(Copied from a letter I just sent to my family, after my brother, who worked on the Key Bridge, sent us some photos he took during its construction.)
Dear Family,
I don't think people can possibly understand that those pillars and other bridge structures J worked on were all massive "pours." These were not prefab pillars brought in and set in place. The giant concrete forms all had to built around the massive rebar structures built by hand by the iron workers and laborers. J's photos on top are like a picture of the cherry on top of a cake. That was almost the "topping out" party. The work that went into getting there, up to that point, people just would not believe. To be standing at the top of that process must be unforgettable. Did they use concrete pumps then, or all buckets?

In the same era, if not the same summer, I worked on the 95 and 395 "flyover" bridges over the same river. You worked at the top, I was at the bottom working down in a cofferdam. My working area looked like the artist's rendition on top. Square, with a barge and crane by it. The bottom working area looked like in the photo, but we were not near anything and did not have a foot bridge. We were out in the middle of the river. We were brought to the barge on work boats, and lowered down into the bottom of the river bed in a "man basket." We jack hammered the bed rock to make about 100 holes in a pattern, put dynamite into them, covered it all with a giant steel mesh blanket, (lowered by the crane), then we got far away. The steel blanket would fly up into the air above the cofferdam but it contained all the rocks and rubble.

Then we'd go back down and put all the rocks into an empty cement bucket lowered down to us by the crane. Anything too big to lift by hand had a steel wire choker put around it for the crane to lift out and put on other barges for removal. When all the rocks and boulders were out, we did the jack hammering again. We'd have to change the jackhammer drill bits for longer ones as we went down. 2', 4', 6'. That was heavy work. It took several men to lift the jackhammers out of the holes with the long bits on them.

The dust and noise was unbelievable. Just yellow foam earplugs. Pumps on the barge running 24/7 to keep the river out because the cofferdam's interlocking steel planks were not watertight. When we had a new pattern of 100 or or so holes, all drilled to the same level depth, we did another demolition charge with dynamite the size of paper towel tubes down each hole. I eagerly worked with the demo-man as his assistant, nobody else wanted to be near cases and cases of dynamite! Before I was ever a SEAL, I had personally put blasting caps into probably a thousand dynamite charges, about 100 per "shot."

The wires were wrapped around the charges and that's how we lowered them down each hole, by their blasting cap wires. Pea gravel was poured down each hole to "tamp" the explosions for maximum power. Then they were all wired together for one big blast. I was alone at the bottom of the cofferdam with the demo man for all of that charge preparation and placement and wiring. All the other older construction workers wanted nothing to do with demo, but I loved it!  Then the crane would lift us up and we'd be taken far away. I would be standing next to the demo guy, and I got to push the button a few times. BOOM! Then repeat the process deep down into bedrock under the Patapsco River with jackhammers. Those supporting piers are STRONG. I think of the 395 as "my bridge."

Always very high decibels. Giant pumps running, and a half-dozen jackhammers going all the time down in a steel box! Injuries like cuts were wrapped in pieces of t-shirt and duct tape until the end of your work day. The workers were very tough men. West Virginia hillbillies, Vietnam vets and ex-convicts. Working with them down in the cofferdam and on other Baltimore mega-construction jobs in the 1970s gave me the confidence to become a SEAL. Other summers I also worked on big highway and land construction projects down in Dundalk, but working at the bottom of the Patapsco River stands out in my mind above them all.

I think I was 16 or 17 at the time. I was a card-carrying member of International Union of Laborers. If you said you were 18, and looked like you could work, you were good to go. In those days, driver licenses and union cards were not laminated, and did not have photos on them. I showed up for my first construction job with a beat-up hard hat, a dirty tool belt and dirty work boots and was hired at a construction trailer in the pre-dawn dark. My dad and J had told me what to do and say and it worked. I was hired and never looked back. I was making $ 5.50 an hour when the minimum wage was about $ 1.50. I was making triple what my high school friends made at pizza joints.

J also worked the big concrete pours high up on the 40-story Transamerica Tower in downtown Baltimore. I did nothing even close to that. We never worked the same jobs, but for all of them, we took several buses in the dark in our hardhats and work boots with our tool belts to get to the jobs, and we came home filthy. But everybody on the buses had great respect and deference for construction workers back then. We were "the hard hats" who were visibly building up Baltimore and the whole port area month by month and year by year!

But in my opinion the crowning achievement of them all was the Francis Scott Key Bridge. For almost 50 years the Key Bridge literally framed Baltimore for every mariner as they sailed in from the Chesapeake. It also gave motorists a fantastic view of Baltimore. It must be unbelievable to you all in Baltimore what happened to it. I wish Maryland had built giant protective dolphin islands like they did for the similar Betsy Ross Bridge in Philly. End of an era. It's just gut wrenching to think not only of the terrible current consequences, but the millions and millions of brutally-hard man-hours of labor that went into building that bridge. It really bothers me that it was destroyed. My mind has just been flooding with these old Baltimore construction job memories since the disaster. Hence this long missive.