"I was impressed by these guys. They worked hard and they played hard," says Larry Rubin, who served 30 years as executive secretary of the Mackinaw Bridge Authority. "They did some drinking and brawling and whoring. There were a few local girls who got married - and a few who didn't. But the people of St. Ignace were so happy to have the payroll they were willing to overlook a lot of things, including a few virgins going astray."
But there was more than boozing and womanizing, more than the feel of cold iron and the moan of the fog horns. There was an awareness of the closeness of death in the cold deep waters of the Straits, and the memory of the five men who died bridging Michigan's two peninsulas.
"An ironworker's wife is always afraid," says Betty Tisron, whose husband, Jack, spent a lifetime in ironwork. "But it's something you learn to live with and put in the back of your mind. When you kiss him goodbye in the morning, you don't know if you'll ever kiss him again. You're always afraid. You wonder, does he have to do it? But once an ironworker, always an ironworker. It's in their blood."Deloris Edens and Bob Koppen were teen-age sweethearts. When they married in 1946, he was 18, she 17. He dropped out of Plymouth High School three weeks shy of graduation and went to work at the Ford Motor Co.'s Rouge complex, fixing the huge furnaces in the steel mill.
Shift change: Part of a total workforce of 10,000
"He hated it," recalls Deloris, "He said it was like a prison, going to work in the same place every day. He liked to be outside, couldn't stand being closed in."
When he was 22, Koppen joined the Riggers union, a branch of the Ironworkers, and learned to operate a forklift and a crane. He was outside, and he loved it.
He earned his journeyman's card. Then came the announcement that after years of political and financial controversy, a bridge was going up across the Straits of Mackinac.
"From the time they started to build the bridge, he wanted to go up there," says Deloris. "He said he wanted to work on the bridge because they said it couldn't be built. He wanted to prove it could."
For two years, she begged him not to go. It was too big, she cried, too far away. By the time Bob finally convinced her to let him go, the couple had four children, from the ages of four months to nine years.
"I remember the night before dad was going to leave for Mackinac," says Carol Koppen Warner, who was 9 at the time. "I woke up in the night and heard him crying."
Bob promised his wife he'd send for her and the children as soon as he found a cottage for them. They'd get a real vacation for the first time, and he could make enough money for them to finish the house they were building on Ford Road in Canton Township.
As he drove away, Deloris was in tears. She was angry and lonely and scared.
The Mackinac Bridge is five miles long, shore to shore. the suspended portion of the bridge is 7,400 feet long, the longest such span in the world. There are bridges that are longer between towers, but for sheer volume and beauty, none compare to Big Mac.
The bridge was built from more than a million tons of concrete and steel - nine-tenths of it underwater in massive piers that support the approaches, the cable anchorages and the 552-foot-high towers.
The steel is joined with 4.8 million rivets and a million bolts. The engineers drew 85,000 blueprints showing the exact location of each rivet and bolt. Every tolerance was met to within one thirty-second of an inch.
Some 10,000 men were involved in the construction; 2,500 at the bridge site and 7,500 at quarries, shops and mills in Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and New Jersey.
The work was demanding and dangerous. In late fall, the steel would ice over, the wind blew fiercely, the waves reached 25 feet, and life was generally miserable.