Vintage St. Pete: The Treasure Island Bridge ladies

Stuck.

Each gust of chilly afternoon wind threatened to send the big sedan careening forward, down vertical steel onto concrete, or – even worse – backwards through the yawning black gap it straddled, a straight drop into Boca Ciega Bay.

The four elderly woman dared not move for fear of shifting the 1962 Thunderbird’s precarious balance. The front tires clung to the western lip of the Treasure Island drawbridge, 35 feet over the road, while the car’s rear section hung suspended in the air.

Bob Hannah/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA Press Wire.

It was Tuesday, Jan. 30, 1973. The ladies, all widows from Canada on a six-week winter vacation, were on their way back to the beaches from a day of lunch and shopping. The white, two-door sedan belonged to Norah Bennett’s chiropractor son Denton, who lived with his wife at the SeaTowers condominiums near Madeira Beach. Mrs. Bennett, 75, was in the passenger seat navigating as Madeleine Dow, 74, drove.

In the back seat were Olive Bond, 78, and Margaret Strype, 77. They were all talking.

Clayton Gignac was in the old-timey (vintage 1938) masonry bridgetender’s booth. At 3:15 he heard the telltale blasts of a vessel’s horn, indicating something with a tall mast was approaching the causeway bridge. He would have to stop auto traffic and raise the ribbed steel spans.

Aboard the 27-foot yacht, headed south, were Roland and Joyce Krippendorf of Dunedin.

Gignac glanced out through his window at the roadway, registered nothing of concern, then turned, looked down and flipped the switch to lower the traffic gates.

He later said he did not see the old white Thunderbird as it crawled up the eastern slope of the bridge, that it must have been in a blind spot.

Behind the wheel, Mrs. Dow saw the striped wooden gate, with its flashing red lights, beginning to lower in front of her. Instinctively, she pushed down on the gas to glide beneath it.

Once the car had passed the bridge’s apex, however, she found the way forward blocked by the lowered western gate.

So she backed up.

When Mrs. Dow realized the gate behind her was also fully descended, she stopped the automobile.

Gignac, meanwhile, had begun raising the steel spans to allow the Krippendorfs’ yacht to pass.

The roadway separated, its steel teeth unclenched, and as the spans began to reach for the sky, so did the car with the women inside.

The loud blasts of Krippendorf’s horn, and from passengers on nearby small craft, got the bridgetender’s attention. Horrified, he stopped the spans before they reached their full vertical positions. Wisely, he did not attempt to reverse the mechanical procedure.

Remaining motionless, the four teetering ladies – 50 feet over the choppy bay water – silently prayed.

Tony Lopez/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA Press Wire.

A crowd gathered on the Treasure Island side to gawk and point. Boats large and small anchored on each side of the crippled bridge. Emergency vehicles and police cruisers pulled up. The media arrived.

Art Mea and Gary Tucker, from the Treasure Island Fire Department, extended two long ladders and laid them on the raised grating. When they reached the terrified foursome, Mea told the St. Petersburg Times, “They were really shook up. We just tried to keep them calm. I don’t know what we talked about – anything we could think of.”

They “joked a lot,” Tucker said, adding they pointed out various landmarks visible from their lofty perch.

The firefighters reached in and turned off the ignition – Mrs. Dow hadn’t thought of that – and, with the assistance of others, used cables and bolts to attach the Thunderbird to the span grate, so it would at least be secure.

Although they calmed down as Mea and Tucker talked with them, the ladies later confirmed that yes, they did think about a worst-case scenario.

“I thought maybe I’d have to swim,” said Mrs. Bond, the eldest of the four. She was the only one who actually knew how.

“But I wouldn’t go without the rest of them. If I couldn’t save them, I would have gone down with them.”

The drama was over in just under two hours. Via another causeway, the St. Petersburg Fire Department sent over one of its Snorkel boom lift trucks – a cherry-picker – and one by one, the ladies were gingerly extracted from the Thunderbird. Firefighters wrapped them in bear hugs and helped them inch over to the boom cab.

It took another hour to lower the bridge and remove the car without damaging either. As a precaution, the women were taken to Palms of Pasadena Hospital, where each was offered a tranquilizer, at $17.50 each. Only Mrs. Bennett declined.

“That’s the most expensive pill I’ve ever taken,” said Mrs. Strype.

“What we need,” declared Mrs. Dow, “is a good stiff drink.”

Tony Lopez/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA Press Wire.

With the women safely rescued, the bridge is carefully lowered. Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA Press Wire.

Back at the condo, the frazzled survivors indeed poured themselves a few, and settled in to watch their rescue on the evening news. They typed up a letter to the Times, publicly thanking the police and fire personnel “who saved us from our close call to Eternity.”

Their 15 minutes of Golden Girls fame continued with phone interviews, over the following days, with reporters from New York, Miami, San Francisco, London and their hometown of Toronto.

“But we haven’t gotten a single proposal,” Mrs. Bennett told a local reporter. “Surely there must be some nice widowers down here who would want at least one of four brave women.”

To the Toronto Star, Mrs. Dow explained that their trip had heretofore been relaxing. “We had a lovely time playing cards,” she said. “We’d each put 25 cents in the pot, and the pair with the highest score got 60 cents and the others got 40 cents.”

Since “the disaster,” she revealed, she’d started nervously smoking cigarettes again, after three months quit.

Said Mrs. Bond: “I just can’t sleep … I can’t get it out of my mind.”

None of the women’s names had ever appeared in the newspaper before. “We’re famous now,” she added, “but it wasn’t worth it.”

Just as Gignac was being suspended, with pay, pending an investigation, St. Petersburg mayor Herman Goldner issued a proclamation naming the “Four Canadians Who Hung in There” honorary citizens. Framed copies were presented to the ladies at a ceremony beneath the Williams Park bandshell.

SeaTowers held a “Bridge Party,” inviting the public to meet the quartet and hear their harrowing tale in person.

On Feb. 13, just two days after the SeaTowers event, Mrs. Bennett suffered a heart attack and was rushed to St. Pete General Hospital.

She was convalescing at son Denton’s condo when the other three went back to Canada on March 18.

In early 1974, a “pain, suffering and mental anguish” lawsuit against the City of Treasure Island, brought by Mrs. Strype, Mrs. Bond and Mrs. Dow, was withdrawn. Mrs. Bennett, who recovered from her heart attack and returned to Toronto, continued her own suit. It was settled out of court.

Editor: It never ceases to amaze me the depths to which the Treasure Island city government will sink to bring dollars to our little island. Most recently, in an apparent grab for the senior citizen tourist dollar, they have lionized four elderly women who either being unwilling or unable to heed the completely adequate warnings provided by lowered barrier gates, flashing lights and clanging bells, obviously should not have been operating a motor vehicle in the first place.

And if that weren’t enough, now City Manager Richard Taylor is attempting to make bridgetender Clayton Gignac the scapegoat by inserting into his file a memorandum cautioning him against carelessness.

In my opinion, that memorandum should be removed and destroyed and in its place should go a citation to Mr. Gignac for clear thinking in the time of a crisis resulting in at least prevention of bodily injury and possibly loss of life.

H.I. Cross, M.D.

Treasure Island

St. Petersburg Times/Feb. 22, 1973

From left: Margaret Strype, Madeleine Dow, Olive Bond and Norah Bennett. Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA Press Wire.

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