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Fuzz was Flying

        I was crabbing on the South Side between the Bayard House and Mallory Toy's pool room. I saw the tanker with the four tugs come by and they were headed towards the south tower of the bridge. Then everything happened at once. Men started yelling and started chopping the hawsers with axes, and from all of the fuzz flying up in the air I knew something was going on. I just stood there watching. I had six or seven crab lines out on the little wharf there, and they had a big wooden barrier around the bridge pier. I kept looking when all of a sudden the ship came through the barrier and hit that pier. POW! Here she come.
        I was next to Johnny Walter's boat ramp and I remember more than anything else the whistles blowing and the fuzz from the rope - all of that hemp - going up in the air. There wasn't any nylon back in those days. I just stood there and I didn't know what to do, whether to run or I don't know; it happened so fast. As I said, all of the men started hooping and hollering and cutting the big hawsers with axes. Those ropes were as big as a man's arm. Then all of the men started running down the center aisle of the tanker towards the stern. And those tug whistles were blowing like mad. The whole upper bridge came down and after they got everything loose the ship didn't go on to Baltimore. They had to take it back to Philadelphia. It sat there about a day and a half.

Francis Brown - South Side, Chesapeake City, Maryland

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I Was Stranded

        I was six years old and was standing in the grass in my bare feet in front of our farm house on Saint Augustine Road. I had a pile of stones on the ground and I was throwing them - one at a time - at the telephone pole about sixty feet away. I heard a sort of dull clank coming from town. I looked over towards the bridge and saw that it had disappeared. In those days the fields between our farm and the bridge were dotted with small trees, not like the tall, dense ones that now block the view. Back then, I could always see the black lift bridge looming in the distance, outlined against the sky.
        My grandmother came outside and I pointed and yelled. She said, "My word, where's the bridge?" She then told me, "not to fret," but to wait till my father came home. When he did come home that evening he didn't say much, but the next evening he drove me in town to see what happened. He drove down Bohemia Avenue and turned left on the dirt street that ran between the canal and the Hole-in-the-Wall. He stopped the car just before we got to Mallory Toy's building and we looked out at all of the wreckage. The big ship was where the bridge used to be and the steel was on top of it and in the water. The steel from the bridge was black and all twisted out of shape. I was excited and started jumping around in the car. Pop didn't say much; he let it speak for itself. We didn't get out of the car but just watched it for a while and then drove on back home.
        Bertha Sager told me that she was one of the last persons to go across the bridge before it was destroyed. She said that she had ridden her bicycle across the bridge to the North Side to visit her friend, Hazel Reynolds, who lived in the corner house across from the fire house. On the way across she thought she saw Dr. Davis pass her in his car on his way to the Elkton hospital. She said that she was talking to her friend on the porch when she heard a kind of loud, crumbling sound. She looked around and saw the bridge collapse. It seemed to fall in slow motion, she explained.
        She said that her short bike ride left her stranded 14 miles from home. She couldn't ride that far so her friend, Hazel, took her home by way of Summit Bridge. When her husband got home from work, they went back around Summit to the North Side to bring her bike home in the rumble seat of their '29 Nash.

Bob Hazel - South Side, near Chesapeake City