STEALING THE BRIDGE
Todd at Living Backstage recently posted a piece on moving his mother out of the house he grew up in. He naturally mentioned details of his upbringing and family history, and as I read them I found there were a lot of correspondences between his family and mine. My father’s folks were sharecroppers who left their farms in Louisiana to look for work in the oil fields of East Texas in the thirties. My grandfather worked as a pipeline welder. When he was injured or out of work, he gambled for a living in the backrooms of honkytonks and juke joints of boomtowns like Kilgore, TX. He and my great uncle also did a little bootlegging, stole gas from the pipeline, whatever it took to feed their families. I suspect Todd’s family may have been a bit more respectable, but our respective parents seem to have followed very similar trajectories into the suburban middle class (his in Dallas, mine in Oklahoma City) in the late nineteen fifties.
I gave my dad a how-to book on writing memoir as a Christmas present in 2002. He took my unsubtle hint and ran with it. By the next summer he had produced a manuscript entitled TRUE STORIES FROM MY YOUTH As Best I Remember Them by G.L. “PAT” PATTILLO. In it, Dad told a lot of stories on himself that I hadn’t heard before, and the ones I had heard included details that were news to me. It was a bit of a revelation for me to discover that the prodigal apple had not fallen all that far from the parental tree. In my comment to Todd, I mentioned a story Dad tells in his memoir, about a stealing a bridge. Here it is, Todd—in my father’s own words. I wouldn’t call Dad a polished writer, but I wouldn’t change one word of it.
The year was 1948 and I was a teenager of 17 and a junior in high school. Christmas was fast approaching and my friend Melvin Duggan and I had no money with which to buy gifts.
We lived in a little town of about 6000, an oil town in south central Texas. If you had ever been to Luling you would remember it because of the strong sulfur smell caused by many years of oil well drilling. I mention this because the oil companies built many roads and bridges (when necessary) to get to their wells. Many of these roads and bridges were abandoned back to the property owners as the wells became old and no longer productive.
My friend Melvin and I found one such bridge in a pasture a few miles out of town. We deemed it to be no longer useful because the creek had come up and washed the floor out and the road to it did not look, to us, like it had been used in a long time. Now this bridge was about 35 feet long and had steel side banisters up about 4 and a half feet on each side. You know the type; they start up at a 45-degree angle at each end and go all the way across the bridge.
To Melvin and me, that old bridge, looking lonely and abandoned was a beautiful sight because back in town the local junkyard was paying $1.00 per hundred pounds for old steel.
Melvin's dad owned a jeep, which Melvin got to drive when his dad was not using it. With sledge hammer, a hacksaw and the jeep to pull the beams out of the creek it took the two of us one whole week to cut the bridge up in pieces, pull it out of the creek and haul it into town. All 3500 pounds of it! That was a lot of work but we cleaned up—$35 for the lot of it. That was a lot of money to us in 1948.
The next day after we sold the steel, feeling pretty flush, I was walking down the four block main street with my dad, who knew nothing about how hard I had been working or what I had been working on. Suddenly in front of us stood Doc Dedicker, the town's only policeman. He proceeded to tell my dad that a landowner a few miles out of town said I stole his bridge!
I thought I was going to throw up right there on the main street.
Well, needless to say, we had to buy back all the steel, all 3500 pounds of it, haul it back to the site, rebuild the bridge (luckily my dad was a welder), put in a new floor, and new cement foundations. I don't remember the exact amount of time it took to build it back, but I do remember that it was much longer and harder than it was to tear it down. We worked for several weeks, tearing it down and building it back and did not earn a penny.
And what did my Mother say to me? And I want you to know I am not making this up for the purpose of this story! She said, "Son, I'm just glad we don't live in Brooklyn."
2:57:19 AM 
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