“St. Johns Bridge”
Reproduced by permission of Celia Burley

In St. Johns Heritage, Vol. 5, page 23, Celia Burley writes, “My dad wrote a song about our need for the bridge. It went to the tune of ‘Sidewalks of New York.’ He plunked it out on his old Blinkendorf typewriter. I still have the original typewriteen paper. Here it is:

Verse: Portland is a lovely place, and that you will agree,
We have some wonderful bridges, they’re as fine as fine can be.

But the town is all lopsided, here’s the way the bridges run
There’s 7 south of Broadway, while in the north we haven’t one!

Chorus: They go from east side to west side, all in the south of town,
While St. Johns, her one best suburb, in a ferry boat goes round,
We’ve been patient and that you will allow,
But we’re fed up with that ferry, and we want a bridge right now.

Verse: Our side is the best side in dear old Portland town.
We produce the payroll, in your book just mark that down.
All we want is a fair deal, and when the voting is done. We’ll walk across the St. Johns bridge in Nineteen thirty-one!

We would get the audiences singing the song with us and it was really fun.”