Just over a week ago, The Chronicle ran an obituary for Jack Balestreri, who was 95 when he died in his San Francisco home. The article said that, as far as anybody knew, he was the last survivor of the thousands of men who worked building the Golden Gate Bridge.

It turns out that wasn't true. Since then, the families of two more very old men have come forward; the last survivors have not faded away just yet.

One is Frank Hanly, 96, who worked as a painter in 1936. The other is Gus Villalta, 95, who worked on the south tower as an electrician's helper right after he got out of Galileo High School in San Francisco.

Hanly isn't well. His memory of those days is pretty much lost. He lives in a board-and-care home. Villalta is ailing a bit, too - he fell and broke his hip recently. But he's on the mend, and with the help of his family, he plans to come up from his home in the Merced County town of Los Banos to San Francisco to attend the celebration of the bridge's 75th anniversary this month.

For the record, here are their stories: Hanly was a painter, working high on the catwalks above the Golden Gate Strait. His wife, Ruth, who lives in San Bruno, remembers Frank talking about how dangerous it was up there. "He was there the day the safety net broke," she said, "And all those men were killed." That was in February 1937, when 10 men fell to their deaths.

Frank Hanly is a native San Franciscan, a veteran of World War II - "He was a medic," Ruth Hanly said. "He never talked about that." He worked for PG&E for 42 years.

"The Golden Gate Bridge was very close to his heart," Ruth Hanly said. "He was always very proud of that."

Villalta, who was born in Italy, grew up in San Francisco and lived most of his life in Los Banos. He was only a kid right out of high school when he worked on the Golden Gate.

"We pulled some electrical cable on the South Tower," he said last week. "Paid in cash. Not much, maybe 75 cents an hour. Grunt work."

Villalta is one of those men who took life as it comes: working on the bridge, the Army in World War II, moving after the war to Los Banos, where he ran a small business. He and Hanly are members of what Tom Brokaw calls the "Greatest Generation."

"What's the big deal, anyway?" Villalta said last week.

But it is a big deal. "My dad is a humble man, the most decent man in the world," said his son, Mike Villalta, who is the mayor of Los Banos. "People like him - workers and immigrants - built that bridge."

That may be so, but employment records for the Golden Gate and Bay bridges have vanished. And though there are plaques on the Golden Gate listing engineers and bridge district officers, a visitor would be hard pressed to find any mention of the laborers who did the work - the people who climbed the towers, drove the rivets, the painters, the ironworkers.

The Golden Gate has a metal plaque honoring the 11 workers who lost their lives building the bridge, but it is in an area not open to the public. A statue to chief engineer Joseph Strauss has a place of honor near the toll plaza.

Either 24 or 28 workers died building the Bay Bridge. Nobody is sure of the exact number. But there is no memorial to them.

The only blue-collar worker to be honored was Albert Zampa. He was a superstar among bridge men - he worked on six Bay Area bridges, including both the Bay and the Golden Gate. He fell off the Golden Gate Bridge, landed in a net, broke his back, lived and went back to work. The new Carquinez Bridge was named for him in 2003. But he's the only one.

Perhaps we don't honor blue-collar work anymore; news about bridges these days usually emphasizes traffic jams, or noise or cost overruns. They are almost never about the working stiffs. That's too bad, because without them, there would be no bridges.
