An avalanche of steel girders rained down along the 400 block of West Bay Street when a section of the new federal building under construction collapsed during a severe thunderstorm.
No one was injured, but four cars parked along the street were destroyed.
Employees in the A.R. Cogswell Building across the street barely escaped serious injury. Several of the girders from the 11-story structure fell against the building, causing significant damage.
The steel on the west section of the building that fell had not yet been welded together.
“Bolts and bracing cable were all that was holding a good bit of it,” said Howard Bochiardy, resident engineer for the U.S. government.
Hundreds of employees and patrons inside the Greyhound Bus Terminal were jolted by the shock of the falling steel.
“It sounded and felt like an earthquake,” said O.E. Albritton, a bus driver who witnessed the collapse.
“There was this terrific gust of wind — at least 75 miles per hour,” he said. “I heard this sound and looked out and saw the building just toppling down.”
A.G. Cole, project superintendent with Warrior Constructors Inc. of Houston, said most of the workers had just ended their shift for the day and were leaving the job site seeking shelter from the rain.
“A few minutes earlier and a lot of people might have been hurt,” he said.
There were some close calls.
The Rev. J. Henry Collins, pastor of Pickettville Gospel Tabernacle Assembly of God, watched as his station wagon was crushed by a falling beam.
“I had just put my mother and daughter on the bus. If I had gone to my car 30 seconds sooner, I would have been sitting in my car,” he said.
A steel safe on the second story of the Cogswell Building was cracked open by a girder that flew through a window.
“There was this terrific wind. I looked out and saw it coming. I started running and got to the office door just before it hit,” said Jean Green of 2220 Fouraker Road, a Cogswell bookkeeper.
Her desk and posting machine were smashed.
The owner of the building, Mrs. A.R. Cogswell, said she had just left her desk when a girder smashed a gaping hole in the wall. The chair where she had been sitting was piled with bricks and debris.
“It sounded like the world coming to an end,” Cogswell said.
A pair of cranes began clearing Bay Street about an hour after the 4 p.m. collapse.
By 9 p.m., the steel had been removed, exposing many holes in the pavement where ends of girders pierced the street.
• Circuit Judge Roger Waybright, who spent quite a bit of time aside from his regular duties on the bench compiling statistical data on the local judiciary, got some good news.
He said according to the Institute of Judicial Administration in New York City, the Circuit Court of Duval County ranked No. 1 in the nation in getting personal injury cases to a jury trial with the least delay.
The 1965 survey listed 1.8 months for Duval’s circuit court. That compared with a national average of 19.9 months.
Elsewhere in Florida, the study showed the Circuit Court of Dade County had an average delay of 7.3 months and the Circuit Court of Hillsborough County, 8 months.
Calculations were based on the average lapse between the time a personal injury case was at issue (usually when the defendant filed an answer to the plaintiff’s complaint) and the time it was tried.
The institute was a nonprofit corporation sponsored by New York University. Beginning in 1953, it published an annual study designed to evaluate courts of general jurisdiction in metropolitan areas in terms of delay in trial of personal injury cases.
• Mayor Lou Ritter and City Council President W.O. Mattox Jr. announced city employees would get a $40 monthly pay raise, effective Oct. 1.
“It was felt that this policy is consistent with actions taken by other governmental agencies in order to adjust salaries of city employees to meet increasing living costs,” said Ritter.
The raise would include all city employees whose salaries were paid from the general fund and who had not had a base salary increase on or after July 1, 1965.
City employees who had received a salary increase of less than $40 since July 1 would get raises to bring their total salary hike to $40 per month. The raise would affect 4,900 employees regardless of whether they came under civil service.
The Police Department was excluded from the increase because police officers and department civilian employees received a $40 monthly raise July 3.
Ritter said the most recent across the board pay increase for city employees was in January 1963, when all employees got a $10 monthly increase.
• City Parking Meter Department Inspector Harry Nearing’s top desk drawer offered irrefutable evidence that Jacksonville was a vibrant international trade and shipping port.
When meter collectors began to comment on the number of foreign coins they were finding along with American nickels in the meter boxes, Nearing began saving the coins to see what and how many would be collected.
After two months, the collection had grown to hundreds of coins from 20 countries in North and South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
The most frequently found coins were pesos, centavos, shillings, sixpence, francs and reichmarks.
The diversity of the coinage fascinated Nearing.
“Imagine what Downtown would look like if they parked their native conveyances instead of cars at the curb. There would be camels, burrows and rickshaws,” he said. “Parking meter people in inland towns like Salina, Kan., would go mad with envy if they could see this collection.”
Nearing said he planned to have the coins mounted on a display board in the department office in City Hall.
He also intended to correspond with parking meter inspectors in other Florida port cities to see if their foreign trade equaled Jacksonville’s in terms of alien parking revenue.
• Melvin Bartley owned 40 acres along Mill Creek Road, a parcel described by County Commissioner Bob Harris as a “Lincoln land grant.”
Bartley’s grandfather was deeded the land during Reconstruction in the late 1860s and then built his home and raised his family.
Bartley appeared before the Duval County Board of Equalization to protest a $60,900 assessment placed on his land.
He produced a letter signed by City Council member Richard Burroughs stating the house and land should be assessed at only $7,000 because it was an ancestral home.
The letter also stated how Bartley’s grandfather secured the property during the “40 acres and a mule days.”
Burroughs conceded the land would be worth much more than $7,000 if it were used for other purposes, such as a subdivision. Bartley said that was not going to happen. He was born on the property and planned to live out his days there.
The commission agreed to table the issue pending further study.
• Jacksonville Zoo officials mated a burro and a Grant zebra with the result a “dozeb.”
The long-eared, stripe-legged offspring may have been the first of its kind.
“It’s an unorthodox cross,” said zoo consultant Raymond Gray. “We’ve been trying to determine whether there are records of similar matings which resulted in offspring, but as far as we know there aren’t any.”
The animal had a gray body like a burro, with legs striped like a zebra’s. The nose and mouth resembled the mother’s and did not bear the father’s markings.
The name was chosen by combining donkey and zebra under the formula which provides that the designation for the father is incorporated at the beginning and the mother’s designation is used at the end.
• The Duval County Budget Commission deferred for one week action on requests totaling $11,607 to open the new Juvenile Court facilities Sept. 1
The court sought $5,607 and the county engineer, $6,000, for operation of the new building.
Commissioners approved an appropriation of $1,300 for insurance.
A request from Small Claims Judge Gordon Duncan was denied.
Duncan, who would become the county’s second Juvenile Court judge Oct. 1, requested $150 from the Small Claims Court traveling expense account to attend the Blue Ridge Institute for Southern Juvenile Court Judges Aug. 16-19 at Black Mountain, N.C.
The commission’s attorney, O.O. McCollum Jr., said an expenditure for the Juvenile Court from Small Claims Court funds would be illegal.
• A Florida Highway Patrol enforcement campaign resulted in 64 arrests, 41 written warnings and 64 faulty equipment citations during a 24-hour period Saturday along North Main Street.
The road was patrolled by 12 troopers and three supervisors under a new FHP policy that gave concentrated patrol coverage in an effort to make motorists more aware of the rules of safe driving.
Included in the arrests were four people who were drag racing directly in front of a trooper in an unmarked car.