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.
From time to time, our bridge web site bring folks together in unexpected ways. In this case, Sparky Witte, a contactor by profession and living in Mt. Pleasant, makes frequent trips between Charleston and Mt Pleasant. Typically Sparky has his curious eyes wide open and when he sees something interesting, he finds a way to capture it with photos. I had one sort-of self photo (above right) of Sparky. Gary Eaton, though, a professional photographer, and I met each other during the construction of the East Bay on-ramp (line 14). Gary found the real Sparky and recently took this photo (left).
My challenge, now, is to get a photo of Gary - which Gary solved this morning. Here he is with Rickie Green (SCDOT)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
C. Frank Starmer