The American who bought London Bridge - BBC News

I didn't even think it was a real story that basically described my grandfather's crazy I remember thinking mr. McCullough had more dollars than sense I said I don't see that city he said you will I promise you you will I said you mean the London Bridge and the song yeah they said yeah the London Bridge in the song and that's that but that sounds so bizarre almost like okay and then I went back to class and then I got home and I said what why did I get pulled out of class and what are they talking about and my mother said no you're we called him harpy she's like our people and bridge he is he is going to take it apart and move it out to Lake Havasu and that's what he's doing I was living and Havasu Palms which was a very remote isolated Park when we first moved there was a trailer park a marina campground 12 mile dirt road to get there CIL's a very primitive we didn't have any telephone and Havasu City was right across the lake and it was a really small little place there wasn't a lot of people lived here we didn't even have a high school back then [Music] my grandfather got together with CV wood who was the master planner of Disneyland and they came up with a plan for Lake Havasu they started advertising in the Midwest in the dead of winter and offered free flights to come out here and check out land so they fly them in and they loaded everybody up they'd get him on the plane they'd fly them in pick him at the airport treat him like kings they built a beautiful hotel where they bring them in serve them brunch and then take mine tours and show them the houses and the time I want to say those houses range between about 30 and 35 thousand dollars each so it was a good deal of course they wind us and dined us and we bought a piece of property and I thought well it was an investment in the future not thinking that we would move here and then they flew you home I can remember people walking up and down the aisle saying who the hell wants to buy a pile of rocks and I thought that person didn't see beyond I I saw a great deal of opportunity here for young people to come and just start and to build something after almost a hundred and forty years of this sort of pounding the Nursery Rhymes famous link between two banks of the Thames isn't falling down it's carefully being taken to pieces somewhere sometime soon it'll all be put back together again London's outgrown the 53 feet wide span it'll be replaced in four years by a bridge twice the width that'll cost four and a half million pounds the London Bridge is up for sale hence the careful treatment a batch of stonework will be demolished and when I say demolished I don't mean blowing it up with explosives or something it was very very carefully removed for obvious reasons taken by lured into barges on the in the tents taken down to Surrey docks about four miles downstream and they were offloaded store there temporally until they could be shipped off [Applause] there's been a breach here since Roman times and of course there'll be another meanwhile this one is earnings others by being rebuilt in an American desert where they're digging a special River to go under it oh well the customer's always right I thought it was kind of dumb well afterwards I didn't think so but at the time when I found out about it I thought that the guide lost his mind [Music] how you gonna do that like one time he told me I see a a city out by the airport there wasn't much traffic there than what Nitti hardly he said he saw a city and there was nothing over here just desert they brought ten thousand six hundred pieces of London Bridge granite on ships through the Panama Canal to Long Beach then trucked it over here to Lake Havasu and put it in a storage compound yard where it was stored until it was ready to be used and installed by the the Masons and the crew working on the actual construction of the bridge [Music] it was my job to put those stones that did you see on the bridge today into their proper positions everything was done according to information that we were given as to their position and altitude of on the on the bridge itself and we have take those and do those one stone at a time they built the bridge over the Dover dirt I didn't think it was going to work but it did and it turned out really neat yeah they scalloped the dirt and then set their forms and then poured the concrete for the bridge and it's hollow so they run all the utilities through it and stuff and then they dosed all that dirt out well I I helped place these stones in here and it was time-consuming you had to be careful and get them all just right and and everything and there was several of us working around here the bridge had a lot of history you could see bullet marks on it from World War two and and just a really interesting thing to do I'm glad I was part of it [Music] they're just kind of building it kind of a strange way I mean most people build bridges you know to across the river they built a river to cross a bridge I [Music] there were lots of articles that came out that basically described my grandfather's crazy yeah they said it's crazy and then once it got erected and it was open and the city flourished then they changed it to crazy like a fox so [Music] the city probably wouldn't be the size that it is if it wasn't because of that so it's had a huge impact and it brings a lot of tourism which is great so then it then it gives me incentive for the business owners the people that build the hotels the resorts all the businesses down by the bridge because they know that it brings a number of people I think a million something and just that aren't they don't live here they're not coming here to take out boats or whatever outs there's come here to see the bridge that's the jewel of this town and there are still people tourists that come from all over the world and if you walk the bridge you can hear all the different languages the Chinese the Japanese Germans and British all come to see the bridge and it's it was an amazing feat to put that up it truly was

Channel: BBC News

Views: 134,247

Keywords: bbc, bbc news, news

Id: W59U9A4xtCE

Length: 8min 30sec (510 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 25 2018