all they do all day is walk up and down, up and down, strutting like gamecocks, a look of suspicion in
their eyes as they glance sideways to see that the pushers are pushing, the punks are punking, and the young steel connectors
are not behaving like acrobats on the cables.
The thing that concerns walkin' bosses most is that they impress the boss, who is the superintendent, and is comparable to
a top sergeant. The superintendent is usually the toughest, loudest, foulest-mouthed, best bridgeman on the whole job, and
he lets everybody know it. He usually spends most of his day at a headquarters shack built along the shore near the anchorage
of the bridge, there to communicate with the engineers, designers, and other white-collar officers from the bridge company.
The walkin' bosses up on the bridge represent him and keep him informed, but about two or three times a day the superintendent
will leave his shack and visit the bridge, and when he struts across the span the whole thing seems to stiffen. The men are
all heads down at work, the punks seem petrified.
The superintendent selected to supervise the construction of the span and the building of the cables for the Verrazano-Narrows
Bridge was a six-foot, fifty-nine-year-old, hot-tempered man named John Murphy, who, behind his back, was known as "Hard Nose"
or "Short Fuse."
He was a broad-shouldered and chesty man with a thin strong nose and jaw, with pale blue eyes and thinning white hair— but
the most distinguishing thing about him was his red face, a face so red that if he ever blushed, which he rarely did, nobody
would know it. The red hard face—the result of forty years' booming in the high wind and hot sun of a hundred bridges and
skyscrapers around America—gave Murphy the appearance of always being boiling mad at something, which he usually was.
He had been born, like so many boomers, in a small town without horizons—in this case, Rexton, a hamlet of three hundred in
New Brunswick, Canada. The flu epidemic that had swept through Rexton in the spring of 1919, when Murphy was sixteen years
old, killed his mother and father, an uncle and two cousins, and left him largely responsible for the support of his five
younger brothers and sisters. So he went to work driving timber in Maine, and, when that got slow, he moved down to Pennsylvania
and learned the bridge business, distinguishing himself as a steel connector because he was young and fearless. He was considered
one of the best connectors on the George Washington Bridge, which he worked on in 1930 and 1931, and since then he had gone
from one job to another, booming all the way up to Alaska to put a bridge across the Tanana River, and then back east again
on other bridges and buildings.
In 1959 he was the superintendent in charge of putting up the Pan Am, the fifty-nine-story skyscraper in mid-Manhattan, and
after that he was appointed to head the Verrazano job by the American Bridge Company, a division of United States Steel that
had the contract to put up the bridge's span and steel cables.
When Hard Nose Murphy arrived at the bridge site in the early spring of 1962, the long, undramatic, sloppy, yet so vital part
of bridge construction—the foundations—was finished, and the two 693-foot towers were rising.
The foundation construction for the two towers, done by J. Rich Steers, Inc., and the Frederick Snare Corporation, if not
an aesthetic operation that would appeal to the adventurers in high steel, nevertheless was a most difficult and challenging
task, because the two caissons sunk in the Narrows had been among the largest ever built. They were 229 feet long and 129
feet wide, and each had sixty-six circular dredging holes—each hole being seventeen feet in diameter— and, from a distance,
the concrete caissons looked like gigantic chunks of Swiss cheese.
Building the caisson that would support the pedestal which would in turn bear the
their eyes as they glance sideways to see that the pushers are pushing, the punks are punking, and the young steel connectors
are not behaving like acrobats on the cables.
The thing that concerns walkin' bosses most is that they impress the boss, who is the superintendent, and is comparable to
a top sergeant. The superintendent is usually the toughest, loudest, foulest-mouthed, best bridgeman on the whole job, and
he lets everybody know it. He usually spends most of his day at a headquarters shack built along the shore near the anchorage
of the bridge, there to communicate with the engineers, designers, and other white-collar officers from the bridge company.
The walkin' bosses up on the bridge represent him and keep him informed, but about two or three times a day the superintendent
will leave his shack and visit the bridge, and when he struts across the span the whole thing seems to stiffen. The men are
all heads down at work, the punks seem petrified.
The superintendent selected to supervise the construction of the span and the building of the cables for the Verrazano-Narrows
Bridge was a six-foot, fifty-nine-year-old, hot-tempered man named John Murphy, who, behind his back, was known as "Hard Nose"
or "Short Fuse."
He was a broad-shouldered and chesty man with a thin strong nose and jaw, with pale blue eyes and thinning white hair— but
the most distinguishing thing about him was his red face, a face so red that if he ever blushed, which he rarely did, nobody
would know it. The red hard face—the result of forty years' booming in the high wind and hot sun of a hundred bridges and
skyscrapers around America—gave Murphy the appearance of always being boiling mad at something, which he usually was.
He had been born, like so many boomers, in a small town without horizons—in this case, Rexton, a hamlet of three hundred in
New Brunswick, Canada. The flu epidemic that had swept through Rexton in the spring of 1919, when Murphy was sixteen years
old, killed his mother and father, an uncle and two cousins, and left him largely responsible for the support of his five
younger brothers and sisters. So he went to work driving timber in Maine, and, when that got slow, he moved down to Pennsylvania
and learned the bridge business, distinguishing himself as a steel connector because he was young and fearless. He was considered
one of the best connectors on the George Washington Bridge, which he worked on in 1930 and 1931, and since then he had gone
from one job to another, booming all the way up to Alaska to put a bridge across the Tanana River, and then back east again
on other bridges and buildings.
In 1959 he was the superintendent in charge of putting up the Pan Am, the fifty-nine-story skyscraper in mid-Manhattan, and
after that he was appointed to head the Verrazano job by the American Bridge Company, a division of United States Steel that
had the contract to put up the bridge's span and steel cables.
When Hard Nose Murphy arrived at the bridge site in the early spring of 1962, the long, undramatic, sloppy, yet so vital part
of bridge construction—the foundations—was finished, and the two 693-foot towers were rising.
The foundation construction for the two towers, done by J. Rich Steers, Inc., and the Frederick Snare Corporation, if not
an aesthetic operation that would appeal to the adventurers in high steel, nevertheless was a most difficult and challenging
task, because the two caissons sunk in the Narrows had been among the largest ever built. They were 229 feet long and 129
feet wide, and each had sixty-six circular dredging holes—each hole being seventeen feet in diameter— and, from a distance,
the concrete caissons looked like gigantic chunks of Swiss cheese.
Building the caisson that would support the pedestal which would in turn bear the
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