125 Years Strong – An IUOE History

INTERNATIONAL UNION OF OPERATING ENGINEERS
Members of I.U.O.E. Local No. 513 in St. Louis operate crawler
cranes to erect the Gateway Arch in 1964 and 1965 as part of
the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial on the west bank
of the Mississippi River. (Photos credit: Arteaga Photos LTD.)
I.U.O.E. Local No. 513 members who worked on the Gateway Arch
included (left to right) Jerry Cottrell, crane operator; James Purl,
oiler; William Quigley and Luther Fritts, derrick operators; and Leo
Covington, compressor operator. (Photo credit: Arteaga Photos LTD.)
In another presentation, the union’s operating
engineers were honored for their safety record
in the construction of the Barkley Dam along
the Cumberland River at Paducah, Kentucky,
before its completion in 1966.
The increased construction pace that
continued into that year was further bolstered
by passage in 1965 of federal education
legislation providing grants for a five-year,
$7.8-billion program for construction of
community educational centers. Much of
the funding was channeled into immediate
work throughout the country that would be
performed by I.U.O.E. members.
However, the buildup of American
involvement in the Vietnam War, a conflict
ongoing since 1955 between U.S.-supported
South Vietnam and communist Soviet Union-
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and China-supported North Vietnam, had
escalated by 1965. Before the war would end
with the fall of Saigon, South Vietnam, on
April 30, 1975, many I.U.O.E. members
would be involved while serving in the U.S.
Armed Forces and especially the Navy’s Seabees
construction units.
In North America during the mid-1960s,
remarkable construction was taking place
under jurisdiction of the National Space and
Aeronautics Administration (NASA), and no
project was more spectacular than the Vertical
Assembly Building at the John F. Kennedy
Space Center on Merritt Island in Florida
that was erected with the help of I.U.O.E.
members from 1963 to 1966. The 52-story
tall facility, in which the Saturn V rocket and
Apollo 11 spacecraft that carried man’s first
voyage to the moon beginning July 16, 1969,
were assembled, would contain some 98,600
tons of steel and was the largest building in the
world when completed. (The Vertical Assembly
Building continues in 2021 to serve as the central
hub of NASA’s multi-user spaceport, having
previously served for 30 years as the final assembly
point for its space shuttles to external fuel tanks
and solid-rocket boosters.)
Meanwhile, Canada was experiencing a surge
in dam building, which put many I.U.O.E.
members to work. Those projects included
construction of the dual-dam, multi-use,
power-generating South Saskatchewan River
Development Project that was completed in
June 1967 with its Gardiner Dam as one of
the largest earth-fill dams in the world; and
the Churchill Falls Generating Station in
Labrador, one of the largest dams and power
stations on the North American continent –
and in 2021 the second-largest in Canada –
after it was built from 1967 until 1974.
Additionally, growing nuclear construction
in the country was also performed by union
operating engineers, some of whom manned
the world’s tallest tower-type cranes to construct
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