Silver Bridge 1967

This brilliant sunny January  morning with a temperature of 48 as I crossed the Ohio River, I thought "how safe is this bridge?". Automatically I thought back to December 15, 1967, and another bridge, the Silver Bridge, that spanned the Ohio connecting Gallipolis/Kanauga  to every place else on the other side of the river, namely Point Pleasant West Virginia. 

December 15 will always take me back to another time and place. The school week was finished and the feelings and sounds of Christmas were in the air as I practiced “O Holy Night” on the piano.  I was waiting for my husband Ronnie to come home from work at the Goodyear Plant in Apple Grove so we could do some Christmas shopping.  The phone rang (and that would be the last time we had phone service for several hours) and it was the wife of his carpooling friend wondering if I had heard from them since they were late.  Luckily, he and Jerry Doughman, his carpooling friend, had stayed a few minutes late at work to shower and clean out their lockers. So they were only as far as where the old Dance Gas Station was located (probably where Cap't D's is now) when they met ambulances and police headed toward Kanauga.  They turned around and went back see what had happened that would result in so many emergency vehicles. Like everyone else they were in shock at what they saw. They helped on the river bank for a while. (I remember he said that he thought he found a man alive in a car, but when he opened the door the man fell out dead.)  

We lived in town on

5th Avenue

and as I played the piano, I heard all of the sirens sounding and not stopping.  I wondered what was happening, and within minutes, my mother-in-law along with her sister and their mother, came to a braking halt in front of my house. Rushing in, they said the bridge had fallen and they were going up there and wanted me to come along. I went as far as their car (in slacks, bedroom slippers, and no coat) when I decided not to go as I felt and said, "He would expect me to be here."  As they pulled out, I turned to go back inside and discovered the door shut and locked and I had no key. 

    We had recently moved to this house and I didn’t know any neighbors. But that night I might Henry and Mary Fowler. Mary learned that if you had not heard from a family member, you were to go to the Episcopal Church over on

Second Ave

, just two blocks from our house. I waited there with other families who were concerned about family members. It was very quiet with people talking in hushed tones when around 7:30 I heard our car outside. (It was a VW with glass pack mufflers that cackled, a very distinctive sound, definitively not quiet.)  When I heard those, I knew my husband was okay.  Many of those people waiting in the church that night did receive the sad news that their loved one “had gone down on the Silver Bridge”

Rescue Scene

Another note to my story, the preceding week I had bought an AM/FM radio at GC Murphy's for Ronnie's Christmas present. FM radio had not been out very long so this was a really special gift.  So that evening to hear the latest news about the bridge, I pulled that radio out from its hiding place under the bed. The rest of the story is that had Ronnie gotten home on time, he had planned to go to GC Murphy's to buy that same radio for me.