Grady Leese said he will never forget crossing the U.S. Mississippi River Bridge. He was 8 years old when it opened on May 20, 1930, and he was one of the first people to travel across the highway that made American history.

“We were amazed, but in a sense we were scared,” said Leese, now 83.

Along with about 100 other people, Leese gathered Thursday night at the Southern Cultural Heritage Center to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the bridge. The evening marked the start of the Old Mississippi River Bridge Jubilee, which includes a re-dedication ceremony Saturday. The last jubilee was in 1990, the 60th anniversary of the bridge.

“We can’t wait until 2030 to celebrate the 100th,” said Nancy Bell, director of the Vicksburg Foundation for Historic Preservation.

The privately built bridge completed the first paved coast-to-coast roadway in America that could be used year-around. Paved routes to the north were sometimes closed by ice and snow. The owners sold the bridge in 1947 to Warren County, which has operated it since.

Bell spoke to the group listing bridge facts, most of them taken from a newspaper article published May 20, 1930, in The Vicksburg Evening Post.

For years, there have been rumors that several men died while building the bridge. The newspaper article confirmed 10 men did, in fact, perish while erecting the structure. One of them was Louis R. Ash, the engineer who designed the bridge. He died a month before it opened.

Ash had done work in one of the bridge’s caissons in unsafe conditions. The air pressure in the caissons was always kept at 52 pounds per square inch. Despite warnings from his fellow workers, he entered at a pressure of 49.

The niece of Harry Bovay, the man responsible for having the bridge built, attended Thursday’s event. Linda Hadala is also the daughter of Glenn Bovay, the first superintendent of the bridge.

“He started the first day the bridge opened,” said Hadala, who was born in 1941, more than a decade after the bridge was opened.

Hadala’s sister, Janice Bovay Clement, who now lives in Atlanta, was born in 1930, however, the year the bridge opened. One of her father’s responsibilities, she said, was to take the tolls collected on the bridge each day to the bank.

“He parked in the ‘no parking’ space every day for years and each day received a parking ticket,” Clement said in an e-mail interview. “He collected them, and finally, after so many years, the chief of police gave up.”

The toll, Clement said, was $1.25 per car and driver and 35 cents for each additional person. “That was a lot of money back then.”

Tolls on the bridge ceased in 1967, and it was closed to traffic in 1998, but the bridge is still an icon in Vicksburg.

Melody Golding recognizes that. Two years ago, she took a photo of the bridge, which has been displayed at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

It is now being shown in Jackson at the Mississippi Museum of Art. Thursday night, she gave one of those pictures to the Vicksburg Bridge Commission.

“It’s a beautiful and unique landmark for Vicksburg,” Golding said of the bridge. “It’s an architectural wonder, in my opinion.”

Steven Hague, vice president of HNTB, the engineering firm that designed the bridge, agreed.

“Bridges change communities, and bridges change lives,” he said.

THE SERIES

In recognition of the 75th anniversary of the opening of the U.S. 80 Bridge over the Mississippi River, The Vicksburg Post is spending a week looking at the old bridge, its operations and history. Many of the photographs accompanying the stories were taken by Post presentation editor Marty Kittrell, who took his camera 110 feet to the top of the span and 85 feet to the bottom of Pier 4, offering rarely seen views.