A Winter's Day -- 1967

It was unbelievably cold in the Mid-Ohio Valley, especially for the middle of December. With only ten days to go until Christmas, I just knew we would have snow that year. After all, it was December 15th and flurries had been flying all day.
When he came home from work, Daddy built a fire in the fireplace. After supper Mom would make muffins and Constant Comment tea to have by the fire.  It was a winter tradition.
I curled up on the couch, reading whatever a 12-year old reads, when the local news came on. But something was wrong. The news was somber, more urgent. The newsman, who seemed ready to cry, said a bridge had fallen into the Ohio River between Point Pleasant and Gallipolis. I screamed for my parents to come from the kitchen.
All evening and throughout the weekend, we watched in horror as news stories told of the collapse of the Silver Bridge. They showed photos of the twisted wreckage on each side of the river. We saw the concrete piers standing empty in the river. And we saw bits and pieces of people's lives -- especially Christmas packages -- floating in the river. We wondered how anyone could have survived, only to later learn that 46 -- many of them families on their way home from Christmas shopping -- had not. They perished either in the black, icy waters of the muddy Ohio, or beneath the debris of the steel superstructure of the once beautiful bridge.
The tragedy became part of our little communities of Newport and St. Marys days later when our beautiful bridge, the twin to the Silver Bridge, was closed. The reason? The design of the bridge -- an I-bar suspension -- contributed to the collapse of the Silver Bridge. (Brittle steel and the stop-and-go traffic were later found to be factors as well.)
The Army Corps of Engineers and others came in to clean up the Silver Bridge disaster. A few years later, I worked with some of those men from the Corps that helped with the clean-up. They refused to talk about any part of their work that winter.
Our bridge, the Short Route Bridge or Hi Carpenter Bridge, remained closed for five more years before it was torn down. For people in St. Marys and Newport, two communities that had always been tied together by that bridge, we either rode a ferry boat or walked the now-deserted bridge. Many times, I walked beneath those soaring gothic towers and marveled at the graceful suspension.
Our bridge had claimed lives too while being built. My own grandfather had died during its construction in 1927. Now, its twin had claimed 46 lives and would soon claim our bridge as well.
The federal government determined that they could never be sure our bridge was safe. It never reopened, and five years later, it too came down, crashing into the muddy Ohio with the help of demolition experts from CDI.  It was another five years before an expansive new bridge reconnected Newport and St. Marys.  Five years of lost time and friendships.
The collapse of the Silver Bridge on December 15, 1967, claimed 46 lives. It also claimed the heart and soul of the four communities that were linked by that ill-fated bridge and its twin. Some dates and events make an indelible mark on your life.  For me, December 15, 1967 is one of those points in time that I will never forget.
We did have snow on Christmas that year.