that afternoon a Mercereau representative dropped by, offering to help. Juana was said to be frantic. Then she refused to believe her husband was gone.
Two generations later, the vestiges of Juana’s grief remain in her granddaughter’s creaky memories. Pasadena Police Commander Marilyn Diaz, whose paternal grandfather was Juana’s second husband, has tried reconstructing what happened in the aftermath of Visco’s gory fall. His son, John, Jr., turned out like the dad he never really knew—self-taught, determined, Diaz said. He was a Culver City fireman before he went into the trunk footlocker business with Diaz’s father.
Twice widowed, Juana died before World War II.
“It leaves me a little bit wistful,” said Diaz, a thirty year department veteran who runs the field operations division. “I think about when this occurred, the police never went out and notified my grandmother. Almost a hundred years later, the Pasadena Police Department has changed. We have tremendous support for victim’s families, whether it involves a gang member or anybody else. We want to show dignity. It’s a different time.”
Scant personal information was revealed about the other two fatalities. Collins, who had come to Pasadena just four months earlier from Camden, New Jersey, was wounded head-to-toe and at one point had nine nurses treating him, plus Dr. Newcomb. They had to scrape dried concrete off him, and it was almost impossible without hurting him more. Collins died of infections from his wounds on August 10th, wounds which would be easily treatable today with antibiotics. He left behind a five year old son. Johnson, the concrete raker, expired from his wounds as well.
On August 4th, 1913 the tough questions started flying. A coroner’s jury, a citizen’s panel summoned to investigate and deliberate on certain fatalities like a specialized grand jury, gathered at the Turner-and-Stevens funeral parlor on North Raymond Avenue.
A Mercereau vice president named F.W. Proctor testified early on. He admitted he still was puzzled. The only scenario he could think of was that the mold for the top of the arch, otherwise known as false work, had probably broken because it had been improperly over-weighted. When it snapped, the concrete burst through the rows of scaffolding, taking Collins, Johnson, and Visco with it.
“Something gave way,” Proctor said. “Nobody knows what… It’s one of those things that makes a man wonder how much he knows after all.”
“Was there any inspection of the work as it proceeded?” he was asked.
“The City of Pasadena has an engineer on the job,” Proctor piped up.
Before more could be learned, City Coroner Calvin Hartwell abruptly ended this line of inquiry. He told the jury that the section of the arch destroyed, a thirty foot by sixty foot frame, was outside Pasadena boundaries, in the minutely inhabited city of San Rafael. Thus, Pasadena’s responsibility was nullified. Officials from the city across the gorge were never trotted before the jury. (San Rafael, which includes what is now the Linda Vista area and land west of the bridge, was mainly farmland run by two families. It was annexed by Pasadena in 1914.)
Coroner jury member F.F. Berry was dissatisfied with what he heard. Based on newspaper accounts from the time, he bore down on the foreman of the carpenters, one John Galloway. Had the false work been inspected? Berry asked. Yes, Galloway said. They always checked for signs of weight-bearing strain. Okay, Berry continued, were there any safety precautions (in this, the age before safety harnesses)? Galloway replied there were ropes workers could grab, but he did not seem to understand the gist of the question.
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