Al Zampa; Survived Fall From Golden Gate Bridge in 1936

Al Zampa, a construction worker on a number of bridges in Northern California who fell off the Golden Gate Bridge and lived to tell about it, died Sunday at Doctors Medical Center in San Pablo. He was 95.

Born in the now-defunct town of Selby, Zampa ran a meat market in Crockett that was struggling financially in the early 1920s. A customer talked him into giving the area’s burgeoning bridge-building business a try.

He found work on the Carquinez Bridge, just north of the San Francisco Bay, as a connector, the person who guides steel beams as they are hoisted by cranes to their connection points on other beams. He also worked on the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge and bridges in Texas and Arizona. Then, in 1936, he went to work on the Golden Gate.

On the morning of Oct. 20, Zampa was working on the Marin County side of the bridge. “It was wet,” he told the Contra Costa Times in an interview some time ago, “and I slipped.”

Zampa dropped 43 feet into a net, which at the time was a new safety feature in bridge construction. However, the force of Zampa’s fall dropped the net another 20 feet to earth.

“I hit the rocks and I bounced,” Zampa recalled in an interview with CBS News. “And the first time it didn’t seem so hard, but when I came down the second time, whoo--that’s when it hurt.” Zampa fractured four vertebrae and spent 12 weeks in a San Francisco hospital.

On his release from the hospital, Zampa immediately went back to the bridge and began walking all over it to make sure he still could.

Zampa was a charter member of the “Halfway to Hell Club,” a select group of workers who had fallen off the bridge and survived.

In later years, a play called “The Ace,” based on Zampa’s life, was produced by the Tale Spinners Theater in San Francisco.

Zampa retired in 1970 at the age of 65. His son and grandson continued the family tradition of working on bridge construction projects.

When asked why he did that kind of dangerous work in the 1930s, Zampa recalled that times were hard. There were “a hundred and fifty men . . . waiting for a job--waiting for us either to quit or fall off.”