Unbuilding the Grace and Pearman Bridges


For Sparky and myself, curiosity drives passion which in turn fuels our life's engine. Our passion was capturing the story of both unbuilding the Grace (1929 - 2007) and Pearman (1966 - 2007) Bridges and discovering the unbuilders. It takes a lot of passion to track a project from July 2005 until April 2007 - rain, shine, hurricanes or moving to Singapore. We discovered the joy of discovery learning. Ken Canty opened the front door for us - then Steve Testa, Ponch Billingsley and Mickey Rogers opened many side doors. Below are the highlights of what we discovered, who we met and what we learned.

And a reminder from T.S. Eliot (East Coker from the Four Quartets)

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

August 22, 2005:
The Pearman Bridge and Meeting Street: Pio Monsini, Jack Foley and Michael Hebb

One of the more pleasant surprises of our learning experiment (these web pages) is to actually observe the Internet flatten our geographic world and bring folks together in new ways. In this case, Michael Hebb, a Testa surgeon that operates a 345, Jack Foley, another surgeon of another piece of large equipment, Michael's wife, Tina, Jack's aunt , Donna (who lives in California), and his sister, Maura (who lives in Massachusetts). Several days ago (August 18) Maura and Donna sent me email and wanted to know if I had met Jack.

Two days ago, while exploring progress on the Pearman bridge, I met Pio and someone. That someone, I thought was Jack, but turned out to be his friend, Michael Hebb (left). In any event, Donna and Maura asked for me to say "hi" to Jack if I found him? Today when I was exploring the progress on Meeting St. I found Pio and asked if he knew where Jack was. Turns out that Jack was standing next to him.

Here is the photo on the Pearman two days ago (left where I mixed up Jackie and Michael) and here they are today (right) at the Meeting St. site.

Today Tina Hebb told me her part of this story. It seems that Tina and Michael's son downloads some of my photos and prints them. Somewhere along the way, he figured out that I had confused his dad (Michael) with his dad's friend (Jackie). So I needed to fix this and unconfuse my photo essay of the bridge unbuilders.

All of you that are parents know that one of the more difficult tasks in raising kids is to let them observe your mistakes and more important, observe how you undo your mistakes. In this case, I thought my confusion (mistake) made a nice story for our Bridge Unbuilders Stories - and maybe some of you could see me try to wriggle my way out of this confusion. So one of the lessons today is about the term wriggle. The third definition is 3. To worm one's way into or out of a situation; insinuate or extricate oneself by sly or subtle means . Obviously I fail the sly or subtle test - but the message is the same.

For the record, Michael wears solid black sun glasses and Jackie wears mirrored glasses. So you check out the above photos, examine the sun glasses and figure this puzzle out!

Today (Aug 23) Sparky got a photo of Jack - a problem with the sun - but there is Jack!

Today (September 21) I finally found Jack again - and this time caught both his smile and his reflective sun glasses.

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C. Frank Starmer

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