June 15, 1956: At the center of the span, the catwalks meet. Of the 2,500 workers on the bridge, five met death during its construction
Men of Iron
Men of Iron
St. Ignace and Mackinaw city weren't Quite ready for the ironworkers when they rolled in, driving big fancy cars and towing sleek travel trailers, in the spring of 1954. The most excitement the two towns were used to was the annual invasion of deer hunters on opening day, when the Straits ferries would get as much as 19 hours behind hauling cars across.
The 2,500 ironworkers and other tradesmen who came from across the United States would refer to the Upper Peninsula as "the Canadian side." They set up shop in the old Nicolet Hotel in St. Ignace and went to work pouring concrete for the 34 piers that would serve as stepping stones across five miles of turbulent waters.
they came from places like Texas City, Tx., and Pocatello, Idaho, Easton, Pa., and Pagosa Springs, Co. They had names like Flop Ears Jones, Race Horse Roberts, Red Eve Maglothin, Few Hairs Sherwood, Beer-Barrel Morgan, Blackie Bullard. They had a weakness for big fast cars and big fast women.
They were called "boomers," because wherever there was a big job, they came in to do it and a poor sleepy village like St. Ignace was transformed overnight into a boom town.
They went out every morning to pour concrete, or set reinforcing bars, or join massive steel frames with bolts and rivets or spin the cables that hold up the roadway. It was always cold and rainy and the wind blew to beat hell and if the sun ever shone and the air turned mild, well, nobody seems to remember those days.
When the boomers weren't building the bridge out on the water, they were building it in the taverns of St. Ignace and Mackinaw City. There's an old ironworker's saying: "you build a 100-ton job on the site and a 900-ton job in the bars."
There was a 24-hour craps game in the men's room at the Nicolet Bar, so crowded at night you had to shove your way in. Sophies Bar had a pet fox who sat on the piano when it wasn't roaming around underfoot begging for beer. A black madam named Lil moved up from Detroit with a stable of girls and opened a whorehouse under the water tower in Mackinaw City. For Five bucks, you got a bath, sex, and a barbecue dinner. The parking lot at the Straits Inn was always full and when you asked Mike Carrier, the owner, where all his patrons were, he'd point up the street and say, "They park here and walk up the beach to that whorehouse. I'm a goddamn parking lot for that place."
Sometimes on a slow night, the guys would leave the Nicolet in St. Ignace and go over to the bar at the Wright Hotel and watch the Indians fight. After the ironworkers had been in town a while, the Indians used to go down to the Nicolet and watch a brawl.
J.C.Stilwell, who broke in as a punk - an apprentice ironworker - on the Mackinac Bridge, said he didn't drink too much but remembers a couple of guys who did. They'll all tell you that.
"Old Red Eye Maglothin and Chuck Heinboll, they liked their beer and whiskey, and nine times out of ten they'd close the bars and not have enough money left for a hotel room. So they'd climb into their car and park somewhere and go to sleep. And every morning, we'd have to drive around looking for them and when we found that old Packard and opened the door you'd just get hit with the smell of beer."
Then there was old Jimmy Armstrong, a timekeeper in the yard at St. Ignace. "He was an older fellow, a kind of comical guy, who handled his beer pretty good," recalls Delbert "Deb" Cornett of Chesterton, Ind., who was a construction superintendent on the bridge. "He'd go down to the Indian place and get all drunked up and give these Indians a temperance sermon and try to be like a spiritual father to them, and maybe they were laughing at him, I don't know. One time he was walking down the street and there was this stuffed Indian on the sidewalk outside some tourist place and Jimmy spoke to him then headed down to the tavern and had a few more beers. On the way back, he stopped to talk to that Indian again, and naturally he didn't answer old Jimmy. So Jimmy said,'When I talk to you, you'd better answer me back,' and of course the Indian didn't say anything so Jimmy just kicked the hell out of that dummy."When you walk eight-inch beams 550 feet above the water for a living, it's not wise to be drinking. "One slip and you're in the hole," is the ironworkers' saying. You got fired for drinking on the job.
But that didn't stop Louie the Thief from shooting vodka into oranges and selling them to the guys. Ernie Wallen used to hide two bottles, one at each end of the dock. "I never did get caught," he boasts.
Joe Lambert, a full-blooded Chippewa Indian who today runs his own construction business in St. Ignace, remembers the day he was working on the tower and lowered a water bucket down to the lake. When he hauled the bucket back up, it had six cold cans of Stroh's in it and some people were waving up at him from the deck of a yacht.
There were some good times out on that job, no question. And when quitting came and the fat pay envelopes were handed out, the fun really began.
"There was a moose head on the wall in one bar, and one night we were pretty well along and J.C. said, 'This moose is snarling at me'," recalls Bill Nichols of Cheboygan. "So I took out my lighter and in five seconds, we had a bald moose."
When the weather turned ugly, nobody went out on the water. Toward the end of 1954, when the contractors were reluctant to close down the job for the season, a marathon poker game got going in a work shack down by the dock. For seven weeks, nobody worked but everybody showed up early at the shack because they wanted a good seat at the card table.
"Late one day, Dec. 12, 1954, the day we shut down for the winter, everyone went to the Straits Inn," remembers Bill Westfall, who came up from West Virginia to build the bridge approaches. "Each guy put a $20 bill on the bar and after that, everything went blank."
The money flowed fast and loose in St. Ignace and Mackinaw City those days. And if the ironworkers raised a little hell, the city fathers looked the other way.