Free The Bridge by Gay Talese Page B

shortly before noon, the casting was discovered more than one hundred feet below the surface of the
     narrows, and soon the cranes were swooping over it and pulling it up out of the water. The whole bridge seemed, briefly, to
     breathe more easily, and Murphy (who had been swearing for three straight days) suddenly calmed down. But two days later,
     Murphy was again shaking his head in disgust and frustration. At 3:15 P.M. on Wednesday, September 25, somebody on the catwalk
     had dropped a six-inch steel bolt and, after it had fallen more than one hundred feet, it had hit a bridgeman named Berger
     Hanson in the face and gone four inches through his skin right under his left eye.
    Berger had been standing below the bridge at the time and had been looking up. If he hadn't been looking up the fallen bolt
     might have hit his hardhat and merely jarred him, instead of doing the damage it did—lifting his eyeball upward, crushing
     his jawbone, getting stuck in his throat.
    Rushed to Victory Memorial Hospital in Brooklyn, Berger was met by the surgeon, Dr. S. Thomas Coppola, who treated all injuries
     to the bridgemen. Quickly, Dr. Coppola removed the bolt, stopped the bleeding with stitches, then realigned by hand the facial
     bones and restitched the jaw.
    "How do you feel?" Dr. Coppola asked.
    "Okay," said Berger.
    Dr. Coppola was flabbergasted. "Don't you have any pain?"
    "No."
    "Can I give you anything—an aspirin or two?"
    "No, I'm okay."
    After plastic surgery to correct the deformation of his face, and after a few months' recuperation, Berger was back on the
     bridge.
    Dr. Coppola was amazed not only by Berger but by the stoicism he encountered in so many other patients among bridgemen.
    "These are the most interesting men I've ever met," Dr. Coppola was telling another doctor shortly afterward. "They're strong,
     they can stand all kinds of pain, they're full of pride, and they live it up. This guy Berger has had five lives already,
     and he's only thirty-nine. . . . Oh, I'll tell you, it's a young man's world."
    True, the bridge is a young man's world, and old men like Benny Olson leave it with some bitterness and longing, and hate
     to be deposited in the steelyard on the other side of the river—a yard where old men keep out of trouble and younger men,
     like Larry Tatum, supervise them.
    Larry Tatum, a tall, broad-shouldered, daring man of thirty-seven, had been spotted years ago by Murphy as a "stepper," which,
     in bridge parlance, means a comer, a future leader of bridgemen.
    Tatum had started as a welder when he was only seventeen years old, and had become a riveter, a fine connector, a pusher.
     He had fallen occasionally, but always came back, and had never lost his nerve or enthusiasm. He had four younger brothers
     in the business, too—three working under Murphy on the bridge, one having died under Murphy after falling off the Pan Am building.
     Larry Tatum's father, Lemuel Tatum, had been a boomer since the twenties, but now, pushing seventy, he also was in the steelyard,
     working under his son, the stepper, watching the boy gain experience as a walkin' boss so that, quite soon, he would be ready
     for a promotion to the number-one job, superintendent.
    It was just a little awkward for Larry Tatum, though it was not obvious, to be ordering around so many old boomers—men with
     reputations, like Benny the Mouse, and Lemuel Tatum, and a few dozen others who were in the yard doing maintenance on tools
     or preparing to load the steel links of the span on barges soon to be floated down to the bridge site. But, excepting for
     some of Olson's unpredictable explosions, the old men generally were quiet and cooperative— and none more so than the former
     heavyweight boxing champion, James J. Braddock.
    Once they had called Braddock the "Cinderella Man" because, after working as a longshoreman, lie won the heavyweight title
     and earned almost $1,000,000 until his retirement in 1938, after Joe Louis beat