Even at 97 years old, Francis Fordyce Post – or ‘Fordy’ as friends call him – clearly remembers the year he spent as an ironworker on a Highland crew for the American Bridge Company that built the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Mid-Hudson Bridge. The total length of the suspension style bridge is 3,000 feet and its deck lies 135 feet above the Hudson River. The bridge, which opened on Aug. 25, 1930, just marked its 80th anniversary.  

To get work on the bridge, Fordy said he was less than truthful about his age, swearing that he was 18 when he was just 17. But he said the temptation was far too great because workers were paid  $1.50 an hour at a time when the average wage was just 45 cents per hour.

“I was real high paid at a dollar and a half,” he said.

Post remembers his initial days out on the bridge.

“When I first started off, I was what you called a rivet jack and used to bring rivets to the workers. But after I was on there awhile, they had me do bolting help and all that sort of thing,” he said.     “I used to drive the drift pins through and put the bolts in until the riveters came. They would replace the bolts and put in hot rivets.”

Post said that if a rivet became too hot it would start to melt and be unusable. The workers tossed them into the river below, but when they hit the cool water a shotgun-like blast would ring out.

“Then you’d hear the guys down on the barges swearing at us guys for dropping things. You couldn’t blame them,” he said with a shrug.

Post said the work was often dangerous.

“I remember I saw two guys die within 20 minutes of each other from falling,” he said.

“One fellow fell from where the cables come down.”

Post said they did not have elaborate safety rigging back then on what was called the ‘catwalk.’

“If you were on a boardwalk, that was it,” he said. “You didn’t have any attachments.”
He said he heard that another worker had fallen into wet cement and his body could not be retrieved.

“But I don’t know anything about that [because] that was on the Poughkeepsie side,” he said.

Post said that at lunchtime they used to slide down the cables “using leather gloves, of course. You treated it just like you were home.”

Post said he later ‘graduated’ to the position of rivet ‘dobber’ where he would put red lead paint onto the secured rivets.

“We had a brush and used to dip it in paint and put it on the rivets after to keep it from rusting,” he said. “Now they can’t use the red lead no more.”

Post added that the entire bridge was later painted in the lead paint as a primer coat.
Post said he knows nearly every square inch of the bridge, saying he even worked atop the towers.

“I helped put the caps on them things,” he said. “They’re rounded off.”

Post said when he looks back; he feels a certain sense of pride because of the collective craftsmanship that went into the bridge.

“I think it’s a wonderful bridge, you know why, because it’s rivets,” he said. “The welded bridges are going to be gone when this bridge is still going to be there. There are thousands and thousands of rivets in there.”

Post said at any given time there were large crews at work – one coming from the Highland side and the other working to meet them from the Poughkeepsie side.
Post said his time on the bridge was his only experience as an ironworker, as he later went to work for the railroad.

In 1936, when Post was 24, he married his sweetheart, Virginia Freer, a day shy of her 20th birthday. Post said his wife had promised herself that she would wait until she was 20 to get married.

“I always kidded her about that,” he said with a twinkle in his eye,” That was an argument that I won.”

The couple, who were married at Holy Trinity Church in Highland, shared 70 years together until her passing in 2006 at the age of 90. They had two sons, Gary, who died as an infant, and Richard, who passed away when he was in his 60s.

By MARK REYNOLDS
mreynolds@tcnewspapers.com