A play in one scene:
A dark night inside the domed Capitol building of a struggling state on the first weekend of summer. Most legislators are long gone with the spring session over. Two men cross paths in the shadows.
NED: Senator? Is that you? Shouldn’t you be home plotting the next Medicaid expansion?
MARTY: Hello, Governor. I was just polishing up my comments for next week’s ceremony.
NED: Ceremony?
MARTY: You know, when you sign paid family and medical leave into law. Took us three years to get it through, a triumph for working people. It’s a great social insurance program that brings us in line with other forward-looking states. What keeps you here so late?
NED: Tolls, Senator Looney, tolls. We have no other way to fix our roads and bridges to get this state moving again. I just spent the week laying out all the facts — how the numbers can’t add up to the $1.2 billion a year we need, even with the car sales tax and more borrowing. Bridge tolls don’t add up either.
MARTY: So what do you want from me?
NED: I want a vote on tolls in the Senate, Marty. Joe A-to-Z has the support lined up in the House. We need you to take action. People are wondering why we haven’t called a special session. They’re starting to believe Fasano that we can’t pass it.MARTY: I don’t know, Gov. I’m just not sure we have the numbers.
NED: Let’s go through this one more time. Hartley is a no for sure, Kushner campaigned against it. Mae Flexer is a no but maybe the unions can bring her around. Maroney is in a tough spot and so is Needleman. But we have the lieutenant governor for a tie-break so we need just one of those five. Come on, Marty. You know you have this.
MARTY: Yeah, okay, but I’m worried, Ned. We’re getting so much done. A $15 minimum wage. Fully funded agencies. Protection for immigrants. Ethan’s law. Time’s Up on sexual assault. Police accountability. Health care for 4,000 more poor parents. Now, paid leave. Why risk all this progress by making senators take an unpopular vote? Some who will vote for it don’t even like tolls. Now they’ll take a fall in 2020.
NED: Been meaning to talk with you about paid leave, Marty. It sure is a pretty bill.
MARTY: Senate Bill Number 1. Our highest priority.
NED: It would be a shame if something happened to it. You know, like, if a legal glitch fell on it and I couldn’t sign the bill. I’d hate to see that.
MARTY: Governor Lamont! You wouldn’t.
NED: Hey, don’t get me wrong, I like paid leave. Even campaigned on it. Everyone pays one-half of 1 percent of their income up to the Social Security threshold - what is that, about $140,000? How can people live on that? Anyway, it should help attract young people to the state.MARTY: That’s $132,900, governor. Yeah, I can’t believe the Republicans think it’s just another tax on hard-working families. And Haar, usually on our side, said in a column we should delay it until the state is back on solid ground. Doesn’t he see all the good it would do?
NED: I know you have your heart set on it. And speaking of tolls, did you see I sweetened the deal with a $100 million income tax cut for the working class? If I were smart, I’d up that to at least $250 million by throwing in some property tax credits for homeowners. Could even target the credits at poor cities, Senator. Like, I don’t know, New Haven?
MARTY: Oh Governor, I never knew you cared.
NED: I care, Marty, I care a lot. You really delivered for me in November and I want to sign that paid family leave bill - maybe right there in your district. That would show up Brennan at CBIA for coming down against tolls, defying half his members. But I need that vote, Senator. Let’s get it done in the summer. No one will even notice - just like the primaries last year.
MARTY: Listen, Ned. You know I’m with you, but a lot of taxpayers say they can’t trust state government. We passed that lock-box referendum in November and seven months later, we yank $58 million of the car sales tax from the transportation fund. Now we’re seeing reports our DOT spends way more per mile on road reconstruction than just about any other state. Seven billion dollars for the Waterbury Mixmaster, really?
NED: That’s just not true. Just Thursday, Joey G. at the DOT told editorial writers that report in Reason about wild spending was ‘inherently flawed.’ He said, ‘When we actually do an orange-to-orange comparison, there is no difference.’ Then Giulietti said the author of the report is about to come out with a revision.
MARTY: We certainly need to straighten that out with the public.
NED: What we certainly need is that tolls vote. Stop worrying. Trump on the ballot in ‘20 means your Senate Dems could run naked along I-95 carrying Nader signs and still win re-election. That leaves you in charge until you’re what, almost 75 in ’23? I could be a one-termer like Weicker but that’s okay.
MARTY: It’s a $500 million tax hike, Ned.
NED: With $300 million from out-of-state drivers and interstate trucks. Don’t make me keep talking about interstate trucks. Way, way cheaper than borrowing.
MARTY: Hard to refute when you put it that way. Can we keep all the gantries out of cities? I don’t want to see any clogged local roads. And tell Lehman at DECD to knock it off with expanding Tweed, okay? That’s the only thing Fasano and I agree on.
NED: We’ll see. Just get it done - for SB 1.
MARTY: Thanks for not mentioning it to Pelosi at the dinner. You know she loves tolls as much as legalized pot.
NED: Speaking of that, how about you and I head up to Northamption? Elliott tells me the Ghost Train Haze is kickass. Too bad you couldn’t get that bill through.
MARTY: That was the House, governor, not us. Talk to Joe.
Construction Work on I-91 in Rocky Hill Expected to Start Monday VIDEO
The state Department of Transportation is expected to begin construction work on Elm Street in Rocky Hill Monday.
Crews were supposed to start replacing two bridges on the street that runs over Interstate 91 last week but postponed it until after the Travelers Championship.
The work is expected to last through late August.
BRIDGE BUILDERS: Men who constructed Pell Bridge tell their stories
Derek Gomes
Fifty years since motorists first crossed under its twin high-arching towers, the Pell Bridge remains an architectural marvel. The longest suspension bridge in New England forever changed the City-by-the-Sea, making it easier for islanders to get to the rest of the state and visitors, for better or worse, to get here.
Depictions of the bridge seem to be everywhere — from the back of the state quarter, to the background of driver’s licenses. It has captured the imaginations of Rhode Islanders — Newporters in particular — like few other structures.
For the countless people who helped build the bridge, the structure is more than an object of fascination; it is a marker in their lives. Workers from across Rhode Island and beyond converged on Newport day after day to raise the structure from the depths of Narragansett Bay’s East Passage.
Assigned to the project were professional construction workers and summer-job seekers alike. The promise of long work weeks and lucrative overtime was incentive enough for many.
From the beginning of 1966 through the spring of 1969, different contractors completed the bridge — from driving the piles that formed its foundation, to assembling the pieces of the superstructure and putting them in place high above the water. Workers like Newport resident Patrick Hayes gathered near Long Wharf to connect pieces of steel and transport them on barges to the construction site.
Asked if the scene there resembled that of a factory assembly line, he said it was more chaotic. Workers had to have their heads on a swivel. They were stationed a few dozen feet atop pieces of steel, while cranes were swinging materials to and fro nearby.
The Newport Daily News spoke with eight men, who ranged in age from recent high-school graduates to their early 30s when they worked on the bridge, about what stood out to them from that experience on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the bridge’s opening, on June 28. For some, it was a career milestone; for others it was an aberration, a detour before they found their true calling. For all of them, the experience gave them a sense of ownership or pride that they played a role, however small, in building that iconic structure.
Like son, like father
Jerry Candelmo downplayed his contributions to building the bridge. He was only on site for a month or two, after all, before he was deployed to Vietnam with his National Guard unit, the 103rd Field Artillery Regiment.
If it weren’t for his father’s role, Candelmo likely would not have agreed to sit down with a reporter in the first place. After owning a tiling business, Anthony Candelmo took a job on one of the tugboats that ferried workers to and from the bridge site. His inexperience did not deter the powers that be from hiring him as a deckhand responsible for cooking meals.
“They were looking for men — they were looking for bodies, let’s put it that way,” Jerry Candelmo said. ”‘Do you think your dad would be interested in doing it?’” he remembered being asked. “So I asked him, ‘Dad, would you like to go down there? It’s a good-paying job.’ He always loved the water. So he went and he stayed there until they took that tug out of there — and the tug stayed until almost the end.” When his father died many years ago, Jerry Candelmo’s brother gave him a token of their father’s work on the bridge: a photo of Anthony Candelmo on the tugboat, with the hulking superstructure of the bridge looming above. The bridge project marked the beginning and end of Anthony Candelmo’s construction career. He went on to manage a parking lot on Empire Street in Providence. For his son, his service during the Vietnam War disrupted what would ultimately be a 45-year construction career.
“When I first started working, I used to ride with this man, an operator, and we were working in Fall River just as you go over the Braga Bridge,” he said. “And we’d be going along and I’d be in his pickup truck and he’d say to me, ‘Jerry, you see that building right there? I put that one up. See that one? I put that one up.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God, this man has worked on so many projects.’”
Thirty-five years later, the roles were reversed, with Candelmo pointing out to a younger co-worker all the buildings marked with his fingerprints.
“All the men who have worked on these projects,” he said, “they have done it with great pride.”
A new paint job for Dad’s ride
It was the summer of ’69. Officials soon would be commemorating the completion of the Newport Bridge with a dedication ceremony.
BRIDGE BUILDERS: Men who constructed Pell Bridge tell their stories
Derek Gomes
Dangerous conditions and good pay were just part of the thrill. As the 50th anniversary of the bridge’s opening approaches on June 28, eight men talk about their role in building one of the state’s iconic structures.
“This is the one business you start at the top and work your way down,” Conrad Johnson said about constructing the Pell Bridge. “You’re required to get up in the air. ... There was an adrenaline to it. It’s self-satisfying.”Fifty years since motorists first crossed under its twin high-arching towers, the Pell Bridge remains an architectural marvel. The longest suspension bridge in New England forever changed the City-by-the-Sea, making it easier for islanders to get to the rest of the state and visitors, for better or worse, to get here.
Depictions of the bridge seem to be everywhere — from the back of the state quarter, to the background of driver’s licenses. It has captured the imaginations of Rhode Islanders — Newporters in particular — like few other structures.
For the countless people who helped build the bridge, the structure is more than an object of fascination; it is a marker in their lives. Workers from across Rhode Island and beyond converged on Newport day after day to raise the structure from the depths of Narragansett Bay’s East Passage.
Assigned to the project were professional construction workers and summer-job seekers alike. The promise of long work weeks and lucrative overtime was incentive enough for many.
From the beginning of 1966 through the spring of 1969, different contractors completed the bridge — from driving the piles that formed its foundation, to assembling the pieces of the superstructure and putting them in place high above the water. Workers like Newport resident Patrick Hayes gathered near Long Wharf to connect pieces of steel and transport them on barges to the construction site.
Asked if the scene there resembled that of a factory assembly line, he said it was more chaotic. Workers had to have their heads on a swivel. They were stationed a few dozen feet atop pieces of steel, while cranes were swinging materials to and fro nearby.
The Newport Daily News spoke with eight men, who ranged in age from recent high-school graduates to their early 30s when they worked on the bridge, about what stood out to them from that experience on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the bridge’s opening, on June 28. For some, it was a career milestone; for others it was an aberration, a detour before they found their true calling. For all of them, the experience gave them a sense of ownership or pride that they played a role, however small, in building that iconic structure.
Like son, like father
Jerry Candelmo downplayed his contributions to building the bridge. He was only on site for a month or two, after all, before he was deployed to Vietnam with his National Guard unit, the 103rd Field Artillery Regiment.
If it weren’t for his father’s role, Candelmo likely would not have agreed to sit down with a reporter in the first place. After owning a tiling business, Anthony Candelmo took a job on one of the tugboats that ferried workers to and from the bridge site. His inexperience did not deter the powers that be from hiring him as a deckhand responsible for cooking meals.
“They were looking for men — they were looking for bodies, let’s put it that way,” Jerry Candelmo said. ”‘Do you think your dad would be interested in doing it?’” he remembered being asked. “So I asked him, ‘Dad, would you like to go down there? It’s a good-paying job.’ He always loved the water. So he went and he stayed there until they took that tug out of there — and the tug stayed until almost the end.” When his father died many years ago, Jerry Candelmo’s brother gave him a token of their father’s work on the bridge: a photo of Anthony Candelmo on the tugboat, with the hulking superstructure of the bridge looming above. The bridge project marked the beginning and end of Anthony Candelmo’s construction career. He went on to manage a parking lot on Empire Street in Providence. For his son, his service during the Vietnam War disrupted what would ultimately be a 45-year construction career.
“When I first started working, I used to ride with this man, an operator, and we were working in Fall River just as you go over the Braga Bridge,” he said. “And we’d be going along and I’d be in his pickup truck and he’d say to me, ‘Jerry, you see that building right there? I put that one up. See that one? I put that one up.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God, this man has worked on so many projects.’”
Thirty-five years later, the roles were reversed, with Candelmo pointing out to a younger co-worker all the buildings marked with his fingerprints.
“All the men who have worked on these projects,” he said, “they have done it with great pride.”
A new paint job for Dad’s ride
It was the summer of ’69. Officials soon would be commemorating the completion of the Newport Bridge with a dedication ceremony.
Vincent Marseglia, who’d just completed his first year at the University of Rhode Island, returned to the bridge for his second summer on the job.He got permission from his father to take his Oldsmobile 88 on the commute from Cranston to Newport. All these years later, he remembers that immaculate car — its black paint job and red interior.
With the deck work completed, Marseglia parked the car on the bridge during his shifts. One day, crews were adding a fresh coat of paint to the steel, and a steady wind blew. As he walked back to the Oldsmobile 88 to head home, his stomach dropped.
“There are thousands of these little green dots on my dad’s car,” he said. “I had to get rubbing compound and compound the whole car and then wax it. After I was done, the car looked just fantastic. But I’ll never forget that. ... So I learned my lesson about parking on the bridge.”
After finishing high school in 1968, Marseglia took a summer job on the bridge doing grunt work. Stationed at the yard, where the Louis Jagschitz State Pier and Newport Shipyard are now, he was tasked with handing bolts to the professional ironworkers who were putting together pieces of the superstructure that were then transported by barge to the bridge site.
“That summer was like we worked 10 hours a day, six days a week,” he recalled. “All the overtime was double time. ... All I had time for was go to work, come home, take a shower, eat, go to bed.”
Marseglia caught the eye of the higher-ups, and by the end of that summer he was tightening bolts himself.
He got married while at URI and didn’t have enough money to pay for an extravagant honeymoon; Newport had to do. Every year, he and his wife return to the City-by-the-Sea to celebrate their anniversary. When he crosses the bridge, he thinks, “I can’t believe I did that.”
“I always tell my grandkids whenever we go over, ‘I worked on that bridge,’” he added. Their response: “Yeah, Papa, you told us that.”
Watching the pieces fall into place
The Newport Bridge project is the one that Conrad Johnson, a full-time ironworker for 38 years, will always remember.
“I think as you grow up ... you want to have some kind of accomplishment, you like to have one story that is remembered by everybody,” he said. “When you say, ‘I worked on that bridge,’ everybody knows what you’re talking about, because it’s the biggest bridge in the state.”
Being a trained paratrooper in the Army did little to ease Johnson’s concerns about being hundreds of feet above water on beams that were only several inches wide. “This is the one business you start at the top and work your way down,” he said. “You’re required to get up in the air. ... There was an adrenaline to it. It’s self-satisfying.”
He was assigned to build the lower section of the tower on the Jamestown side of the span and, after taking a break to work on another job site on Cape Cod, the upper reaches of the tower on the Newport side. The work might have been monotonous at times, but the engineering that allowed for such a colossal structure captured Johnson’s imagination. For example, workers could be bolting together pieces of steel and were instructed to leave a few holes unfilled in specific places, he explained. Only months later, in some cases, would bolts be added.
“Like I say, the engineering was phenomenal,” he said. “The pieces fall together.”
A bridge he helped build, but rarely crossed
George Akstin’s first construction job was building a biochemistry lab at Brown University. As that project was winding down, Akstin needed more work, so he went to his local union hall. The next day, he was at the bridge site.
“Probably about zero,” he said when asked what relevant skills he brought to the job. “You know, I had worked in a factory. I had worked as an auto mechanic for four or five years, which was kind of my fallback job.”
Like other novices, Akstin lugged a basket of bolts and gave them to his more experienced co-workers upon request. For the first two or three weeks, he was stationed at the yard. The next phase would test the young man’s mettle. “The tugboat dropped us off at the same place every day,” Akstin said. “There was a set of ladders to the top. The first day when we went out to the spot, I thought, ‘Holy crap, we’re up that high?’”
A motorcycle accident in 1970 cut short his fledgling construction career. For the next 33 years, eight months and one day, Akstin worked at a jewelry production plant in Attleboro. He enjoyed the work for the first 20 to 25 years before cost-cutting measures sapped the joy from the building. Akstin retired when leadership announced it was shutting down the plant.
Now living in Tacoma, Washington, he is planning to visit Rhode Island later this summer for his grandson’s 30th birthday.
He still has his E-ZPass transponder handy, though he wishes the toll wouldn’t apply to him. “You know, I didn’t drive over that bridge for years because I was like, it’s $2 to cross. No, I’ll do 10 cents on the Mount Hope Bridge. The least they could have done [for the workers] was: Here’s a free pass.”
A job worth doing right
For Ray Ferreira, doing every job right is what matters the most. The work itself was worth it.
His father emigrated from the Azores to Portsmouth, where Ferreira has spent his entire life. “Like Dad said in Portuguese, ‘Pay attention,’” Ferreira said. “And that was me. I did. That’s why I am where I am today.” He also has an innate curiosity about how and why systems function. “Everything I do I have to know everything about it, and it stays right in my mind, you know.”
Those two qualities allowed Ferreira to soak up as much information as possible about the bridge project and, on one occasion, likely saved lives.
One Friday afternoon, workers crammed into the cage that lowered them toward the water. The lift that was intended to carry eight people was packed with about 18.
“It started coming down,” Ferreira said. “It starts speeding up.”
He remembered one of the workers previously instructing him about an emergency lever that would bring the lift to a sudden halt.
“I say, ‘Hit that lever!’” he said. “He whacked it and it put the brakes on. Lives were saved.”
Ferreira started working in Newport earlier than most, helping build the causeway out to Goat Island in 1963. Once that was done, he drove piles, the foundations on which the bridge structure stands, and he went on to work for Bethlehem Steel as an ironworker. He quips that he was among the last men to walk off the job site.
“It’s one of the greatest things I’ve done,” Ferreira said. “I look at it that way. I was so happy that I did it, so happy. The grandchildren call it Papa’s Bridge. It was so gratifying.”
An invitation to ‘God’s country’
Anthony Branca was out of work in New York City with bleak employment prospects.
A friend recommended heading to Newport, the site of an ambitious bridge-construction project. Branca took an interview with Parsons, Brinckerhoff, Quade and Douglas, the engineering firm overseeing the project. John W. Kinney, the resident engineer, wanted to know how much experience Branca had in surveying work. Very little, he responded, barring some rudimentary combat surveying during the Korean War.
Branca got the job and reported for his first day of work on Jan. 3, 1966. His first responsibility was analyzing surveying reports used to identify the coordinates to drive the piles. At his disposal to crunch the numbers was a Monroe calculator with the four basic functions and a thin booklet of logarithms.
Asked if he ever worried about the accuracy of his coordinates, he said: “Let me tell you, I never thought about it. It wasn’t until years later that the magnitude of my responsibility really hit me. ... It was a job to do, I did the job, and that was it. Not to put too much on me. We checked, but the responsibility was on the contractor [Perini Corp.].”
Once the foundations were in place, one of Branca’s main responsibilities was PBQD’s ledgers, calculating the exact amount of materials brought to the job site for payment purposes. His bookkeeping practices drew the ire of one contractor, who took exception to Branca’s practice of rounding quantities to the third decimal point instead of the industry-standard first decimal point. Being meticulous was his calling card.
Taking the bridge job forever changed his trajectory. He and his family never left New England.
“I’m in God’s country here. I love it,” Branca recalled thinking. “My children are growing strong and healthy.” He declined an offer from PBQD to work on a project back in New York.
As the Newport Bridge project wrapped up in 1969, his family remained in Newport so his two daughters could finish the school year. Eventually, they settled in Sharon, Massachusetts, where Branca lived until two years ago, when he moved to Smithfield. For about 35 years, he worked for bonding companies that secured his services for projects in jeopardy of going unfinished. Branca credits the lessons he gleaned on the Newport project for the success he enjoyed.
“I came to the job as an engineer with not a lot of real engineering experience,” he said. “On the job, I met professional engineers — not just by name, but by attitude and by performance. And it influenced me. I think by the time I got through with the job, it taught me professionalism that I didn’t know. And professionalism is what carried me through the rest of my life.”
With only one summer working on the project with no prior construction experience, Patrick Hayes takes little credit for the finished product.
Yet the lifelong Newporter takes pride in the fact he played a part in it, however inconsequential.
“There is at least one joint on that bridge that I built with my friend without any major ironworker or anybody else,” Hayes said. “I hope it doesn’t have a structural flaw,” he added as an afterthought.
Entering his senior year at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Hayes was looking to make some money that summer of 1968. And there was probably nowhere else a 20-year-old could rake in more than on the Newport Bridge.
He estimated he worked 10-hour days, seven days a week. In addition to overtime, Saturdays were time and a half, Sundays were double time and holidays triple time. “It was a very lucrative summer,” Hayes said. “I went back to college that year flush with cash, comparatively speaking. I made a lot of money for a summer job, that was for sure. But I worked, like I said, every day.”
Like other inexperienced laborers, he was assigned to the crews on the yard that put together pieces of the superstructure that were shipped out on barges.
“It was more hard work than difficult to figure out,” Hayes explained. “You carried the bolts up, you torque them up to the right [tightness] and then you test them — or you’re just feeding the stuff up to the guys who are doing the really dangerous work. You didn’t need an engineering degree to do this work, but you had to have some common sense or you’d get hit by a crane.”
That summer was his only foray into the construction industry. The following summer, the project was done and Hayes was preparing to start law school in Boston. He now specializes in estate planning and real estate law, with an office in Newport.
Tales from the bar
Sure, David Kilroy remembers working on the bridge. But what sticks with him most are the scenes that played out at Leo’s First and Last Stop on Long Wharf.
The bar was the go-to spot for the bridge workers to cash their paychecks and then blow off some steam — and their hard-earned keep.
“Sitting on a table is $200,000,” Kilroy said. “And [the man cashing the checks] had a .45-caliber pistol on the table and he had two bodyguards standing behind him. Some people walked out of that place with 10 bucks in their pocket. They blew all of the thousand bucks. It just evaporated.”
He regaled a reporter with the tale of Big Bob from Boston who broke a man’s jaw, not once, but twice in a matter of a few weeks. “The fights were crazy,” he said.
And just as quickly as people from across the country and beyond flocked to Newport for the job, they vanished once it ended. “It was surprising how fast they disappeared,” Kilroy said.
He learned about job opportunities on the bridge from a newspaper advertisement. At the time, he was working in the blood lab at Newport Hospital, making about $100 a week. PBQD was offering more than $500 a week. It was an offer Kilroy wasn’t going to turn down regardless of whether he was qualified for the job.
He filled out a questionnaire that tested his understanding of basic principles behind trigonometry and physics. “The last question was: Are you afraid of heights?” Kilroy said. “Well, of course, I said ‘No.’”
The truth was he had no idea. “I really didn’t know.”
Lamont eyes new strategy on toll issue
PAUL HUGHES
HARTFORD – Gov. Ned Lamont is just unable to sell state legislators and the public on highway tolls despite his decades of business deal making.
Nothing the former businessman has tried yet has won over a majority of House and Senate members, or changed public opinion.
“I’m ready to negotiate,” he said.
Lamont last week floated a targeted cut to the income tax to entice support. He has acknowledged he needs to do a better job of making the case for electronic highway tolls.
“I’ve tried to convince people this is the best investment we can make to get this state growing again,” he said.
This is something Lamont has been saying for months, and yet he is no closer to getting a tolling plan passed than six months ago when he took office. He is now left to try to get a vote done in a special session.
His changing positions have added to his challenge. First, he supported highway tolls for all motor vehicles, then out-of-state trucks only, and back again to tolls for passenger vehicles and trucks.
With the deck work completed, Marseglia parked the car on the bridge during his shifts. One day, crews were adding a fresh coat of paint to the steel, and a steady wind blew. As he walked back to the Oldsmobile 88 to head home, his stomach dropped.
“There are thousands of these little green dots on my dad’s car,” he said. “I had to get rubbing compound and compound the whole car and then wax it. After I was done, the car looked just fantastic. But I’ll never forget that. ... So I learned my lesson about parking on the bridge.”
After finishing high school in 1968, Marseglia took a summer job on the bridge doing grunt work. Stationed at the yard, where the Louis Jagschitz State Pier and Newport Shipyard are now, he was tasked with handing bolts to the professional ironworkers who were putting together pieces of the superstructure that were then transported by barge to the bridge site.
“That summer was like we worked 10 hours a day, six days a week,” he recalled. “All the overtime was double time. ... All I had time for was go to work, come home, take a shower, eat, go to bed.”
Marseglia caught the eye of the higher-ups, and by the end of that summer he was tightening bolts himself.
He got married while at URI and didn’t have enough money to pay for an extravagant honeymoon; Newport had to do. Every year, he and his wife return to the City-by-the-Sea to celebrate their anniversary. When he crosses the bridge, he thinks, “I can’t believe I did that.”
“I always tell my grandkids whenever we go over, ‘I worked on that bridge,’” he added. Their response: “Yeah, Papa, you told us that.”
Watching the pieces fall into place
The Newport Bridge project is the one that Conrad Johnson, a full-time ironworker for 38 years, will always remember.
“I think as you grow up ... you want to have some kind of accomplishment, you like to have one story that is remembered by everybody,” he said. “When you say, ‘I worked on that bridge,’ everybody knows what you’re talking about, because it’s the biggest bridge in the state.”
Being a trained paratrooper in the Army did little to ease Johnson’s concerns about being hundreds of feet above water on beams that were only several inches wide. “This is the one business you start at the top and work your way down,” he said. “You’re required to get up in the air. ... There was an adrenaline to it. It’s self-satisfying.”
He was assigned to build the lower section of the tower on the Jamestown side of the span and, after taking a break to work on another job site on Cape Cod, the upper reaches of the tower on the Newport side. The work might have been monotonous at times, but the engineering that allowed for such a colossal structure captured Johnson’s imagination. For example, workers could be bolting together pieces of steel and were instructed to leave a few holes unfilled in specific places, he explained. Only months later, in some cases, would bolts be added.
“Like I say, the engineering was phenomenal,” he said. “The pieces fall together.”
A bridge he helped build, but rarely crossed
George Akstin’s first construction job was building a biochemistry lab at Brown University. As that project was winding down, Akstin needed more work, so he went to his local union hall. The next day, he was at the bridge site.
“Probably about zero,” he said when asked what relevant skills he brought to the job. “You know, I had worked in a factory. I had worked as an auto mechanic for four or five years, which was kind of my fallback job.”
Like other novices, Akstin lugged a basket of bolts and gave them to his more experienced co-workers upon request. For the first two or three weeks, he was stationed at the yard. The next phase would test the young man’s mettle. “The tugboat dropped us off at the same place every day,” Akstin said. “There was a set of ladders to the top. The first day when we went out to the spot, I thought, ‘Holy crap, we’re up that high?’”
A motorcycle accident in 1970 cut short his fledgling construction career. For the next 33 years, eight months and one day, Akstin worked at a jewelry production plant in Attleboro. He enjoyed the work for the first 20 to 25 years before cost-cutting measures sapped the joy from the building. Akstin retired when leadership announced it was shutting down the plant.
Now living in Tacoma, Washington, he is planning to visit Rhode Island later this summer for his grandson’s 30th birthday.
He still has his E-ZPass transponder handy, though he wishes the toll wouldn’t apply to him. “You know, I didn’t drive over that bridge for years because I was like, it’s $2 to cross. No, I’ll do 10 cents on the Mount Hope Bridge. The least they could have done [for the workers] was: Here’s a free pass.”
A job worth doing right
For Ray Ferreira, doing every job right is what matters the most. The work itself was worth it.
His father emigrated from the Azores to Portsmouth, where Ferreira has spent his entire life. “Like Dad said in Portuguese, ‘Pay attention,’” Ferreira said. “And that was me. I did. That’s why I am where I am today.” He also has an innate curiosity about how and why systems function. “Everything I do I have to know everything about it, and it stays right in my mind, you know.”
Those two qualities allowed Ferreira to soak up as much information as possible about the bridge project and, on one occasion, likely saved lives.
One Friday afternoon, workers crammed into the cage that lowered them toward the water. The lift that was intended to carry eight people was packed with about 18.
“It started coming down,” Ferreira said. “It starts speeding up.”
He remembered one of the workers previously instructing him about an emergency lever that would bring the lift to a sudden halt.
“I say, ‘Hit that lever!’” he said. “He whacked it and it put the brakes on. Lives were saved.”
Ferreira started working in Newport earlier than most, helping build the causeway out to Goat Island in 1963. Once that was done, he drove piles, the foundations on which the bridge structure stands, and he went on to work for Bethlehem Steel as an ironworker. He quips that he was among the last men to walk off the job site.
“It’s one of the greatest things I’ve done,” Ferreira said. “I look at it that way. I was so happy that I did it, so happy. The grandchildren call it Papa’s Bridge. It was so gratifying.”
An invitation to ‘God’s country’
Anthony Branca was out of work in New York City with bleak employment prospects.
A friend recommended heading to Newport, the site of an ambitious bridge-construction project. Branca took an interview with Parsons, Brinckerhoff, Quade and Douglas, the engineering firm overseeing the project. John W. Kinney, the resident engineer, wanted to know how much experience Branca had in surveying work. Very little, he responded, barring some rudimentary combat surveying during the Korean War.
Branca got the job and reported for his first day of work on Jan. 3, 1966. His first responsibility was analyzing surveying reports used to identify the coordinates to drive the piles. At his disposal to crunch the numbers was a Monroe calculator with the four basic functions and a thin booklet of logarithms.
Asked if he ever worried about the accuracy of his coordinates, he said: “Let me tell you, I never thought about it. It wasn’t until years later that the magnitude of my responsibility really hit me. ... It was a job to do, I did the job, and that was it. Not to put too much on me. We checked, but the responsibility was on the contractor [Perini Corp.].”
Once the foundations were in place, one of Branca’s main responsibilities was PBQD’s ledgers, calculating the exact amount of materials brought to the job site for payment purposes. His bookkeeping practices drew the ire of one contractor, who took exception to Branca’s practice of rounding quantities to the third decimal point instead of the industry-standard first decimal point. Being meticulous was his calling card.
Taking the bridge job forever changed his trajectory. He and his family never left New England.
“I’m in God’s country here. I love it,” Branca recalled thinking. “My children are growing strong and healthy.” He declined an offer from PBQD to work on a project back in New York.
As the Newport Bridge project wrapped up in 1969, his family remained in Newport so his two daughters could finish the school year. Eventually, they settled in Sharon, Massachusetts, where Branca lived until two years ago, when he moved to Smithfield. For about 35 years, he worked for bonding companies that secured his services for projects in jeopardy of going unfinished. Branca credits the lessons he gleaned on the Newport project for the success he enjoyed.
“I came to the job as an engineer with not a lot of real engineering experience,” he said. “On the job, I met professional engineers — not just by name, but by attitude and by performance. And it influenced me. I think by the time I got through with the job, it taught me professionalism that I didn’t know. And professionalism is what carried me through the rest of my life.”
The best-paid summer gig?
Yet the lifelong Newporter takes pride in the fact he played a part in it, however inconsequential.
“There is at least one joint on that bridge that I built with my friend without any major ironworker or anybody else,” Hayes said. “I hope it doesn’t have a structural flaw,” he added as an afterthought.
Entering his senior year at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Hayes was looking to make some money that summer of 1968. And there was probably nowhere else a 20-year-old could rake in more than on the Newport Bridge.
He estimated he worked 10-hour days, seven days a week. In addition to overtime, Saturdays were time and a half, Sundays were double time and holidays triple time. “It was a very lucrative summer,” Hayes said. “I went back to college that year flush with cash, comparatively speaking. I made a lot of money for a summer job, that was for sure. But I worked, like I said, every day.”
Like other inexperienced laborers, he was assigned to the crews on the yard that put together pieces of the superstructure that were shipped out on barges.
“It was more hard work than difficult to figure out,” Hayes explained. “You carried the bolts up, you torque them up to the right [tightness] and then you test them — or you’re just feeding the stuff up to the guys who are doing the really dangerous work. You didn’t need an engineering degree to do this work, but you had to have some common sense or you’d get hit by a crane.”
That summer was his only foray into the construction industry. The following summer, the project was done and Hayes was preparing to start law school in Boston. He now specializes in estate planning and real estate law, with an office in Newport.
Tales from the bar
Sure, David Kilroy remembers working on the bridge. But what sticks with him most are the scenes that played out at Leo’s First and Last Stop on Long Wharf.
The bar was the go-to spot for the bridge workers to cash their paychecks and then blow off some steam — and their hard-earned keep.
“Sitting on a table is $200,000,” Kilroy said. “And [the man cashing the checks] had a .45-caliber pistol on the table and he had two bodyguards standing behind him. Some people walked out of that place with 10 bucks in their pocket. They blew all of the thousand bucks. It just evaporated.”
He regaled a reporter with the tale of Big Bob from Boston who broke a man’s jaw, not once, but twice in a matter of a few weeks. “The fights were crazy,” he said.
And just as quickly as people from across the country and beyond flocked to Newport for the job, they vanished once it ended. “It was surprising how fast they disappeared,” Kilroy said.
He learned about job opportunities on the bridge from a newspaper advertisement. At the time, he was working in the blood lab at Newport Hospital, making about $100 a week. PBQD was offering more than $500 a week. It was an offer Kilroy wasn’t going to turn down regardless of whether he was qualified for the job.
He filled out a questionnaire that tested his understanding of basic principles behind trigonometry and physics. “The last question was: Are you afraid of heights?” Kilroy said. “Well, of course, I said ‘No.’”
The truth was he had no idea. “I really didn’t know.”
Lamont eyes new strategy on toll issue
PAUL HUGHES
HARTFORD – Gov. Ned Lamont is just unable to sell state legislators and the public on highway tolls despite his decades of business deal making.
Nothing the former businessman has tried yet has won over a majority of House and Senate members, or changed public opinion.
“I’m ready to negotiate,” he said.
Lamont last week floated a targeted cut to the income tax to entice support. He has acknowledged he needs to do a better job of making the case for electronic highway tolls.
“I’ve tried to convince people this is the best investment we can make to get this state growing again,” he said.
This is something Lamont has been saying for months, and yet he is no closer to getting a tolling plan passed than six months ago when he took office. He is now left to try to get a vote done in a special session.
His changing positions have added to his challenge. First, he supported highway tolls for all motor vehicles, then out-of-state trucks only, and back again to tolls for passenger vehicles and trucks.
“The fact of the matter is the people of Connecticut – by a wide margin – oppose tolls, and the lawmakers who vote for them will have to answer to their constituents. Every time they drive under a gantry and have to pay another tax, they will remember who supported this legislation,” Sasser said.
NEARLY 60% OF CONNECTICUT residents opposed tolls in a poll that the Hartford Courant and Sacred Heart University released on May 30. The level of opposition was virtually unchanged from a March poll.
The last version of the tolling plan targeted Interstate 84, Interstate 91, Interstate 95, and the portions of Route 15 that comprise the Merritt and Wilbur Cross parkways. There would be 50 tolling locations between the four highways.
The plan proposed maximum toll rates of 4.4 cents per mile after discounts during peak times and 3.5 cents per mile during off peak times. It provided rates could go up or down 30% to satisfy federal requirements. Also, there were to be discounts for purchasers of a state-issued electronic pass, frequent commuters, and motorists whose household income is within 125% of the federal poverty level.
CT Schaghticoke Indian group wants recognition, land, casino
Emilie Munson
Primarily, Russell hopes federal recognition can revive a scattered indigenous community. When he was a boy, the Kilsons, the Cogswells and other families lived on the reservation. But as heads of households died, the state burned and bulldozed their houses in the 1960s, preventing families from staying on the reservation, Russell and Velky agree. Russell’s own home once burned in a suspected arson, he said.
Down a long dirt road, only two small houses now sit on the reservation: Russell’s and his sister Gail’s. With the funding and lawmaking capability federal recognition would bring, Russell said he believes more Schaghticoke families would move back from places like Stratford, New Haven, Vermont and Tennessee.
“A lot of the Schaghticokes - some are well-to-do - but most of them are poor. If I can help them in any way, this is the way to do it,” Russell said.
NEARLY 60% OF CONNECTICUT residents opposed tolls in a poll that the Hartford Courant and Sacred Heart University released on May 30. The level of opposition was virtually unchanged from a March poll.
The last version of the tolling plan targeted Interstate 84, Interstate 91, Interstate 95, and the portions of Route 15 that comprise the Merritt and Wilbur Cross parkways. There would be 50 tolling locations between the four highways.
The plan proposed maximum toll rates of 4.4 cents per mile after discounts during peak times and 3.5 cents per mile during off peak times. It provided rates could go up or down 30% to satisfy federal requirements. Also, there were to be discounts for purchasers of a state-issued electronic pass, frequent commuters, and motorists whose household income is within 125% of the federal poverty level.
CT Schaghticoke Indian group wants recognition, land, casino
Emilie Munson
KENT — From the quiet woods cradling the Housatonic River, Chief Alan Russell is launching a monumental, long-shot effort to bring land, community, prosperity and possibly a casino to the Schaghticoke Indians, now scattered around Connecticut and the country.
Russell and 50 other members of the Schaghticoke Indian Tribe will refile its petition for federal recognition in July. That petition may kick off a years-long review process — one that is likely to lock the tribe, the state, the town of Kent and others in a high-stakes administrative and legal battle.
To succeed, the little tribe would need to overcome the certain fierce opposition of Connecticut’s political establishment that has quashed efforts like this before. If the tribe fails, it cannot try again.
“I’m just hoping I’m alive to see something,” said Russell, “Grey Fox,” chief since 1983.
If federally acknowledged, the Schaghticoke Indian Tribe would be able to create its own laws as a sovereign nation, receive funding and services from the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs and operate a casino. Russell and his lawyers profess to have land claims to more than 2,000 acres in Kent, including property occupied by the private Kent School and Bulls Bridge Hydroelectric Plant.
If recognized, the Schaghticokes could fundamentally redefine a bucolic town, acrimonious state/tribe and intratribal relations, the New England gambling market and the troubled history of an indigenous people.
“The people of Northwestern Connecticut should avoid any undue fear about these claims, which have been so frivolous in the past and that have been rejected consistently by the courts,” said U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who as attorney general from 1991 to 2001 opposed tribal petition efforts on behalf of the state.
“We have prevailed in the past,” he added. “I’m pretty confident the state will prevail again.”
Lamont and Attorney General William Tong said they will review the Schaghticoke petition when they see it.
Blumenthal, state officials and the town of Kent have experience fighting a tribal recognition effort. They opposed the petition of the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation, who split from Russell’s faction and briefly won federal recognition but had it revoked in 2005.
The Eastern Pequot Tribe, based in North Stonington, won and lost federal recognition in the early 2000s. The Golden Hill Paugussetts, a small tribe in Trumbull and Colchester, also were denied.
Decades of fighting
The bitter split between Russell’s Schaghticokes and those following Richard Velky, chief of the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation, prompted decades of feuding and violence between the sects.
The two groups do not agree when the split happened or who is the rightful Schaghticoke leader. They each accuse the other of having members who are not Schaghticoke. Police were called on numerous occasions to deal with conflicts between the groups.
Velky pursued recognition for his part of the tribe with the backing of casino backers who included Subway restaurants founder Fred DeLuca.
“I believe there is only one tribe. It is the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation,” Velky said Friday. “… All they did was copy (our petition).”
Russell’s group, the Schaghticoke Indian Tribe, had its own letter of intent to petition filed with the U.S. Department of Interior dating back to the 1980s. Russell said the Schaghticoke Indian Tribe withheld its boxes and boxes of historical and genealogical documents from the Velky clan.
Now that Velky’s petition effort has died, the Schaghticoke Indian Tribe has crafted a petition document 7,000 pages long tracing their history back to the 1700s using contemporaneous sources, said the tribe’s senior adviser, William Buchanan. The document outlines the genealogy of their members and their claims to land.
This petition was submitted to the Interior Department in 2016. The Department responded recommending technical revisions.
“The last petition filed by this group fell well short of the standards and criteria under federal law to meet the requirements for recognition,” Blumenthal said. He said the Schaghticoke Indian Tribe is a faction of Velky’s group.
The Schaghticokes re-sent the petition on March 13. On April 10, the Interior Department sent recommended changes again.
Russell, Buchanan and their lawyer, Toney Pignatiello, said this week they are cleaning up citations and references and plan to resubmit again in July. They are unsure if that one will be the final version.
“I have yet to see this petition but it would have to be radically different and offer significantly new information for federal recognition to be plausibly considered,” said Blumenthal. “I would be surprised if there was anything new in it.”
The U.S. Department of Interior will review the petition and decided whether to acknowledge the tribe. There are now 573 federally recognized American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and villages. Only two, the Mohegans and Mashantucket Pequots, are in Connecticut.
Fast money
To get their petition over the finish line, Buchanan said the tribe will accept investor funding to pay for legal work. He claimed he has had meetings with every major casino operator in the world.
“They’re all watching this very closely,” said Buchanan.
Russell, 73, is not interested in opening a casino on the wild 400-acres the Schaghticoke’s now have as a reservation. Born in New Haven in 1946, he’s lived on this land since he was four and half, scampering the woods, bluffs and riverbanks to hunt, fish and pick berries.
He’d prefer to use the tribe’s land claims and right to run a casino on the reservation to negotiate a deal with the state to open a gambling facility, financed by a private investor, elsewhere - perhaps Fairfield County.
But the Schaghticokes are poor, Russell said. They see casinos as fast money. Buchanan made a thinly veiled threat to the state: if Russell dies or another chief is elected after the petition is granted, a new leader might not hold the same preservationist attitude as Russell.
Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim said Thursday he’s had no recent conversations with the Schaghticokes. The governor and attorney general said the same.Primarily, Russell hopes federal recognition can revive a scattered indigenous community. When he was a boy, the Kilsons, the Cogswells and other families lived on the reservation. But as heads of households died, the state burned and bulldozed their houses in the 1960s, preventing families from staying on the reservation, Russell and Velky agree. Russell’s own home once burned in a suspected arson, he said.
Down a long dirt road, only two small houses now sit on the reservation: Russell’s and his sister Gail’s. With the funding and lawmaking capability federal recognition would bring, Russell said he believes more Schaghticoke families would move back from places like Stratford, New Haven, Vermont and Tennessee.
“A lot of the Schaghticokes - some are well-to-do - but most of them are poor. If I can help them in any way, this is the way to do it,” Russell said.