Dan Rodricks: These ironworkers helped build the Francis Scott Key Bridge, now a lost legacy | STAFF COMMENTARY

When they were young, they walked the steel beams high above the Patapsco River and bolted in place the massive girders of the Outer Harbor Bridge, as it was then known. In cold mists and boiling sun, they clocked hundreds of hours of hard and dangerous work to complete the 52-mile loop of the Baltimore Beltway in 1977.

Buddy Cefalu, Frank Piccione and Butch Henry each had their hands in the construction of what was later named the Francis Scott Key Bridge, a 1.6-mile span of steel and concrete over the entrance to the Port of Baltimore.

They each had served the nation in the military – Piccione and Cefalu in South Vietnam, Henry in South Korea – and taken jobs as union ironworkers when they came home. They joined Local 16, went through apprenticeships, worked on the second span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, then took jobs with the John F. Beasley Co. for the new bridge over the Patapsco.

“Young ironworkers wanted the big jobs,” Cefalu says. “And the Key Bridge was the biggest job in town …You got to make your bones on that job.”

The work was rough, the pay was great, the promise of legacy even greater. They believed the bridge they built would stand forever.

But Tuesday morning, their legacy broke apart and crashed into the Patapsco between Sparrows Point and Hawkins Point. A massive container ship struck the bridge that Cefalu, Piccione, Henry and hundreds of other ironworkers had built with brawn and sweat.

“I cried,” says Henry, who is 79 years old and gave two years of his life to the bridge – 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week – before quitting from exhaustion.

Piccione watched the shocking video of the disaster, with the Key Bridge snapping apart, and his thoughts went to bolts — all the heavy bolts, some of them a foot long, that he and his raising gang had installed in massive pieces of steel atop the concrete piers.

“You can’t imagine that the bridge could come down like that,” he says.

And Cefalu, after feeling Tuesday’s shock and sadness, reflected on his time, nearly 50 years ago, as a young “cowboy in the sky,” leaving the nearby union hall each day and joining his gang for the ride to the bridge.

“As those things are being built, they’re just a majestic sight,” he says. “You get on the boat and you chug out across the water and, as you’re nearing the span, you look up and you see the iron that you worked on the day before.”

Like all ironworkers, Cefalu refers to all metals, including steel, as “iron.” They “set iron” or “hang iron.” That’s the language of their trade.

“Out there in the middle of the water,” he says, “you see the span arching out, and you can see what it’s going to become and what you’re going to be able to do with your hands. Guys are working together for a common goal.

“It’s not just going to work, putting in the eight hours and collecting a paycheck. It’s very much more prideful than that.”

The construction of the Key Bridge took five years, with various incidents causing delays — some reported in the press, some not — and reflecting the dangers in the work.

One man was killed when he was crushed by a stack of reinforcing bars at the bridge’s Hawkins Point construction site in 1973. Piccione recalls an ironworker who became paralyzed when he fell from the bridge and hit steel before landing in a net.

On a winter day in 1975, a 75-ton girder pulled away from its place on the half-completed bridge and twisted, almost killing a dozen ironworkers on its way down; other girders, twisted by the one that fell, had to be replaced. “We’re lucky the bridge stayed up because the whole bridge could have fallen,” a worker told The Sun at the time.

Cefalu remembers that a barge bearing a derrick broke away from its moorings during a weekend storm and imperiled one of the bridge’s piers.

Hard and dangerous work, men of flesh and blood assembling massive objects over a river.

“The challenge,” says Piccione, when I asked what he liked about working iron on a bridge. “I learned this early on, while serving my apprenticeship on the bay bridge. When you see those guys up there, who have been around for a while, and they’ve got that stare in the eye, and you say, ‘What’s wrong?’ And he says, ‘I’m scared, aren’t you?’ Think about it. We’re up there, and we’ve got iron swinging all around us. So there’s always that awareness, or fear, that something could go wrong.”

Henry knew all about the life because his father, two uncles had been ironworkers, going back to the construction of the first Bay Bridge in the 1950s. So, after a stint in the Army, Henry joined Local 16. “It was a family thing and I got into it and loved it,” he says.

He started out on his butt, sitting on beams, holding on with two hands while sliding from place to place. It’s what a lot of new ironworkers do before standing and walking on beams. It is relatively safe, but there’s a downside. “You wear out too many pairs of pants,” Henry says, “and your behind gets sore.”

He landed on the Key Bridge project in 1975, bolting beams to girders. Because the project was behind schedule, Henry regularly worked overtime. He lasted two years, before the bridge was finished.

“I left the job a little early, before they connected the center span,” he says. “I’d been working for two years, seven days a week, sometimes 12 hours a day. … I was just tired.”

Henry took a couple of weeks off, then got another job through the union, building a downtown office tower at Pratt and Charles Street. He later worked on the Fort McHenry Tunnel.

After retiring as an ironworker, Henry took a job with the state of Maryland, doing road maintenance on the Key Bridge. His tears on Tuesday were for a bridge he’d not only built but helped keep in good repair.

Henry, Piccione and Cefalu all saw the bridge, a steel smile across the Patapsco, as a point of personal pride, something they built well, something that would stand forever. They remember being up on the iron, taking breaks to enjoy the great vistas to the north and south, the tall ships entering the harbor for the nation’s bicentennial in 1976.

As the years went by, they frequently crossed the bridge with thousands of other travelers.

“There wasn’t a time,” says Cefalu, “when I didn’t take notice of the iron, going across the road bed, looking up through the sunroof of the car at the top bracing, being able to say I walked on that iron, I was up on that iron, I helped put this thing together, beam by beam.”