“It was the best job I ever had,” Ronnie Bass told me, and alas it is no more. Ronnie was one of the last bridge keepers on the old Palm Valley Bridge over the canal on the road from Mickler’s Beach to what is now Nocatee.
The drawbridge, a historic double leaf bascule, was built in 1937 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It featured rattling wooden deck planks and a dedicated bridge tender house. Before that, if you wanted to get across the canal you needed a skiff or a Jonny boat. The bridge was tended and open 24 hours a day, with a bridge keeper always on duty. “There was somebody on that bridge all the time,” Ronnie said.
Bass told me that the job “didn’t pay well,” but it was only a half mile from his house. Every night after work, he fished from the bridge and brought home a bucket full of fish, mostly trout, flounder and redfish. That memory clearly delighted him to this day.
Before he could go fishing, he had to sweep the glass off of the bridge. The old drawbridge was only two lanes and extremely narrow on the western side. It was not quite wide enough for two cars at the same time, and drivers regularly knocked off their side view mirrors trying to pass each other.
This was especially true if one of the vehicles was a truck or a bus. Ronnie’s mother Betty Bass drove a school bus over the bridge twice a day, five days a week, nine months a year. She was the longest-tenured school bus driver in St. Johns County history. For 48 years she drove the bus out to Mandarin to bring students to the Palm Valley School. Later, Ronnie’s wife, Sylvia, took over the route.
The bridge had a little office with a good view in both directions. During those last four years, when Ronnie and three other men tended the bridge, there was a radio. Boats needing the bridge raised would radio the keeper. That would happen about 30-40 times a day. There was a logbook to record the time, direction and name of the boat. In the 65 years the drawbridge operated, there were lots of keepers. One of the most famous was Merlin Mickler.
Petie Pickett told me that in the earlier days of the bridge, boats would blast their foghorns three times to alert the tender. If someone blew their horn three times, the tender had to raise the bridge by law. He might come out and yell at you that you did not need the bridge raised, but he had to do it anyway.
Petie lived two doors from the base of the bridge, and when she heard those three horn blasts, she got excited. Mr. Moody, one of the bridge keepers, taught her how to work the levers to raise and lower the bridge when she was 9 or 10 years old, and she would come running yelling “Mr. Moody, Mr. Moody, can I open the bridge?” There was a trick. One side of the bridge had a lip. You had to raise and lower one side first or the bridge would jam. Mr. Moody always wore one black glove. Some people said he had an artificial hand.
A tender’s shift lasted eight hours. One night, four inspectors came to check on the bridge toward the end of Ronnie’s shift. He had spent most of his down time “heading shrimp.” He had a cooler of shrimp in the keeper’s house and it stank of shrimp, as shrimp do. They all left and Ronnie “thought I got away with it.” Then, one of the inspectors popped back in and asked, “What you got in that cooler?” Ronnie and Syliva both laughed so hard they nearly cried as they told me that story.
The little two-lane drawbridge was replaced in 2002 by a modern, four-lane, fixed, clear-span bridge. “I hated it,” Ronnie said, “but we needed it.”
Scott A. Grant is a local historian and author who loves sharing tales of yesteryear in our lovely community. He welcomes your comments at scottg@standfastic.com.
