Now that the bridge was finally being rebuilt at Lake Havasu, the deal makers got to relax about it. Some might have even relaxed a bit too much.
From the Arizona Daily Star, Sunday, December 20, 1970:
London Bridge Going Up
Lee Mueller
LAKE HAVASU CITY — The Mohave Desert might seem a strange place to replant London Bridge. But some strange things happen in this part of the West.
The night before the recent World Outboard Motorboat Championship for instance, C. V. Wood Jr., was walking around a crowded nightclub, topless.
Now, C. V. Wood Jr., topless, is not to be compared with Fran Jeffries, topless, or even a 1956 Mercury, topless. He is a chunky, balding, middle-aged fellow with a spare tire that is reaching four-ply proportions. But Mr. Wood also happens to be president of the McCulloch Oil Corp., which — if you operate a night club in Lake Havasu City — entitles him to walk around dressed in two wren feather, if that’s his whim.
Across the Colorado River from California — miles from nowhere and even farther from Phoenix and Las Vegas — Lake Havasu City was founded in 1964 as “McCulloch’s First Planned City for the Future.” There is no doubt about who runs the town.
“McCulloch!” sputtered a frustrated highway patrolman. “Every time you start to give someone a speeding ticket out here, they throw that name at you — like it was going to change my mind about giving them a ticket.”
As for Mr. Wood being topless, well, “they had a pie-throwing fight at Mr. Wood’s table and he got pie all over his shirt,” a nightclub employe explained. “Sure made a mess . . . coconut cream all over the place. Mr. Wood took his shirt off. That man, he’ll do anything for a laugh.”
Not quite anything.
By now, most of the country is vaguely aware that London Bridge is being built in Arizona. For most people, it’s just an off-hand item to toss into lulling conversations. But for C. V. Wood Jr., and McCulloch Oil Corp., it is a serious matter.
Wood was the original designer of Disneyland. He watched while Anaheim, Calif., bloomed from a snoozy Los Angeles suburb of 23,000 into a prosperous community of 100,000. He watched, especially, the flow of tourists who injected more than $500 million into Anaheim’s economy during a 10-year period.
“If a tourist attraction can do that for Anaheim, Calif.,” he said, “it can do it for Lake Havasu City, Ariz.”
London Bridge was purchased from the City of London for $2.4 million three years ago after the British announced they were going to tear down the 137-year-old span and throw it away. “It could no longer accommodate London’s mounting traffic,” said Wood, “and, anyway, it had been sinking into the Thames riverbed at a rate of one inch every eight years under the immense weight of 130,000 tons.”
So Wood and board chairman Robert T. McCulloch Sr. got together in a New York hotel room and decided to buy London Bridge.
For three years, McCulloch has been bringing the bridge to Arizona — by ship to Long Beach, Calif., by truck to Lake Havasu. Ten thousand stones, weighing 10 thousand tons, lay in neatly numbered piles, waiting to be reassembled.
Now, at a cost of about $6 million, the bridge is nearing completion. Scheduled for dedication in October, about all it needs is some water to cross.
Lake Havasu is, of course, a McCulloch-made lake. The bridge is merely the main attraction in master planner Wood’s complex with English-type hotels, English-type shops and English-type restaurants.
“It is much cheaper to build a bridge over dry land than it is over water,” a McCulloch spokesman said. “We estimate it saved us a million dollars to wait until the bridge is completed before diverting water under it.”
Now 10,000 miles form its original site, the London Bridge (the song, incidentally, was written about a predecessor which lasted 600 years) will conform exactly to its previous 1,005-foot length.
“It will be reconstructed with dignity and respect,” said chairman McCulloch.
The bridge has, of course, created considerable excitement among the 6,000 retired persons, asthma-sufferers and rat-race escapees now living in Lake Havasu City.
“It sounds like a keen idea,” said an elderly man, “but it seems to me London Bridge will look a little out of place here in an Arizona desert. Maybe the McCulloch people should buy England and ship it over here, too.”
The British people still appeared to find the prospect of London Bridge in America worthy of a chuckle. They also seemed to think Americans were easy to scam.
From the Star, Sunday, May 30, 1971:
British Still Chuckling Over The Sale Of London Bridge To The Yankees
By BETTY BEARD
Star Staff Writer
LONDON — Britains seem to feel more like chuckling than crying at the sale of the London Bridge to developers of Arizona’s Lake Havasu City.
“All of England is laughing. It (the old bridge) was just a piece of junk. If Americans hadn’t bought it, it would have ended up in some dump. Instead we made a million pounds off it,” said a London hotel manager.
The 140-year-old bridge was sold three years ago for almost $2.5 million to the McCulloch Corp. of Phoenix and has been dismantled from its site on the Thames River. It is now being put back together, brick by brick, over a newly dug channel at Lake Havasu City.
In its place on the Thames River a wide and more solid bridge is being constructed. Although hundreds of pedestrians cross it daily, it is still mainly a mass of steel beams.
Actually the Arizona London Bridge was not the only one that came “falling down.” The original one was said to have been knocked down by King Olaf of Norway in 1014. Another 19-arch London Bridge, completed in 1209, served as the only bridge over the Thames for several centuries until it was replaced by the more “modern” one in the 1820s.
This newer one, about 65 feet wide and rather plain with five arches, settled irregularly on its clay foundation and had been sinking at about one inch every eight years. Londoners had been planning to destroy it anyway until the Americans purchased it — for a great boost to the British economy.
The 1970s London Bridge is a sleek white version of its predecessor and will serve modern bustling London more efficiently.
Beside amusement at the sale of the old stone relic, there are two other reasons why the London Bridge brings a smile to the British.
For one thing, tourists have been generally mislead somehow to think that the London Bridge is actually the picturesque Tower Bridge, known for its two stately towers. This bridge is the next bridge to the east of the London Bridge.
When the Arizona developers bid for the bridge, one newspaper reported that they thought they were bidding for the Tower Bridge and were somewhat surprised but nevertheless decided to make the best of their mistake.
Another thing is that the British claim that several wealthy foreigners, notably Americans, have been swindled for several million dollars by false sales of famous English relics and buildings.
The story goes that the London Bridge had been falsely sold twice before its 1968 sale and that the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace have also been “sold.”
When asked if the British had much respect for their old buildings, one young man said: “Not really. We have so much of that here, you know.”
But occasionally one sees a poster here admonishing the people to save some building that is being threatened with a bulldozer.
A whole block of centuries-old homes are going to be razed northeast of Lambreth Palace (London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury) for a hospital extension, but historical conservationists managed to have an old grammar school saved — one that was attended by the founder of Harvard University.
It would seem unlikely that a businessman astute enough to plan whole cities would not be sure which bridge he was purchasing. In any case, let the British chuckle. Lake Havasu got its spot in the Guinness Book of World Records with this bridge.
