Know
Mother’s Day brings back tragic memories of Skyway collapse
For 45 years, Mother’s Day weekend has been inexorably linked to the Sunshine Skyway Bridge tragedy.
It was May 9, 1980 – a Friday, just like this year – when an errant freighter, caught in a sudden, violent storm just as it was about to pass under the massive structure, collided with a support pier and sent more than 1,200 feet of concrete and steel plummeting 150 feet into Tampa Bay.
Thirty-five people from the bridge died when their vehicles dropped the entire distance and hit the water at a high velocity.
The last to fall was a Greyhound bus with 25 passengers and a driver aboard.
Among the passengers were six students from Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, heading home to Florida at the end of the school year and anxious to get there in time for Mother’s Day, two days later.
Sunday, May 11, 1980 – just like this year.
Out of the dozen or so students who’d boarded the bus back at Tuskegee, most had already been dropped off as it chugged out of the St. Petersburg station and headed south of U.S. 19, towards the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.
There were six of them left, chatting, napping, reading, gazing out the windows as a light rain began to fall: Duane Adderley, 21; LaVerne Daniels, 20; Yvonne Johnson, 22; Alphonso Blidge, 22; Sharon Dixon, 21 and John “Chip” Callaway, Jr., 19.
At 7:34 a.m., just moments after the Greyhound began the long ascent to the top of the Skyway under a suddenly-black sky and pounding rain, they were all dead.
Tawanna McClendon, 20, was a student at Tallahassee Community College. She was taking the bus to Palmetto, across Tampa Bay in Manatee County, for a Mother’s Day visit. Also boarding in the capital city was 24-year-old Wanda McGarragh, who was in the Masters program at Florida State University’s College of Education.
She carried in her lap her 6-month-old daughter, Manesha.
The Sunshine Skyway Bridge disaster was the moment St. Petersburg lost its innocence; no longer was it a Molasses-slow, Mayberry type of small town where nothing bad, nothing tragic on a grand scale, had every happened.
May 9, 1980 changed all that forever.
To this day, it remains the worst ship/bridge collision, in terms of human casualty, in world history.
May 9, 1980. The freighter Summit Venture at rest, its port bow anchor pinned to the bottom by debris from the fallen Sunshine Skyway span. The big yellow Buick belonged to St. Petersburg car dealer Paul “Dick” Hornbuckle; he and three friends escaped the vehicle after it slid to a stop 14 inches from the break. Photo: Florida Archives.
Catalyst Senior Writer and Editor Bill DeYoung is the author of Skyway: The True Story of Tampa Bay’s Signature Bridge and the Man Who Brought it Down (University Press of Florida).
In commemoration of the 45th anniversary of the tragedy, he will give a power point presentation Thursday, May 8 at 6:30 p.m. at the St. Petersburg Museum of History (part of the “Happy Hour With the Historian” series). Tickets are available at this link.
The presentation will be repeated Friday, May 9 at 7 p.m. as a benefit for the Gulf Beaches Historical Society Museum, which was severely damaged by Hurricane Helene. Admission is by donation at St. Petersburg City Theatre, 4025 31st Street S., St. Petersburg.
