BECOMING A LANDMARK….WITHOUT REALLY TRYING
(yes, I’m older than the Golden Gate Bridge…but don’t call me a landmark!)

It’s somewhat of a shock to realize I’m older than the Golden Gate Bridge….but don’t call me a landmark! For those who are mathematically inclined, and otherwise don’t have to take their boots off to count to twenty, I was nine years old when it opened up to traffic, and began taking those toll collections for it (cash cows are for milking, aren’t they?).

Frankly, at the time, I had never heard of San Francisco, much less about some bridge there. In fact I barely knew much about the good old USA, beyond New York City (the place from which you sailed on ships to go to and from la Belle France). But, there was some firsthand knowledge about America’s train rides to far off places like Chicago, and St. Louis, and, right out there to the edge of the Wild West at a place called. St. Joseph, Missouri. All I knew and understood about what existed beyond that was just cowboys and Indians, and a hell-raising outlaw named Billy the Kid. Yet all of that was quickly and firmly dismissed by my grand-uncle Sam, when he explained that we were standing in the heart of Jesse James country and something called – the Pony Express – right there in St. Joseph, of which he had been one of its stable masters. But nowhere was there anything said about a place called San Francisco, or even California, much less about some kind of bridge there.

I suppose one has to chalk up such narrow perspectives to Midwest provincialism, which even viewed places like Chicago and New York just a tad shy of qualifying as dens of alien forms of otherwise normal iniquities. St. Louis, of course, being the great state of Missouri’s premier urban development, was just fine and the epitome of grandeur. After all it had been, and still was, the gateway to the Golden West, wherever that was. As for Kansas City, it might be up to date, but it was still just…Kansas City.  Eventually, however, I did learn all about the rest of the USA, and many of its places both great and small (like North Zulch, Texas), thanks to the US Army.

But there eventually came a time when, on the occasion of a family visit from back east and tiny Delaware, two young grandsons (about the same age as I was when the bridge was built), dared me to hike across it with them. Apparently they thought a geriatric T-Rex like me wouldn’t be able to do it. I was till blithely striding along half way across its span when I had to pick up and carry one of them, and haul the other along by his sweaty little paw (chuckling to myself at their miscalculation). Needless to say by the time we got to the other end they were convinced I was anything but geriatric…just a real live T-Rex grandpa.

So, from that episode I can truly say…Hey, Bridge! How’s it feel to have someone older walk all over you?

 CENTURION