Our Lady of the Rivière

Going through some old tapes and video files, it occurred to me that a round-number anniversary is looming, as we are coming up on thirty years since the Notre Dame bridge in Manchester was taken from that New Hampshire city’s skyline.

It’s not often a person gets to be a part of history, in my case, as a documentarian of a moment in time. The Notre Dame bridge was an iconic part of Manchester’s identity, standing, for fifty yeas, astride the Merrimack River, an arch of solid steel connecting Manchester’s west side, with its Notre Dame cathedral, to the east side, with the Amoskeag mills, the city’s cathedral to industry. Built as a WPA project, the half-century-old bridge was deemed to be past its useful service as a means of getting cars across the river.

It had to go.

Here’s a story I produced for NH Journal at New Hampshire Public Television. Word leaked out late on a Friday that the bridge would come down “sometime” the following week. Public outcry made the exact date and time leak out, too, and I convinced my news director that this needed to be a story in our program. He agreed, but I had no time in the schedule to do a full feature. I literally drove to Manchester after photographing a story in Concord in the morning, en route to Portsmouth for a another recording for a future story. I had about a two hour window, and all I could arrange for that time was to have Dean Kamen (yes, that Dean Kamen…) arrange parking for me, and access to a rooftop. (Kamen was one of many in Manchester who tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the bridge from coming down.)

After the green lady was in the water, I ran over to Kamen’s office and we went to his roof and I lifted off in his Enstrom helicopter (he liked the helicopters so much he bought the company!) to get a quick aerial view – the only one on TV – and then off to the Seacoast to work on another producer’s story.

At the end of a long-ish day, Sam Fleming (my news director) asked me to write a narration. Since there were no interviews, my Demo Day footage and whatever words I came up with were all we had to tell the story for the week’s “kicker.”

I typed. Sam approved.

Initially I voiced the story, and when it was reviewed late Thursday (we taped our weekly show on Friday mornings) the fact that I was not an on-air voice or personality became a hitch. So Sam voiced it for me, keeping every word intact.

I’ve received a number of comments over the years, even before I posted the story to YouTube. It wasn’t just a story – it was also a commentary. “Some call it progress, most call it sad…” was the final line, one that I felt strongly should stay in the story; to his credit, Sam agreed, or at least assented, and there it remains to this day.

This story has special meaning to me, as it is a recording of a moment that meant so much to so many. But it is also a moment when I, finally, was able to put my words and my pictures, alone together, on the air as a story. Up until that date, I had produced a number of “kickers,” short stories that go at the end of the program, usually to end the show on a lighter note. Sometimes they were montages of images set to music; other times, they were full-fledged stories, but self-contained in narration by the participants, produced in a cinéma vérité style, where the narration is completely from the scene, rather than a reporter. Here’s perhaps my favorite example of this style, not from NH Journal though; a combination of the on-camera talent of Fritz Wetherbee and the incisive producing and editing talent of Chip Neal: (this has nothing to do with the bridge, by the way…)

If I had a nostalgic bone in my body, I might be tempted to look up the Notre Dame bridge, to see how she manages as a mere memory. Indeed, were I to do so, I might stumble upon a site that brings me other memories, those of the times I found myself rubbing elbows with the Union Leader’s marvelous photographer George Naum; a site that reveals how he captured a sequence of 35mm frames in exquisite black and white elegance of the same moment in time I recorded for posterity.

The bridge is gone. George is gone, too.

History, however, remains.