SEATTLE — Some guys have all the luck. And then there's Rolf Neslund.
"Good ol' Rolf. He never knew he was going to get so much attention," said Mike Shaughnessy of the Southwest Seattle Historical Society.
In 1978, officials had been bickering for more than a decade over the need to replace the old West Seattle drawbridges.
"It was the ultimate Seattle process: 'Maybe we should do something. We should think about doing something. Let's talk about doing something,'" said longtime West Seattle resident Rose Feliciano.
Then Neslund, an 80-year-old ship pilot with a bit of a drinking problem, forced the subject when he drifted wide and severely damaged one of the rickety structures.
"There was a run of tee shirts that were done, and it said 'Where were you when the ship hit the span,'" Shaughnessy said.
West Seattle finally got new high-span and low-span bridges, and Neslund became a folk hero for having made it all possible.
Neslund's bad luck continued two years after the accident when his wife, Ruth, shot him dead during a dispute over money. In 1985 she was sentenced to life in prison, where she remained until her death in 1993.
When the new bridge closed for structural repairs in 2020, a sculpture in honor of the "Patron Saint of the Broken Bridge" mysteriously appeared along a nearby bike path.
"Clearly a masterpiece," Feliciano said of the concrete bust mounted atop a waist-high pedestal.
But bad luck struck again earlier this year when Feliciano noticed that the bust had toppled over.
"Is this an omen?" she joked, "I reached out to the West Seattle Blog."
Feliciano's neighbors from the Southwest Seattle Historical Society read the news on the popular neighborhood website and stepped in to help bring Rolf Neslund back once again.
"Propped it up and built it in about an hour," Shaughnessy said.
Neslund may have had the worst of luck, but he has the best of friends.
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