Vincent Taylor helped build Chesapeake City’s over-head bridge

I was in the Pacific Theater in World War II, and when I got home I took a job as a surveyor for the contractor who was working on the bridge project. I did the survey work for the bridge piers. I shot all of the grades, did all of the transit work, and ran all of the levels. Then, about nine months later, I was invited to work with the steel contractor who constructed the bridge. My job was a rivet inspector, and when I wasn't checking rivets I worked with their surveying engineer, doing a lot of taping and measuring. We had to check grades to put on the piers and put marks on there for the steel men to set their steel. That had to be nearly perfect.

Now, when we did the measuring for those steel beams, we used piano wire. For instance, when we measured the area that spanned the water—between the two double piers—we used the wire and calibrated it for stretch and heat and all that. The distance between those piers was 550 feet, I believe. Temperature expansion for steel piano wire is .50645 per foot. Yes, we were up there 130 feet doing the measuring—two men on each side. When you do that kind of work you have to have a spring balance; for whatever the tensor is you have to pull a certain amount of pounds' pressure. That accounts for the sag in the wire. It's very precise work.

There was a close call on that bridge. It happened after the span was closed. One day a skid crane operator started jerking on one of the temporary piers, trying to pull it out of there. The bridge shook each time he jerked, and finally he crumbled a flange he was sitting on with that skid rig, and that let him down so that his boom hit the top arch of the bridge. That shook the bridge like the devil. It was so bad that one gang of riveters quit the job the next day. There were several riveting gangs, and at that time my job was to go behind them and inspect the rivets. The bad rivets were called "cutouts" because they had to be cut out and re-riveted. I didn't find as many bad ones as my co-worker did for some reason. But when an engineer checked my work, it was fine.

To my knowledge, not a man was seriously injured on that job. But the worst scare I ever had was when we were checking rivets up near the main span. It was early in the winter, one of those days when we had a freezing rain, and rain will freeze on steel up high like that when it won't on the ground. Well, that day the steel beams became glazed with ice, and we had to crawl along real easy or we could slip off. It was a terrible sensation because your hands could slip, so you just had to slide along very carefully. There's a term for that; we had to "coon-a-beam." You know, it’s the way a coon clings and moves along a frozen branch. Anyway, it happened only that one time all the rest of the winter. But it was a scary time; I'll tell you.