Submitted by HistoryLink.org/Murray Morgan.
“Murray Morgan (1916-2000) was one of the Pacific Northwest’s most beloved historians. A native Tacoman, he wrote the indispensable Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle and several other books about the region. In the following reminiscence written in the 1960s and shared with HistoryLink by his daughter, Lane Morgan, Murray writes about the night he was unable to raise the Eleventh Street Bridge in Tacoma. It’s a favorite family story, Lane Morgan said, made more poignant when the Eleventh Street Bridge was officially renamed the Murray Morgan Bridge in 1997.
‘The 2,100-foot Steel Monster’
“In this land of lovely bridges the one that means the most to me is over-aged, squat and misshapen — one of those Prides of the Past that has become a Bottleneck to Progress — the Eleventh Street Bridge in Tacoma. It connects the downtown business district with the industrial tideflats.”
“This seems like a good day to reprint Murray Morgan’s story of malfunction on what is now “his” bridge,” writes Murray Morgan’s daughter, Lane. Read the rest of the story at https://historylink.org/File/21150.
One of my Morgan favorites is “The Dam”, about the workings of Grand Coulee dam flooding not too long after it was built. A good read, and a pretty wild event that could have potentially crippled the dam.
I took a couple of his classes at TCC in the late 60s and early 70s. He had a way of speaking so that you could tell he loved the history of the PNW. I believe his wife’s name was Rosa (maybe Rose) and he told of their adventures down the Columbia River. Memories of his classes are fond.