London Bridge builder: 'I knew it would stand'

Lake Havasu City founder Robert P. McCulloch famously purchased the London Bridge for about $2.5 million at an auction the year prior. McCulloch had arranged to have it shipped, piece by piece, from England to Havasu, and contractors wanted Bear to be a part of its construction.

But it wasn’t just a bridge that McCulloch sought to build. McCulloch had commissioned the construction of a channel for the bridge to cross - and by extension, an Island in the Colorado River where none had existed before. Contractors excavated about 400,000 tons of earth to accommodate McCulloch’s vision … and that may have been the easy part.

At 87 years old, Bear now lives in Texas. He remembers well the experience of rebuilding the “world’s oldest antique,” in what would become one of the Southwest’s most scenic decisions.

“I sent my resume, and they told me to come in October,” Bear said. “The bridge pieces started arriving in shipments by March … it was quite the spectacle to see them arrive. Each stone could weigh as much as 800 pounds, and the cornerstones were about 1,200 pounds apiece. Nothing about the bridge was small.”

And all of that weight would only make the builders’ task harder, with a deadline of about 30 months.

“A lot of people don’t even realize what it took to get that bridge shipped to Havasu from Los Angeles,” Bear said. “It was in the middle of summer when we started. It got hot … so hot, our thermometers would break.”

The bridge would need to be completed by October 1971. But according to Bear, construction crews met that deadline - or came close enough to it.

When it was finished, the bridge spanned 930 feet across the new Bridgewater Channel. The bridge was complete with lamp posts forged from the melted cannons of Napoleon Bonapart, and each of the bridge’s parapets was lined with flag posts to display both the flags of the United Kingdom and United States, who worked together to bring McCulloch’s project to fruition.

“We were ecstatic,” Bear said. “When the bridge was finally complete, there was a big party in the city. Not all of the workers were invited … it was for the ‘hoity-toity’ types. But everyone who worked on the bridge was proud of it.”

Bear settled in Lake Havasu City after the bridge was built, and soon found other work at the Lake Havasu Marina, and building residential swimming pools for Havasu residents.

“I never built anything as big or as complicated as the London Bridge again,” Bear said. “It’s a one-of-a-kind thing. But when it was done, I knew it would stand.”