By Newport This Week Staff | on June 20, 2019

Two bridge workers dwarfed by the mighty crane. (Photo courtesy of Joe Muldoon)

J oe Muldoon was just 18 and working as an apprentice when he lifted steel to the top of what would become the Newport Pell Bridge more than 50 years ago. Seven years ago, he wrote a country song about it, called “Swingin’ That Steel,” after he rediscovered the slides of the spectacular photos he took during what would turn out to be the most interesting job of his lifetime. You can hear it on YouTube.

Muldoon, whose uncles all worked in the Iron Workers Union near Bridgeport, Connecticut, worked his first iron at 16 in 1965.

“I worked less than three months on the [Pell] bridge, from the bottom to the top,” he said, speaking from his Minneapolis home. “You are not out on the beam at all until it gets higher. It was very comfortable at the time. They didn’t send me up the first day.”

He was tested for fearlessness. He was asked to fetch bolts by walking across a 14-inch-wide plank over a 100-foot drop.

Joe Muldoon worked his first iron at 16 in 1965.

“I never thought until this day that they were probably watching me,” he said. “I didn’t have any chance to think about it, and once I did it, I didn’t think about it at all. That was a jolt that really worked [to make him secure at extreme heights]. Soon, they put on a plank twice as wide.”

Muldoon said the veteran workers thought of apprentices as kids. “Either you do it, or you don’t,” he said.

The creeper moved up and down with the job. The main crane was mounted on the creeper platform. When one level on both sides of the tower was completed, the creeper would hoist itself up to the next level, then get clamped down again on the two towers.

“Every time you put eight sections in and it was bolted down, the creeper would go up to that next level,” said Muldoon. “One guy was really worried about me, but it passed. By the time I left, the plate was on the very top of the tower, where they were going to put the saddle on top.”

He shared some of his amazing photos with NTW, along with these comments, which he also posted on YouTube and Facebook: “The line in the song, ‘Joe was lead, connecting those cells,’ makes use of some artistic leeway. All the connectors, the young, athletic ironworkers who climb up or out to the end of steel beams and other structures to guide the next 30 tons or so of steel into place and lock it down, were pretty much equally and highly skilled. But when they were ready to set a boom at the very top of the towers, they had Joe, an Indian working on the west tower, climb underneath the boom at 400 feet and put in the lynchpin. It was hair-raising to watch.” To listen to Joe’s song about the bridge visit: youtu.be/NQLIVHEqG98

“The work of the ironworkers on this job took place hundreds of feet above the base where the crane operator sat below with no direct view of the work. They did not use intercom or walkie-talkie voice communications to tell the operator how to position the load. Rather, they employed a bell signaling system. The best ironworker on the job, Lee Shenandoah, worked the bells on the east tower. He wore a vest with six or eight buttons to signal boom up/down/left/right, load up/down, whip up/down/left/ right and just how much for each move.

“Shenandoah was an Iroquois Indian, champion lacrosse player, Green Beret and a member of the honor guard at JFK’s funeral. He died young, but not due to the dangers of high steel work.”

The major sections of the bridge were brought in by barge, he said. Each vertical increment of about 50 to 60 feet was made up of four prefabricated cells for the two columns of each tower.

“When a section was ready to lift, two ironworkers, connectors on the raising gang, would hook on to a steel eye or something like it at the top of the section. They didn’t have to wrap it around with chokers like the guys in the video,” he said.

“The connectors would ride the load, then unhook it after it dropped into place. The bolting up gang, which I worked on, would drive in drift pins to make sure the section was pulled down tight and that all bolt holes of the new section lined up perfectly with the section already in place.

“Usually we’d use a pneumatic hammer, but sometimes, depending on circumstances, an ironworker would drive drift pins in with a beater [big sledge hammer]. Then we’d bolt it up with ‘yo-yo’s’ [pneumatic impact wrenches]. Later on, another ironworker and I would go around with a three-foot torque wrench to make sure the bolts were just right. Not too tight. They were never too loose. No rivets on this part of the job.”

If anything had to be done on the outside of the towers below the platforms, a man would go down in a spider scaffold. “I was the coffee guy on the job,” he said. “When we were near the top, instead of using the elevator from the creeper to the ground, they’d lower me down in a lift box. The sections were painted in the factory. The [foremen] were on high alert to make sure no one chipped the paint.”

A benefit of working on the towers was being in the sunshine and above the fog most of the time, said Muldoon. “There was always a light breeze. All summer we had only one really hot day. As luck would have it, a new apprentice started that day and he never came back,” he said.

He has college friends who live on the other side of Narragansett Bay. They thought the massive bridge has been there forever.

“Most people think that bridge went up in the 1950s. My friends from college don’t believe I worked on that bridge,” he said. “They thought I worked on that little Jamestown Bridge. They can’t believe for 300 years you crossed the water on a ferry boat.”

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