Bridges Carry Bits of History Along With the Traffic

Most of the bridges that carry us over the moister parts of our region are named after people or things we recognize.

The Woodrow Wilson Bridge? That's easy. It's named after Woodrow Wilson, our 28th president. The American Legion Bridge? Even if old-timers will forever call it the Cabin John Bridge, we know that the American Legion is a veterans group.

Duke Ellington, John Philip Sousa, Francis Scott Key. . . . We have at least a dim idea about all of them.

Other namesakes, though, are less identifiable. (And some roads seem to suffer from multiple personality disorder. See "Honored in All but Name," Page 12.)

Meet the people behind a few spans:

Whitney Young Memorial Bridge

In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson bestowed the Medal of Freedom on civil rights activist Whitney M. Young Jr. Three years later, President Richard M. Nixon sent a U.S. Air Force plane to Nigeria to bring Young's body home.

Born in Kentucky, Young was an Army vet and social worker who went on to lead the National Urban League. A quiet pragmatist, he was instrumental in getting America's corporations to participate in the civil rights movement. That didn't always earn him friends. Philip Geyelin, a former editor of The Post's editorial page, wrote that many people believed "a black man had to be suspect who dealt with the Rockefellers and the Fords."

But Young thought it was critical to make those connections, and he took his message to boardrooms across America, as well as to the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon White Houses. It was said of Young that he could bring together all the people -- black and white, rich and poor -- because he could talk to all of them.

In March 1971, Young was part of an American delegation attending a conference in Lagos. He was swimming in the Atlantic Ocean when he apparently had a heart attack and drowned. He was 49. In 1973, the East Capitol Street Bridge was renamed in his honor.

Francis Case Memorial Bridge

It's always nice to see a newspaperman make something of himself. Before he became a politician, Francis Higbee Case worked at various papers published in his home state of South Dakota. He was editor and publisher of the Custer Chronicle when he was elected as a Republican to the House of Representatives. In 1950, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he got the nickname "Senator Comma" because of his obsession with detail.

Case chaired the Senate's District Committee. He was architect of the legislation that finally allowed D.C. residents the radical act of actually voting in a presidential election. He also was interested in building bridges -- or, more correctly, in not building one. Case opposed the District highway department's plan to cross the Potomac at 11th Street NW by bisecting Roosevelt Island. His compromise was to build a bridge farther south, grazing the bottom tip of the island.

Case died in 1962. Two years later, the South Dakota Senate delegation lobbied to have the bridge that carries Interstate 395 over the Washington Channel renamed in his honor. They couldn't name the bridge he'd worked on after him. It was already named after Teddy Roosevelt.

Betty Cooke Memorial Bridge

Scotts Run tumbles into the Potomac about a mile and a half west of the American Legion Memorial Bridge. The stream passes through a forest of hemlock, beech, maple and ferns. It was that patch of nature that Elizabeth Miles Cooke wanted to preserve for future generations.

The longtime McLean resident was an artist and historian and author of a book on Old Georgetown Pike. She and her husband, the curator of paintings at the National Gallery of Art, lived in a 200-year-old house near Swinks Mill Road and Georgetown Pike (Route 193). In 1970, she was among those who opposed plans to build 300 luxury homes on the 340-acre site known as the Burling Tract. The battle was tough, but Cooke prevailed and the land is today the Scotts Run Nature Preserve.

Betty Cooke died in May 1999 at the age of 91. Later that month, residents of Georgetown Pike approached the Fairfax County supervisors and urged that the bridge over Scotts Run not far from her home -- and not far from the wilderness she had saved -- be named after her.

Harry W. Nice Bridge

The bridge that carries Route 301 over the Potomac between Maryland and Virginia is a nice bridge. But more important, it is a Nice Bridge.

When it opened in 1940, it went by the blandly descriptive name of the Potomac River Bridge. It was renamed in 1968 for Harry Whinna Nice, Maryland's Republican governor from 1935 to 1939, during whose term the bridge's construction was approved.

Born in Washington, Nice moved with his family to Baltimore when he was 8. He became one of that city's most acclaimed criminal lawyers. "A simple, sentimental fellow," as The Post editorialized after his death in 1941, Nice was able to "easily play upon the sentimentalities of other simple souls."

Maybe so, but he had one unusual trick up his sleeve: Nice was known for being able to affect a "heart-breaking tremolo" in his voice when pleading cases. "So effective was this device," wrote The Post, "that often not only the jury or audience but also the speaker himself were moved to tears."

Officer Kevin Welsh Memorial Bridge

The Harry W. Nice Memorial Bridge crosses the Potomac and honors the Maryland governor who authorized it. (BY MARK GAIL - THE WASHINGTON POST)

The Anacostia River's current was swift on the day that Miriam Lieb decided to end her life. The mentally ill woman had spent 18 months at St. Elizabeths Hospital and was worried she wouldn't be able to cope after her upcoming release. On the afternoon of Aug. 4, 1986, she jumped from the 11th Street Bridge into the murky water below.

Officer Kevin Welsh and his partner were 10 minutes from the end of their shift and patrolling Minnesota Avenue SE when they got the call and drove to the scene. Welsh kicked off his shoes, put down his service revolver and dove in. Others did, too, and they pulled the woman from the Anacostia, though she'd suffered a heart attack and eventually died.

By that time, Welsh himself was in trouble. "He was only a few feet away, and we lost him," said his partner, Steven O'Dell.

Welsh was 34 when he died and had been in the D.C. police department for seven years. In that time, he had become renowned for his uncanny ability to make arrests, once nabbing three people while on his lunch break during a trial. He'd received eight commendations from the chief of police, 31 from his commanders and 60 letters of praise from residents, the sort of record a veteran cop would be proud of.

In honor of Welsh's heroism, the D.C. Council voted to rename the southern span of the 11th Street Bridge in his honor.

John Kelly's column appears every weekday in the Style section. He can be reached at kellyj@washpost.com. Julia Feldmeier helped research this report.