Golden Gate One-Upped by a Lesser Span

The 60th birthday party for the less-than-famous Carquinez Bridge ended Sunday with 7,500 pedestrians walking across the span, officials said.

“Finally, the Carquinez Bridge has recognition,” said Dan Doherty, one of the party organizers.

The wacky celebration started as a take-off of the more elaborate and problem-plagued party planned May 24 for the Golden Gate Bridge, which has had trouble with fund raising and organization.

The party in Crockett began Thursday with the glow of 2,000 flashlights and a song that took a stab at the Golden Gate Bridge called, “Keen on Carquinez”:

“The Bridge is 60 years old,

Doesn’t matter that it ain’t gold,

Stretches from Vallejo to Crockett,

Sunday we are gonna walk it.”

A 50-foot-high neon sign at Crockett’s C&H; sugar refinery, the largest in the world, also was lighted for the first time since 1973.

On Saturday, area residents were invited to a “rock concert” at which judges awarded prizes for best-painted “pet rocks” and poems about the bridge.

Doherty said a fly-over of antique aircraft on Sunday was a salute to aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, who flew across the Atlantic to Paris on May 21, 1927, the original day of the Carquinez Bridge Celebration.

“That day, Lindbergh got the headlines,” he said with a chuckle.