Even Its Boss Feels the Golden Gate’s Spell

It was amid the bustle of the morning rush hour that the lawn mower man threw his oily wrench into Kary Witt’s car-moving machine.

The guy was calling from a pay phone, boasting that he had driven his old John Deere clear from Maine like that tractor-riding character in the film “The Straight Story.” Now he wanted to rumble his grass-cutter across the Golden Gate Bridge through the teeth of a Friday commute.

Witt, the Golden Gate’s 40-year-old manager, is a good-humored sort who can normally laugh at life’s oddities. But not on this day.

“You’re not driving that thing on my bridge,” was his curt reply.

But Witt also knows the public relations responsibility that goes with managing one of the world’s most recognizable icons--and he soon changed his mind after a flurry of press calls and exhortations from the lawn mower man’s police escorts.

His fears confirmed, traffic soon bottle-necked, but not because of the mower; a mobile home broke an axle and Witt’s crew frantically torched off the lug nuts to get the beast moved--all while the tractor sputtered past.

“A crazy morning,” he now recalls, “but a typical morning.”

With its soaring orange-vermilion towers often shrouded in mist, the Golden Gate Bridge is regarded as one of the world’s architectural wonders. The centerpiece of the San Francisco skyline, the Art Deco-style span each year attracts 10 million walk-up visitors and shoulders the burden of 42 million vehicles.

But the Golden Gate is more than a bridge; it’s a teeming city.

And Witt is its mayor.

He directs an army of 250 workers--including the 44 toll collectors who greet each passing motorist and the 58 painters and ironworkers who battle the salty air that quickly peels the bridge’s coat of trademark International Orange and can chill a worker through three layers of clothing, even on a summer day.

There’s the 15-man security force that patrols for suicide jumpers who see a leap from the Golden Gate as “the only stylish way to go.” Not to mention the electricians, masons and traffic engineers who help keep the bridge in business.

Witt deals daily with the unexpected--from babies born in trucks stopped at the toll plaza to bodies dumped from the pedestrian walkway on starless winter nights.

“Kary learned a long time ago that this job comes calling for you at home on the weekends--you just can’t get away from it,” said Lt. Mike Locati of the Golden Gate’s police force. “But if you want to be a bridge manager, this one is certainly the place to do it.”

The boyish-looking Witt isn’t the wrinkled veteran you might expect to be running the venerable bridge, which at age 63 is old enough to be his father. But he brings to the job a passion that many say is well beyond his years, as well as a scholarly respect for the bridge’s history.

“You don’t have to spend a lot of time explaining where you work,” said Witt, who took the job last spring. “While it’s no longer the biggest bridge in the world, it’s still the Golden Gate, the bridge they said couldn’t be built.”

Constructed by engineer Joseph B. Strauss during the Great Depression, the Golden Gate defied critics who claimed the San Francisco Bay’s swift current, deep waters and ominous weather conditions would permit no man-made structure to span its shores.

Eleven men died building the bridge, which was opened to vehicular traffic on May 28, 1938, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a cable from the White House to announce the event.

Even today, with its tremendous twin towers set against a backdrop of mountains, sea and city, the bridge inspires letters from visitors compelled to describe the emotional experience of seeing it for the very first time.

But nobody has to sell Witt on the sheer wonder of the thing.

He knows the secrets of his bridge: that the U.S. Navy once wanted to paint it black with yellow strips to assure more visibility for passing ships, and that on the windiest days, when gusts can reach 70 mph, the span towers can sway 27 feet and the arched roadway can rise and fall 11 feet.

Witt came to the bridge in 1990, for years serving as a health and safety engineer--working alongside the painters and ironworkers who have spent decades suspended perilously above the roadway. Like them, he has felt the momentary fear of heights, knowing that one slip could send him plummeting 60 stories into the swift waters below.

The job of running the bridge can be grueling. Rising at 4:30 a.m. to make the 60-mile drive from his home in Sonoma County, Witt monitors bridge communications on his radio, already scouting the day’s problems.

Once at the office, he eyes the commuter flow from surveillance monitors or from a bank of screens that fills the security headquarters overlooking traffic.

He spends nearly half his time in meetings--managing a $31.5-million annual budget and dealing with the 11 unions representing bridge workers.

Bridge emergencies are common. Such as the day the electronic toll collection system failed, delaying angry commuters who pay for the privilege of zipping through the booths. It’s $3 if you’re heading south to the city, but free going north to Marin County and beyond.

Or the day the skyscraper-sized Chinese container ship--about as tall as the bridge’s roadway--announced it wanted to pass beneath the span. Witt spent days consulting tidal maps and timetables, looking for the right opportunity, and one morning guided the ship past, gasping as it missed the span by a mere eight feet.

The father of two preschool-age children, he sighs when his pager repeatedly beeps--even in the middle of the night--forcing him to sleepily don his clothes and go to work.

His family knows the job can consume him. “I just love bridges--especially this one,” he said. “I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

No matter how busy he gets, Witt still makes time to play tourist. Camera in hand, he takes the tiny elevator lifts to the tower tops and walks the taut cable lines. Riding a scooter along the tourist walkway, he scouts out lunch-hour sites along the shore that offer new angles from which to view the majestic span.

Witt also spends a lot of time fielding requests from people who want a piece of his bridge--from Hollywood film crews to the circus promoters who want to parade their elephants across the span and put clowns in the tollbooths.

One day San Francisco 49ers coach Steve Mariuchi showed up unannounced with eight uniformed players and an NFL Films crew in tow. Cameras rolling, walking through busy lanes of traffic, the coach said he and his players were going to greet commuters from the tollbooths.

And last year, an Internet company created a maelstrom of controversy when it suggested festooning the bridge’s tollbooths with a car-selling banner, offering to pay $400,000 and pick up commuter tolls for a day for the privilege of hanging its sign.

The unsuccessful offer prompted one local supervisor to sniff: “This bridge is not for sale. What’s next? Half Dome?”

But not everyone asks before making the bridge their own platform, instead just marching across--like the Buddhist monks on a symbolic walk to Los Angeles and the man who strolled his trick-performing donkey along the span in an attempt to snare an invite to Jay Leno’s show.

Witt tries to accommodate all requests, but will allow nothing to interfere with traffic flow.

Sometimes the grandstanding carries a political edge.

Actor Woody Harrelson and eight anti-logging protesters were arrested in 1996 for climbing the span’s cables and tying up traffic for hours.

Last summer, 1,500 Indian Americans wearing black ribbons and death signs joined hands on the bridge to protest the killing of six Indian soldiers at the hands of their Pakistani captors.

But nothing troubles Witt more than the bridge’s reputation as a suicide magnet. Authorities estimate that 1,000 people have jumped from the span, excluding more than 400 “possibles” whose bodies never turned up.

Now a safety task force patrols the walkways, looking for lingering pedestrians. Officials estimate that they deter 30 jumpers a year. Nearly as many end up going over the side.

The encounters are poignant. Former bridge operations chief Jackson Fung once approached a man perched on the east railing. When the man told Fung he didn’t like Japanese people, Fung replied, “That’s good, because I’m Chinese.” He eventually talked the man down.

Witt doesn’t like to discuss how surviving jumpers call their leap “a romantic thing to do,” saying it would only encourage copycats.

“It isn’t glamorous; it’s an ugly way to die,” he said. “When you jump off this bridge, you hit the water like a brick wall. It’s violent.”

Still, Witt can’t get enough of his bridge. Often at day’s end, he’ll pop in a special cassette at home to remind him what he’s missing.

The hourlong recording features the eerie music of the old span, from the blast of the air-powered foghorns to the jolt of cars hitting the expansion joints as they scurry across the bay.

“It’s soothing just to lie back and imagine; if you know what to listen for, the sounds are unmistakable,” he said. “Of course, I’m happiest when I’m on the bridge. There’s no substitute for that.”