It was the spring of ’52.
I was six.
My great-grandmother had woken up one morning that year and found herself in California, and needed a ride back to the homestead and the prairies of Alberta. My Mother and Dad volunteered to pick her up, and while I don’t know who paid for the gas, I do know that Dad went down to the White Rose gas station and filled up the 1950 Pontiac, and off we went.
California then wasn’t the California that it is now. The Dodgers were still the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the San Francisco Giants were still the New York Giants.
Thankfully, I don’t remember much about the monotonous hundreds and hundreds of miles and the number of times that my sister crossed the line that supposedly divided her space and mine in the back seat.
But I sure remember San Francisco. There was a lot of stuff there. The zoo, Fisherman’s Wharf, an appropriately named place called the ‘Fun House,’ and more. One thing on the ‘more’ list and high on the list of things to see there at the time was a bridge. A famous bridge. The Golden Gate Bridge. It was a big bridge, and when you crossed it, you knew, even if you were six, that you were crossing one of the engineering wonders of the world at the time.
I knew a little bit about bridges.
We lived only about sixty miles south of Edmonton at the time, so we were there every so often, and in those days, if you went to Edmonton and didn’t cross the High Level Bridge, you might as well have stayed home. If you don’t believe me, ask Carol Penno. She grew up in the same neighbourhood, well, not really, but close.
So it was 1952, and we’re talking about bridges. Does that ring any bells for you? If not, ask yourself if the Kicking Horse Bridge that we are using today has any connection with ’52, and, of course, it does.
That’s the year that the bridge was born and is now being replaced. Most of us will have seen the year 1952, engraved in the concrete of the bridge. We will never know, and probably don’t care, how many vehicles have crossed it in the 74 years that it’s been used. We don’t know, and again, probably don’t care, if it was ever repaired to a large extent to extend its life.
And we have forgotten the many winters/springs when we worried whether it was going to stay where it is or whether the river ice would maybe drag it down to the Columbia.
But there is one thing which we might be curious about.
What did it cost back there in ’52?
Now we all know that the new bridge is going to cost a lot of money, and it’s not my point here at all to criticize the new bridge. There is a whole world of differences in our economy now compared to 74 years ago. And if whatever the new bridge costs seems excessive, that may be somewhat true. I know that because I know that you and I both waste some money every day. It’s a big project, and there will be some overruns.
A good comparison of the cost of the bridge is what baseball players are signing contracts for these days. One guy just signed with the Dodgers for $240 million over four years, that’s $60m per year. Another signed for $220 million over three years.
And the Blue Jays’ Bo Bichette just signed with the New York Mets for $126 million over three years. That’s $42 million a year for a man playing a kid’s game! And if our new bridge lasts a hundred years and costs $50 million, it’s going to work for half a million a year, not counting interest and all that kind of stuff. So compared to some things, even though it’s expensive, it may not be too bad a deal.
So the cost of the new bridge is not what this piece is about.
But still, what did the old bridge cost?
I can tell you that that question has been almost impossible to get an answer to. Not that anyone had any reason not to tell, just that nobody knew where the answer could be found.
I got interested in it last summer and went to lots of people looking for an answer. Nobody had one. That included several Ministry of Highways people in Victoria and several places here in Golden.
Then, some magic happened.
The magic was Keith Baldrey.
He suggested looking in the Legislative Library in Victoria. I had already done that and got nowhere. But he knew something that the librarians didn’t know.
Keith knew that, at least back there in the middle ages, like the ’50’s and ’60’s, the individual ministries in Victoria had to produce things called Annual Reports, and in those reports, in the fine print that probably nobody ever took time to read, were little nuggets of information such as contract amounts for government expenditures, including the cost of bridges, including the cost of our bridge in Golden that we drive over everyday, which would have been so proudly opened in ’52. They probably even had a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
But what did the bridge cost?
Well, the bridge itself cost $280,447.79. Don’t forget the 79 cents.
But in addition to the bridge itself, there was an additional cost of $84,648.08 for what was called the substructure. Don’t forget the 8 cents.
Then they also needed $974.58 to fix up the approaches. And there were some other small amounts, but for our purposes here today, we are probably close enough with what we’ve got.
It totals, including the cents, to be something like $366,070.45.
Quite a difference in the cost of bridges in 74 years! And quite a goodly number of years of service from the old bridge! The new bridge will likely give us an even greater number of years of service. Maybe a hundred years. Which means that none of us who are walking the streets and bridges of Golden today will be around to remember what today’s new bridge ever cost.
But there it is for the old bridge: $366,070.45.
I was starting to give up on ever finding out what the old bridge cost, but not completely, because I did have the presence of mind to mention it to Keith Baldrey. Without his capacity for extreme detail and a good memory, we might never have known. He even dug the numbers out and called them to me.
Thanks, Keith.
