David Benoit
Special to the Reporter

Where Granite Avenue crosses the Neponset River into Dorchester there sits a rusty maroon drawbridge, its function a sore spot for drivers and a way of life for boaters. Without the bridge, no boat would make it down river from upstream yacht clubs &endash; high tide can create as little as two or three feet of clearance

That's why 18 hours a day for six months out of the year, someone is sitting in a two-story wooden house attached to that drawbridge. Five part-time sentinels share the post, all retired and looking for a little bit of amusement. The man in charge has been waiting for boats to come for the past 13 years.

"I sit here and I read," says Charles Dineen. "It's a pretty good job. I get away from the ma, and, occasionally, I open a bridge."

That's the extent of the job description, but it has provided a wealth of stories to Dineen. From the time he saved a woman from drowning, to the fish he caught off the bridge, to the promiscuous couple he caught on the river's shore, the man is full of tales of the strange and wacky things he has seen from his perch.

Sitting in the cool, bare cabin during the last two hours of his 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. shift, Dineen rubs his arthritic knees and laughs as he recalls all the things he has experienced at the bridge.

On one shift he was engrossed in a book &endash; he can't remember which, but it was good &endash; but kept hearing a strange noise from the river.

"I was sitting here reading some book and finally I thought, 'What the heck is that noise?' and got up to check it out. This woman had apparently been untying the boat and she must have fallen in the water and she couldn't swim," he remembers. "I grabbed the phone, dialed nine-eleven and told them there was a woman drowning off Granite Ave. and I grabbed one of those floats and ran down."

At the shore Dineen threw the woman a flotation device and then jumped in to try and save her. Describing himself as "not the best swimmer," he had her hanging on his neck and she handed him the rope tethering the boat which was floating in neutral in the middle of the river.

"It must have been in between tides, otherwise I wouldn't have been strong enough to hold the boat and she would have drowned me too," he explains.

Thankfully, a group of ironworkers at the State Street Building had seen something was wrong. They came over and threw Dineen another flotation device and pulled him in. He never let go of the woman or her boat, The Doris. As they got out the paramedics arrived, but the woman wasn't satisfied with Dineen's rescue quite yet.

"She grabbed me and said, 'My keys!' She was trying to get me to go back in and get her keys," he says with a shake of his head. Then, his face brightens to red with laughter, "I should have pushed her back in."

On another night he watched a car crash on the Southeast Expressway result in a car falling into the river downstream. Luckily for the woman driving, however, a few youths happened to be painting under the bridge, and two dived in to pull her out.

"I remember thinking 'I can't believe this is happening' and it was probably only a few moments but it seemed like it took forever and you're thinking 'Come on, just come up,' and they did," Dineen's favorite part of the story he learned later on the evening news. "Their mothers were glad they saved her, but they weren't supposed to be there in the first place. So they grounded them for the week. They saved a woman's life and got grounded for a week. I couldn't believe it."

Not every day is as exciting for him as those two and there can be a lot of time between calls to open the bridge. More often he sits and he reads the bestsellers supplied by a friend, patiently waiting for a few boats to give him something to do. Inside the cabin are large metal lockers full of electrical equipment, a few lockers for personal storage, an arm chair, a desk, and a few folding chairs. Next to the desk sits a television. Dineen says the guards sometimes watch DVDs of their favorite shows for amusement (Rescue Me and The Sopranos rank among their favorites). Otherwise there isn't much to the space he spends 30 hours a week in, but there can't be too much distraction; he is at work after all.

The call comes over the radio requesting a bridge opening, and Dineen jumps to first turn on the bridge's power. He walks over to a board full of dials and blinking lights and puts the traffic signals to red. He shuts the gates and sounds the alert siren, warning anyone who might be walking on the bridge. After a few seconds of high-pitched squealing, the bridge begins to rise. As the boat passes under his window he gives a wave to its occupants, this time a large family. The process is reversed and the bridge is down with cars driving over in just over five minutes. It's one of the estimated 1,100 to 12,00 times the bridge is opened during its sixth month span of operation from May to November.

For Dineen, this is his retirement, and it allows him the freedom to travel with his wife and two grown sons while bringing him a little extra spending money. This month he and his two sons will spend a week in California catching the Red Sox series against Anaheim and relaxing with just the three of them before his younger son gets married. Last year he paid for all of them, the boys, a girlfriend, his wife, and him, to go to Ireland. He spends as much of his six months traveling as possible.

"I love to travel, it's great," he says. "I just wish I had done it when I was younger."

Before he retired, Dineen spent 23 years as a track supervisor at the MBTA and before that served in the Army. He narrowly avoided being in Vietnam after he was drafted, instead getting sent to hospitals in Germany and Italy as a medic delivering babies for nine months.

"I thought, 'how did this happen?' I thought for sure I was going to 'Nam and then I wind up delivering babies," he recalls. "Everyone kept asking me if I was a Kennedy or something. Being Irish Catholic from Boston they all just assumed I knew the Kennedys."

When he returned from his time oversees, Dineen set up in Dorchester and began working for the MBTA. After 23 years he decided the long hours weren't worth it, drew his pension, and retired.

He started working at the drawbridge in 1993. It's an experience he says he loves to do. But it's not a job for everyone, he insists.

"There used to be a young guy here too, and I said to him 'what are you doing here.' There was nowhere for him to go here, no advancement. This job is just for old farts like me."