This was the first day on the job. Before he went out on the water, Koppen mailed a letter he had written the previous night to his young wife back in Plymouth.
"It is very beautiful up here. Very warm today," the journeyman rigger wrote. "My working hours are from 11a.m. to ? I am going to have to do Ironwork. Tomorrow I go up on the main pillar, about 275-300ft. Pray for me. And I hope you get this letter in time for a prayer. HAHA."
Five hours later in an accident, that shouldn't have happened, Bob Koppen and a co-worker were thrown from a narrow platform near the top of the tower. On the way down, he struggled unsuccessfully to unbuckle his ironworker's belt--40 pounds of wrenches, hammers, bolts and rivets. He turned so he would enter the water head first. He didn't make a sound. The other man tossed from the platform, Jack Baker from Colorado, screamed like a siren all the way down, a wail the men on the tower that day will never forget.
Koppen's broken body floated on the water momentarily, then sank like a two-inch iron bolt, down, down into the chill 200-foot-deep waters of the Straits.
" I'll never live to be 30," Koppen used to tell Deloris. "and when I go, I don't want any big fuss over my body. No big funeral and a lot of crying."
Bob Koppen was 28 when he went in the hole, as the ironworkers say. His body was never found.
"I wouldn't refer to him as a hero," his widow said recently. "He was an Ironworker."
