The Vicodin Thieves. Chip Jacobs

was a more haphazard approach to these issues then,” explained state historian Kevin Starr. “The temptation is to imply a conspiracy [by the politicians], which can be true, but it can also be that it just didn’t register on the radar screen.”

      Did the cities and the companies at least send back-door condolences to the victim’s families? Was there a moment a silence? A check cut? A memorial plaque? All these years later, it is the mystery stitched through the bloodstains.

      “To the extent city fathers saw this as a potential [hurdle] to their great dream, they wanted it to keep it moving like George Ellery trying to get the telescope up to Mount Wilson,” said Sue Mossman, Executive Director of Pasadena Heritage, the preservation outfit that has championed the bridge. “When you look at the magnitude of the project and the way it was built basically by hand, the probability there’d be an accident was pretty high… And, this bridge was fairly controversial.”

      Whimsy and Despair

      If there was a face to the tragedy, it was Visco’s. A Pasadena Daily News article published August 4th characterized the family’s loss as one of “clean-minded aspiration cut short by ‘fate.’”

      Visco had emigrated to the U.S. as a child. He was not much for mingling or chitchat about Woodrow Wilson and his League of Nations or pennant races. He wanted to assimilate, enrolling himself in a night course to learn English. Carpentry was his trade but he poured concrete for Mr. Mercereau.

      In 1912 he married a pretty, olive-skinned woman who had come to the states from Mazatlán, Mexico. Visco was Juana Rojas’ third husband. Her first had died, her second had run off and she had to work in a San Diego laundry to support her two kids. When she married Visco, they set up house on Wilde Street, southwest of downtown L.A. In summer of 1913, three weeks before she would be widowed again, Juana delivered Visco’s son, John, Jr.

      Nobody from the city or the company came in person to inform her about the accident at first. A neighbor of hers, a carpenter who happened to have read a story about it, took on that duty around sunrise on August 2nd. He rapped on the door and looked so pale that Juana asked if he was sick. No, the neighbor told her. It was John who had been hurt.

      “Oh,” she said, “I know he is dead.”

      Later that afternoon a Mercereau representative dropped by, offering to help. Juana was said to be frantic. Then she refused to believe her husband was gone.

      Two generations later, the vestiges of Juana’s grief remain in her granddaughter’s creaky memories. Pasadena Police Commander Marilyn Diaz, whose paternal grandfather was Juana’s second husband, has tried reconstructing what happened in the aftermath of Visco’s gory fall. His son, John, Jr., turned out like the dad he never really knew—self-taught, determined, Diaz said. He was a Culver City fireman before he went into the trunk footlocker business with Diaz’s father.

      Twice widowed, Juana died before World War II.

      “It leaves me a little bit wistful,” said Diaz, a thirty year department veteran who runs the field operations division. “I think about when this occurred, the police never went out and notified my grandmother. Almost a hundred years later, the Pasadena Police Department has changed. We have tremendous support for victim’s families, whether it involves a gang member or anybody else. We want to show dignity. It’s a different time.”

      Scant personal information was revealed about the other two fatalities. Collins, who had come to Pasadena just four months earlier from Camden, New Jersey, was wounded head-to-toe and at one point had nine nurses treating him, plus Dr. Newcomb. They had to scrape dried concrete off him, and it was almost impossible without hurting him more. Collins died of infections from his wounds on August 10th, wounds which would be easily treatable today with antibiotics. He left behind a five year old son. Johnson, the concrete raker, expired from his wounds as well.

      On August 4th, 1913 the tough questions started flying. A coroner’s jury, a citizen’s panel summoned to investigate and deliberate on certain fatalities like a specialized grand jury, gathered at the Turner-and-Stevens funeral parlor on North Raymond Avenue.

      A Mercereau vice president named F.W. Proctor testified early on. He admitted he still was puzzled. The only scenario he could think of was that the mold for the top of the arch, otherwise known as false work, had probably broken because it had been improperly over-weighted. When it snapped, the concrete burst through the rows of scaffolding, taking Collins, Johnson, and Visco with it.

      “Something gave way,” Proctor said. “Nobody knows what… It’s one of those things that makes a man wonder how much he knows after all.”

      “Was there any inspection of the work as it proceeded?” he was asked.

      “The City of Pasadena has an engineer on the job,” Proctor piped up.

      Before more could be learned, City Coroner Calvin Hartwell abruptly ended this line of inquiry. He told the jury that the section of the arch destroyed, a thirty foot by sixty foot frame, was outside Pasadena boundaries, in the minutely inhabited city of San Rafael. Thus, Pasadena’s responsibility was nullified. Officials from the city across the gorge were never trotted before the jury. (San Rafael, which includes what is now the Linda Vista area and land west of the bridge, was mainly farmland run by two families. It was annexed by Pasadena in 1914.)

      Coroner jury member F.F. Berry was dissatisfied with what he heard. Based on newspaper accounts from the time, he bore down on the foreman of the carpenters, one John Galloway. Had the false work been inspected? Berry asked. Yes, Galloway said. They always checked for signs of weight-bearing strain. Okay, Berry continued, were there any safety precautions (in this, the age before safety harnesses)? Galloway replied there were ropes workers could grab, but he did not seem to understand the gist of the question.