In 1953, Gatti was asked to estimate a detailing price for a bid to reconstruct the Third Avenue swing span over the Harlem River in New York City. "Being 20 years old and capable of doing anything, including scaling tall buildings, I responded with, 'Of course,'" he recalled in a 2006 essay in Modern Steel Construction. After it won the bid, that company asked him to start a bridge detailing department--a field that was, by Gatti's own admission, absolutely foreign to him at the time.
"When you are thrown in the middle of a lake, you learn to swim quickly or drown," he said. "I avoided drowning by hiring some capable steel detailers and learning from them as fast as I could."
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