Silver Bridge, part 1

We're coming up on the 40th anniversary of the Silver Bridge collapse.

It's hard to believe, but the old bridge has been down longer than it was up.

There will be a lot of reflection and a lot of talk of modern bridge safety. I'll probably write a piece about what that meant to a 13-year-old kid and what it meant in the years after.

When I was at "the Ohio university," I had to write a paper for my History of American Journalism class. I wrote one using publications of the time on the bridge collapse.

(Here is how it probably will begin)...

As a child, I always figured Huntington's old 6th Street Bridge would someday fall into the Ohio River. But on Dec. 15, 1967, that changed.

I was at home on the Friday evening, a 13-year-old kid glad that the school week was over and looking forward to the Christmas break. I was watching some sort of rerun on Channel 8 when the news flash came across that the Silver Bridge between Point Pleasant, W.Va., and Gallipolis, Ohio, had fallen into the river. I ran to my parents' grocery store with the news.

I remember little of what happened after that, although I did watch every minute of TV news that night. What stood out in my mind was NBC's Chet Huntley referring to "Galli-POE-liss," but that was not so bad.

The next day found me watching television again. There were interviews with people in hospital beds and reports from the scene. I had been across the bridge a few times, but not nearly as many as I had been across the 6th Street Bridge. But as a person who grew up along the Ohio, any such event having to do with a bridge occupied my thoughts.

The afternoon was clear and sunny. I sat in our corn crib, examining the ears of feed corn and trying my best to remember what word WSAZ-TV's Bos Johnson had used to describe what happened. "Collapse," it was.

The following day, a Sunday, we took a family drive up that way. We drove past on the Ohio side. The bridge was gone. We could see the roadway going from one pier straight down into the river. No one said much of anything as we drove past.

Days passed. I read the Huntington, Gallipolis, Ohio, and Athens, Ohio, newspapers to read everything I could about the recovery operations. As all things do, this one eventually passed from the front pages.

(More to come.)