I mentioned that my Gram was from Tacoma, right? Coincidentally, I got an email from Great-Aunt Marlene (Gram's sister) just a couple days before we left for Seattle. She wrote:
You can tell Liam that my dad worked on the Narrows Bridge, the one that went down, when the span was already at least partly completed, and the workmen parked their cars on the bridge while they worked. The bridge had enough of an up and down wave motion at times so that the parked cars would disappear from sight, then reappear. He told us this after the bridge had gone down, more or less as an example of how the people in charge denied the obvious.
That would be my Great-Grandpa Walt, shown above working on the Grand Coulee Dam, also in Washington. I know Grandpa Walt kept journals, but I don't know if he specifically wrote anything about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. However, thanks Aunt Chris, I do know what he wrote about the Grand Coulee Dam:
[The dam was] a no man’s land in 1934 when I first plodded through the mud that winter, when the earthmovers had started to prepare for the foundations of this huge structure. When the dam was completed, it had taken more concrete than what was used in the state of Washington up to that time ...
The workers in our group lived in a barracks-type bunkhouse with perhaps ten or twelve beds ... The country was full of skilled men and they were flocking to the work areas ... Men would camp wherever they could, living in tents, shacks and trailers. They were waiting for a chance to work here and had no place else to go, so they would stay put ...
This way of earning a living seemed rather joyless, but it should be remembered that the Number One consideration at that time was to earn a living for ourselves and our families and that was enough for us at the time. In fact, we were grateful for the opportunity.
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