Our Tropical Adventure in Construction

By Dom Martino

One day in 1936 the phone rang and a man's voice asked my Mother if her son would like to go to Panama? Mama, thinking Panama was another suburb of Boston, said, “Certainly, as long as it's a construction job. He will go anywhere on a construction job.” A month later I was aboard the Grace liner Santa Maria, deeper than ever in my “Adventure in Construction.”

The trip was terrific. The mighty ship's engines surged her forward through the limitless ocean, and a young man, dedicated to construction, stared thoughtfully at the moon, thinking of his lovely wife and three adorable baby girls, wondering with a strange fascination how he could tear himself away from them and what predicament his love of building was getting him into next?

At Cristobal harbor the immigration authority would not let me debark because I did not have a signed contract with a government contractor. The man who talked to my mother came aboard, laughingly bought me a return ticket to New York City, and so I was permitted to land.

Cristobal was fascinating — the better masonry buildings all had wide, arched porches and were a ruddy, sparkling white with old red mission tile roofs. The corrugated iron buildings were usually unpainted. Native quarters, of frame construction and several stories high were teeming with people, dogs, and a cacophony of noise. Juke boxes in local cantinas blared forth Spanish and American “hot” songs incessantly. The older streets were a broad, flat V, with a trough at the center for the passage of sewage. This disposal system had been abandoned long before, but the facilities remained.

One of the curious things about the native quarter is that almost every doorway has a few potted plants around it. Several of these had little sticks about 18” long and ½” thick stuck into them. On top of each stick was an inverted half egg shell. I have asked a hundred questions as to what this “egg shell on the stick” signified but no one who knew would ever answer the question.

Majestic palms poised their lofty fronds to the bluest skies I had ever seen, with magnificent clouds passing by in celestial splendor.

Next came the trip across the isthmus on the Panama Railroad, with probably the last of the kerosene train lamps in American usage. At Gamboa, I was assigned to a double room in a construction camp and so to work.

The fragrant smell of Ginger Lilies was everywhere, particularly after a rain. The townsite was being hacked out of lush, primal jungle.

I found a species of lily whose bulbs were as large as and shaped like an 18 pound ham. I could never get one to bloom.

My first project was a Bachelor Officers Quarters, 216 feet long, concrete on the first story, wood frame on the second. My first experiences with truly unskilled labor were amusing. We had about eight laborers excavating for foundations by hand. These boys were digging away with picks and shovels and throwing the dirt no farther away than they could reach. I told them to throw the dirt a little farther away, leaving a flat level berm about 2 feet wide at both sides of the excavation so that carpenters could walk around and set their forms. Upon my return I found a boy shoveling earth from the edge into the bottom of the trench and then shoveling it up again from the bottom to points farther out of the way, a sorry waste of effort.

While building concrete stairs, I cut the riser forms the exact width of the stair. These pieces would not pass 2x4 edge stringers along the wall. I asked a carpenter to cut one inch off the risers, so we could just barely slip them past the stringers. In setting the pieces I now found them two inches shorter and spoiled for the work. I asked the carpenter how come? He said, “You told me to cut off one inch.” “Certainly,” I said, “but these are now 2” shorter.” “Of course,” he said, “I cut one inch off each end!”

The plants and animals around Gamboa were fascinating. Electric Blue Butterflies with a wing spread of 4 to 6 inches. An Ocelot 6’0” long shot on a weekend within a half mile of the construction camp. Tarantulas, furry looking and loathsome, darting sidewise like lightning. Tarantulas had such an adverse effect on me that all through my six years on the isthmus I often had a particular nightmare in which a tarantula, broad as your extended hand, would be crawling on the screen of our sleeping porch, within a foot of my face. A Fer-de-Lance snake 5 feet long, violent green and no bigger around than your thumb. A Sloth, hanging upside down by his three-toed claws, moving in slow motion toward a leaf of his fastidious choosing.

Colorful Macaws, plumed in reds, blues, yellows and oranges, with black and white stripes around their eyes, and tails three feet long.

The Superintendent had a little monkey who was in great fear of fire. A visitor came into the construction shack smoking a cigar. The monkey grabbed the cigar and stomped it out. The boss felt that the visitor had been improperly treated by this episode and so gave the monkey a spanking. The monkey promptly leaped up among the rafters and spit upon the boss!

A visit by an Iguana was an occasion expensive for the contractor, a joy to the boys, and always fatal to the Iguana. First all work stopped while all the native boys armed with sticks and stones sought to capture him, in a joyous hue and cry. The hunt continued until the beast was caught, but kept alive so the meat would stay fresh, trussed up in a traditional fashion so that he could not get away, then the construction camp would get back to work. I was told that Iguana meat is similar to chicken in flavor and appearance.

On Sundays we took trips along the water-way into the jungle, in borrowed native cayucas. These boats are hacked out of native logs. Silent reminders of the French failure to put through a canal lay rusting in the jungle, symbols of men and machines long gone. Limes, Oranges and grapefruit grew wild along the riverfront. I saw a bunch of the largest “bananas” I had ever seen. With clumsy determination I hacked down the plant and brought the bunch about our cayuca. To my dismay, I found that my “bananas” were not bananas at all, but were plantains, which have to be cooked to be eaten. I also found that the bunch was teeming with Army ants, which took over the boat, swarming into every nook and cranny and taking piercing nips out of us. My boatman was disgusted.

These Ants systematically strip trees of foliage, carrying the bits of green above their heads like little banners, filing by in endless rows, all the banner-bearers going one way in bobbing processions, and those who have delivered their burden scurrying back for fresh loot. Gruesome tales are told about these ants, describing ancient methods of torture by tying humans in their path to have their flesh torn away bit by bit till only the skeleton remains.

One night at about eleven o'clock, while we were still in the construction camp, our radio gave forth the voice of the King of England announcing his abdication “for the woman he loved.”

My roommate made no comment and neither did I, but next morning, when we were summoned to breakfast at dawn by the clanging of a sledge hammer on a bent rail suspended triangle, he swung his feet to the floor, set his elbows on his knees, put his head in his hands, and soliloquized, “Boy, that woman must have a lot on the ball.”

My employers graciously sent for my little family and Gert certainly had a rough time of her expedition to the tropics. Shots for international travel, close up a New York apartment, embark with three babies.

Aboard the fine ship Ancon, the captain put a new crib in her stateroom for our baby. While docked in Haiti, Gert decided to show the girls the strange island. While they were ashore, a freight loading spar fell across the spot where she and the children had habitually sat all through the voyage.

Gert and I met as teenagers, 18 and 14, and were immediately in love. A third of a century later the same glorious situation exists. We had no standards or rules to go by, and as age, maturity and knowledge came, I am pleased to say that as I grew to know what qualities in a person were admirable, it has been my happy and delightful experience to discover that Gert has always had them all, kindness, beauty, love of people, warmth, sense of humor, understanding. She raised three lovely daughters, one a sharp little Lieutenant Junior Grade in the Navy, one a handsome and happy wife, who has brought us a fine son called Avan, and one a sweet Freshman in College. I am satisfied that the Lord's finest creation is a good woman and potential mother.

One night while we were working the graveyard shift (12 midnight to 8 A.M.), Gert looked out of our home and saw a strange “Fire-making creature rooting in the near distance!” Petrified with fear for the babies, she put on a pair of my shoes and clomped around the house, carrying on imaginary conversations to make the intruder think she was not alone!

When I got home I went investigating and it developed that these Army Ants were stripping my neighbor's rose garden and he, crawling on his hands and knees with a flashlight, was seeking out the nest of our Army Ants, to blast it out with a half stick of dynamite.

One point of great scenic beauty was the Coronado Trail, down which the Ancients traveled with Indian gold, then pirates sought refuge there with untold treasures, and later still cross-country travelers from the East coast of the United States to the California Gold Rush transited the isthmus on mule back at ten dollars a head. There is a little water falls there, with swift, white water, as pretty and as tranquil a spot as I have ever seen.

My love of building brought me to the ruins of “Old Panama”, an original township said to have been sacked by Morgan, the pirate, centuries ago. Broken bits of ancient stone cutting in the rubble around the place showed pure Greek Doric architectural design. Aged Cathedral walls, tree and jungle grown, towered above the countryside in ecclesiastical dignity. Shorn of roof and altar and tapestries and plaster, these bare, stark walls still reached heavenward 400 years after their construction, testifying to their builders' faith in, and struggle to reach, Almighty God.

Square openings in the walls about 5 inches square, approximately 5 feet apart both ways, and in a fairly regular pattern baffled me. Could they be rifle ports? No! no rifles then; besides, how could (would) the riflemen reach them way up there? What were those holes?

After many visits to the ruins with many friends, my superintendent solved my puzzle. “Construction scaffolding holes,” he said, “whose sealing mortar and stucco have fallen out centuries after the walls were built.”

We found two underground dungeons with prisoner chains on the walls. Rumor had it that the dungeons were floodable, making them execution vaults for bygone killers!

A Picnic Excursion to Summit Gardens gave me a glimpse of nature and wildlife which I shall remember always — a garden pool with rustic stone footbridge, pink and white and yellow water lilies and lotus blossoms, lily pads and lotus pads with turned up edges all over the place. Birds, like little cranes or herons, about 4 inches tall, played among the pads.

There was a baby among these birds, the sweetest little mite you ever could see. The larger birds flew from pad to pad but baby evidently could not fly yet. So it would back up to the far edge of the pad it was on, take a running start, and skip right on top of the water to the next pad it wanted to get to!

My next project was a bridge across the Rio Grande River to the Canal. The first leg was a temporary, working trestle along the route of the bridge. This river was very interesting, in that it was tidal and had a peculiar gait. The tide here would take about 6 hours to go out, but it would sometimes rush back in in half an hour, often forcing my boys to operate in water up to their noses to accomplish their work.

There were three shifts around the clock on this project and floodlights enabled us to work at night. Schools of fish cavorted about under the lights and one evening a shark went back and forth among the lights. Contrary to my earlier notion that sharks were ugly monsters, this eight-foot beauty was a sight to behold, volplaning about in graceful, easy, figure eights.

When we started to put heavy equipment on our wood trestle, one pile split and had to be replaced. In order to get it out, I was to remove an eight x sixteen stringer. This developed into a hefty problem and smart aleck me figured out an easy solution. I hooked a cable to the piece, attached the cable to a 15-ton diesel tractor ashore and waved the operator on. The piece was snaked out easily and I paid no more attention to it for the moment. Soon a clamor arose among my boys. I looked up. The tractor was barely visible, thrashing through swamp growth about an eighth of a mile away! I ran after it, demanding from the operator where in Hades he was going! He said, “Well, you told me to go, but you never told me to stop.”

After the working trestle was finished, we started on the permanent structure. To clear the way for the bridge piers, 24’ x 48’ steel sheet piling cofferdams were to be built. Because the piles were 70’0” long, temporary guides were fashioned from wood piles and 12x12 timbers. My stint was the guides. I would build the guides on the day shift, the riggers would set the piles in place on the swing shift (4 PM to 12 PM), and the pile drivers would hammer the piles to refusal on the graveyard shift. I built these guides to a tolerance of ½”, that is, the top rail was plumb with the bottom rail to within one half inch.

One of the piers was located on a little island and I could not get the usual depth between guides. I erroneously figured that, since I had only half the distance I need be only half as accurate, so this time I worked to one inch instead of one-half inch.

Next morning, when I came on shift, the boss was rocking back and forth on his toes and heels in front of my guides. No piles had been stood up that night and so none had been driven! Figuratively speaking, he was fit to be tied. Meekly I asked him what happened. “Why,” he said, “your guides were so far out of plumb we could not stand the piles up in them.” Quickly I remembered the situation. Half the distance, now it was clear, the tolerance should have been half as much, or a quarter inch, and not the twice as much, or one inch that I had used. Sheepishly, I murmured, “I'll turn around and you can kick it.” “It's not that bad,” said the dear man, now long dead, “but the next time you feel that I am an S.O.B. remember this.”

Believe it or not, the land crabs around the bridge were red, white and blue. There were also thousands upon thousands of little white fiddler crabs on these beaches. They were called Fiddler Crabs because the males all have enlarged right claws which they wave aloft constantly in a sort of rhythm, each beside his hole in the sand. The beaches were white with these little creatures and when disturbed they would all vanish into their holes simultaneously changing the shores, chameleon-like, from white to grey.

One day, a boy servicing a compressor with gasoline, got his oil-saturated clothing on fire. The poor fellow was running in circles, screaming, when an armed guard – with great presence of mind – intercepted him with a thrust of his rifle, knocked him down and rolled on him with his own person, smothering the flames until the fire was out, thereby saving the boy's life.

Upon completion of the cofferdam, we went on to the construction of pre-cast concrete piles, up to 80 feet long. The boom on our crane was too short to raise such long piles, so we rigged a wood jib on it by use of a select 12x12 Douglas Fir timber 40 feet long, lapping the steel boom 20’ and extending out beyond the steel boom by 20 feet.

Driving the piles required the closest harmony between design, inspection and the field. To drive the piles beyond refusal would shatter them and yet failure to drive to refusal would materially decrease the design value of each.

There is a curious pattern to the hazards of construction. At the townsite, a man fell off the wall to the front porch, perhaps 5’0”, on one of a pair of the only exposed vertical reinforcing rod dowels within 100 yards of the job. It was fatal. On the bridge, we had 12 dowels in each 16” x 16” concrete pile and the piles were 48” apart. This left less than 30” between groups of 12 dowels in both directions. Believe it or not, a foreman fell 30 feet into this nest of deadly perpendiculars, landed between groups of dowels without a scratch and was hospitalized for shock only.

The burning sun, high humidity, three shifts, and advanced completion schedule on the bridge made for frayed nerves. A concrete foreman and a steel foreman got into it on some point or other and wound up with “let's fight!” In accordance with the construction code they both lived and worked by, they walked together to a shed a half mile away so they would not fight before the workmen. Soon they returned on good terms again, one with a broken thumb, and the other with a cut under an eye which required nine stitches. The code had been satisfied.

My next tour of duty was in the woodshop.

There were rights and wrongs to construction, and mistakes sometimes exact a rough toll. One of the functions of the wood shop was to rebuild worn out wood protective bumpers and sheathing on dredges and scows, using precious, heavy, dense hardwoods. One of these, Alimandra, is so dense that the knives of planers give off little sparks from grit which the tree has assimilated from the earth.

Some dredges have great tall structural steel pins called spuds about 5’0” square and 70’0” high which probe down into the river bed to keep the dredge from going backwards as its agitator stirs up the muck forward. To save wear and tear on both the spud and the spudwell, both are sheathed with hardwood, and the sheathing of one side alone sometimes weighs about a ton. These are set by a rigging gang, using a drydock crane. As some of our spudwell sheathing was lowered into place by riggers and crane, my new partner tried to help. I advised him that it was the function of the riggers to set the piece, ours to secure it, and to leave it alone until it was set. I then went below to start securing the bottom. A few minutes later the boss stuck his head over the side and told me to go for the ambulance. My over-willing partner, eager to help by pushing the piece into place with both hands and both feet, had not noticed a three-quarter projecting shelf on the piece and it had sheared off the tips of his toes.

I have often told my apprentice classes that, other than spiritual considerations, the greatest difference between men and animals is tools and their use. Anything that both men and animals can do, I feel that animals do better. This statement offends many persons, but it certainly gives them something to think about.

I have a great fondness for working tools. Although many years have passed since I worked with them, I still maintain a very full kit of carpenter's tools. One day as I was working on a PT boat between four torpedoes, one of them began to hiss and sizzle like fury. The sailor on duty shouted repeatedly, “Fire, abandon ship! Fire, abandon ship!!”

I was stunned with fear and fear is a corroding emotion. Quickly I picked up all my tools and in the confusion dropped them. I did this over and over for what seemed like an eternity and finally an officer scrambled aboard, shut one valve on the torpedo, and all was serene again.

These little PT boats were heroic craft. A squadron consisted of six boats and, because of their high maneuverability and the fact that each boat maneuvered differently, a crew assigned to it was kept aboard it throughout. These squadrons, after training at home ports, were assigned to a period of indoctrination to tropical conditions in our area. Therefore, boats and crews were loaded on tankers in the U.S., off loaded in our waters, a new squadron was loaded aboard and off they went to the wars in the Pacific.

Because of the tankers' vulnerability to submarine warfare, the boats were so loaded that, in a torpedoing, the releasing of four gooseneck hooks on each would allow the PT Boats to float off if and when the tanker sank.

At long last the war was over and our wartime community was over-manned for peacetime activity. We were going home! Our tropical adventure in construction was over.