Hard work, pride gave us 'Bob Miller's bridge'

My father made iron things - tooth gears and turnbuckles, flanges and valves - thousands of cast-iron parts for machines and manufacturing systems in dozens of factories during the height of post-World War II industrial production.

He and his band of foundry brothers took pride in all that. It was hot, dirty and heavy labor, but every foundry man I knew took a moment now and then to admire a perfectly cast, clean-grinded widget needed for a growing American economy.

Of course, most of those cast-iron things are probably gone now. A lot of the machinery for which my father made parts became obsolete. His customers closed factories or shipped operations elsewhere. A wholesaler can now order "U.S.-like turnbuckles" via the Internet from Qingdao Xiangda Hardware Co.

Even so, back when business was good – in the quarter-century between the Truman and Nixon presidencies, my father's foundry floor produced useful iron things every day. And while much of the work was drudgery, the guys still felt pride in a job well done, a thing well made. It wasn't just about the paycheck.

A lot of men and women care not a whit about the workmanship thing. They find their jobs uninspiring and dreary. They find their bliss elsewhere. But many more, though they seldom express it, take considerable pride in what they do.

When I met Bob Miller in 2002, he was still beaming about his role in the construction of the first Chesapeake Bay Bridge, 50 years earlier.

My father would have envied Mr. Miller. While Joe Rodricks could not point to anything public he had a hand in making, Bob Miller could drive to Sandy Point and tell the passengers in his car all about his first job out of college.

Bob Miller, a former coal-mining kid from Cowen, W.Va., got a job testing rivets on the bridge, and he might have tested every last one of them. In the kitchen of his home in Carroll County, he showed me the wooden-handled hammer he'd used to tap the rivets. He'd kept the hammer all those years, the way combat veterans might keep a knife or bayonet.

Work already had begun on the Bay Bridge when Bob Miller, on a field trip as a college senior in 1950, saw the Chesapeake for the first time. "It was the biggest thing I ever saw," he told me. "I couldn't believe it was just the bay and not the ocean."

Mr. Miller felt a surge of excitement at the barges between Sandy Point and Kent Island, and construction crews building the footings for the bridge and driving tons of pilings into the bay floor. He wanted to be one of the thousands who had a hand in building it.

"He said it was the most amazing thing he had ever seen, the bay and the substructure of the bridge emerging from the water," says Mr. Miller's niece, Liz Miller. "His face lit up when he talked about it, even after all these years."

Ms. Miller visited her uncle as he lay in a hospice in Westminster two weeks ago. "Of course, he told me about the Bay Bridge," she says. "It must have been the dream of a lifetime. ... He was so proud to have worked on it."

People back home in West Virginia used to call the Bay Bridge "the bridge Bob Miller built." He worked on many other projects, including the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel and the second span of the Bay Bridge. He was widely respected in his profession. He died Aug. 28. He was 80.

His niece spoke at his funeral and said the same words there that I've quoted here. Liz Miller works for the Office of Highway Maintenance in Prince George's County. She's worked on the Connecticut Avenue Bridge project, on the River Road noise wall, on the Leonardtown bypass - things she can point to, with pride.

"I'm not sure I know what makes someone a remarkable man," she told fellow mourners, many of them from West Virginia. "But I do know that my Uncle Bob did remarkable things. ... Go and see Bob Miller's bridge before you go home. He would love that."

Dan Rodricks' column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. He is host of the Midday talk show on WYPR-FM.