933 and 1934 when the bridges were going in.1 Just riding the ferries I was getting an engineering education, looking at all the bridge foundations being built. It was really amazing to see. You could see things going in at the approaches on the Oakland side of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, from putting in a cofferdam to driving the pile to pouring the concrete. You could see all that going on because the train to Berkeley went right by there.
Going across on the ferry from San Francisco to Marin County, you could see the tower starting up and the foundations going in on the Golden Gate Bridge. By the end of my last year at Cal, you could see the two big cranes and red iron sticking up a little bit from the tower. Sometimes you could even see a piece being erected.2 I hadnāt the least idea then that I would soon be working on the Golden Gate Bridge myself.
I was born in Fairfax, California, in 1911.3 I was fortunate enough to be born in such a gifted country. When my father came to America from Pisa, Italy, around 1905, he was fifteen years old and looking for some way to subsist.4 He went to work in the East as a water boy on a railroad, made his way west, and got into setting marble in San Francisco.5
My mother was from a little town near Lucca. My parents were both very poor when they met in the city. After the earthquake and fire in 1906, they stayed in a tent at the San Francisco Presidio. Then they came to Marin County. My father loved Marin County, so he commuted to San Francisco by ferryboat for a couple of years after the earthquake. Then he found a job closer to home as a caretaker, chauffeur, and gardener for a steel fabricator. He worked for him from about 1918 to 1931 or 1932.
In 1917 I started attending a school in St. Regis Church of Fairfax. We spoke Italian until about the fifth grade, when I moved to Fairfax Menās School, where we were taught to talk English. My father and mother began to pick it up, so we gradually eliminated the Italian. I graduated from Fairfax Menās School in 1925. Then I commuted to high school on a steam train.
We were pretty primitive here until some time after the Golden Gate Bridge was built. The woods were beautiful in Fairfax in the 1920s, and we hunted for deer, quail, and pigeons. We used to fish for trout in streams that went right through town. Weād rely a lot on what we could catch and hunt.6 There were five children and my father and mother. My father was a gardener, so my parents struggled, but we had good food on the table. During high school, I waited tables and washed dishes in local Italian restaurants. My sister did housework for these people that my father was the caretaker for.
There were many other Italian families in Fairfax that came to America at the same time as my father and mother. They were all in the same boat, struggling to stay alive. They had a little community of their own. If there was somebody building something, the other Italians would go help them do the work. I remember that every year weād all go over to Simiās vineyard and help them pick grapes to make wine.7
Our family eventually built a little compound of our own up in Fairfax just like the Kennedys have. Itās still there [in 1987], including the first house, built by my father in 1918. My sister lives next door, my brother and sister-in-law live next to that, and my other sister built the house behind us. Then we put up another house over there, so there are five houses. Five families lived there for a long time.
When I started high school, my family couldnāt give me advice [about what to study]! They didnāt have that kind of a background. But the trades were coming up, so I took machine shop for three years and worked in a machine shop for a while. Then it dawned on me that I could stay at home and go to Marin Junior College, which opened in 1926. I went there from 1929 to 1931. School came hard, and I really studied. My grades werenāt the best, but I got enough to get into Cal and start there.
In 1931, when I was at Cal, my mother passed away. Things were breaking up. Money was hard to come by after the Depression hit in 1929. There were many students with me in the same hole. I left school for a year, then tried to recoup. I was going from hand to mouth. My older sister took over, took care of my little sister, and helped me. I even lived with her and my brother-in-law while they were in San Francisco, where he owned a restaurant on Broadway in North Beach. Otherwise I would never have gotten through school.
At Cal I majored in mechanical engineering. When I graduated in 1934, I tried my best to find a job, but I couldnāt find anything. It was just fortunate that two students Iād started Cal with continued on and graduated a year ahead of me. Somehow or another they got jobs on the Golden Gate Bridge project with Bethlehem Steel.8 One was a timekeeper and one was an engineer. When they heard they needed a laborer to help scrape paint, they told the foreman they knew a kid that just graduated from college. They asked if he could come over and try. Thatās how I got a job on the bridge.
I started scraping paint for the Bethlehem Steel paint superintendent.9 A couple of painters signed up at the same time with me. When we went to work, we got in the Marin tower elevator. The tower was nearing completion at that time. The elevator was a wire cage operated on two cables that were about an inch in diameter on each side, and guides. You went up alongside the tower on the outside. The wind was blowing, the fog was coming in, and everything was dripping wet. As you went up, the wind pressure would push the elevator sideways.
Finally we were near the top. The travelers were still up there. A traveler is a movable construction rig with booms and stifflegs.10 They would move it up the tower. I donāt know if the last couple of steel pieces were in the tower, but all the construction equipment was there. The raising gang was still working. You could hear the riveting hammers going and the compressors going. Just noise. And here I am, a country hick, just coming in. Iād never been on a job like that in my life. Iām going up this elevator, up, up, up, getting more scared as we get up there.
The towers are 746 feet high. We were down near the bottom of the traveler strut. If the traveler top was at 746 feet, we would have been thirty feet lower, or about 710 feet. Then the elevator stopped. The elevator operator says, āThis is where you get off.ā The two painters were with me. We looked out there. To get off, you had to step on a two-by-twelve that was cantilevered out from the bottom strut of the traveler.
The two painters started to go out. They looked over there and saw the two-by-twelve. They said, āDo we have to get out going across that?ā The elevator operator said, āWell, thatās the only way.ā The painters said, āNo. Take me back down. Iām quitting.ā Then the elevator operator said to me, āHow about you? Do you want to get off?ā I thought a little bit. Then I says, āItās the only job I have. Itās only three or four feet to walk out there. I can make that.ā So I braved it and went across.
When I got out, I looked up. There was the black steel of the travelers, the red steel of the towers, and hoses running in all directions. I was amazed at all the activity going on. I just couldnāt picture it. I was in awe.
The paint superintendentās office or shack was up there. He assigned me to a foreman and told me the job was scraping inside the tower. I had a hard hat on with a light, a pair of overalls, and regular shoes. I donāt think they had shoes with hard toes then. I couldnāt afford āem at that time anyway. There was some safety taken care of, with masks for the paint smell and safety belts. When I started to work, you could smell burning paint. The foreman gave me a scraper and a wire brush and told me what to do. There I was, scraping paint.
Heaters and riveters at work on the Golden Gate Bridge. The intense construction activity awed Fred Divita when he began his first day on the job in 1934. Photo by George Douglass. Courtesy of Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University. Copyright Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, and Transportation District.
The towers were made of three-foot square cells.11 Every ten feet or so there was a diaphragm and a ladder.12 You went up the ladder. You got to the next diaphragm and you could stop and stand there. There were 103 of these cells starting out at the bottom of the tower. They ended up at the top with twenty-one cells.13
There were manholes that went from one cell to another. They couldnāt be all in one position because that would weaken the tower. So they were spaced. Youād go up five flights. Youād go in a manhole and maybe youād have to go down another one to get into a certain cell. I later read there were twenty-three miles of ladders in those towersāthat is, between the San Francisco tower and the Marin tower. I was in there for about four months, scraping the paint and cleaning it up.
Workers on the Golden Gate Bridgeās south tower with a view to the north, 1935. Divita described getting around in cells like these (right) when he became a paint scraper on the north tower in 1934. Photo by Ted Huggins. Courtesy of California Historical Society, Huggins Collection, CHS.Huggins.001.
I must say I really had admiration for those ironworkers. Iād hear them and watch āem rivet. There would be the heater heating up the rivets and throwing āem to the catcher, and the bucker-up trying to buck up the rivets.14 And there would be the raising gang erecting these pieces. Some of those pieces were as much as eighty tons. They were erecting āem thirty-five feet high raising the towers. Theyāre just fascinating.
I got to know a lot of people in that four months scraping paint. Evidently I did a fairly good job because they sent me over to Alameda after that [to do a different job for the same company] when they were having trouble with the Golden Gate Bridgeās San Francisco [south tower] foundation and there was a delay in that tower. They said something about four monthsā delay in the foundation. I read that the caisson they put in there wouldnāt fit. It started to tip. They took it out and eventually towed it out in the ocean.15 Then they built the foundation from the cofferdam that they built around it. So, during the delay, they sent me over to Alameda and I worked there for almost a year as a sandblaster. I was sandblasting the steel that went on the Bay Bridge.
Whenever they roll steel, thereās a layer on there of mill scale. You could sandblast it, but on the Golden Gate Bridge they didnāt do that. Somehow or another I think they wished they did to get it down to raw steel before they painted it. On the Bay Bridge, we had a new system of sandblasting using steel grit. This blasting was done inside a building and the grit could be used over and over. They got it down to raw steel before they painted it. Boy, it was really clean when they got through with that grit blasting. They would then take the steel outside and the painters would paint it. I donāt know how many coats they would paint on the steel. Then they took it out to the Bay Bridge.
When the Bay Bridge was all sandblasted, Iād finally got to be a foreman on the sandblaster crew. I had five or six people. After we got through with the sandblasting, I got a job out on the Bay Bridge as a materials man. I would go to every foreman and ask him what he needed, whether it was slings, sledgehammers, cable clamps, or anything that was required out in a crew. Also, if the riveting gangs needed anything, I would be sure they got it. I had that job for quite a while. It must have been four to six months.
Then they ran out of work, so I went to work for American Bridge as a timekeeper on the Bay Bridge. I donāt recall how I got that job. Jobs were really tough to get. I must have known somebody. A fellow by the name of Gage was the office manager. He was a rough, tough guy, but a hard worker.
Gage really worked us to death. I would catch a little boat and go all the way out to Yerba Buena Island from Pier 24 in San Francisco and I would take time on the people there.16 They were just finishing up spinning the cable on the suspended span.17 There was about two hundred people on that job that I had to keep time on. Iād go into t...