A set of secondhand books changed Fred Callahan’s world.

Callahan was swinging a pick and shovel while building roads for a construction company when he asked to help layout grade on the engineering crew.

“He was a real go-getter and did not mind asking for things,” said Callahan’s granddaughter, Nancy Callahan. 

Eighteen at the time, Callahan got the job. The chief engineer took a liking to him and gave Callahan a set of engineering books.  

No one had encouraged Callahan to study since his mother died six years before. “Believe me, no one has the interest in you like your mother,” Callahan said.

“After my mother died the family broke up,” said Callahan, one of seven siblings.

As a result, Callahan dropped out after struggling to get through grammar school. “Nobody insisted that I go to school,” he said.

Callahan did not go to college, or even graduate from high school. 

But he has built more than 100 bridges throughout Maine and New Hampshire. 

“I learned a lot from that engineer and the books he let me have,” said the Auburn man, who is now 95. “That’s where I got a lot of knowledge about building a bridge.” 

Working alongside his brother, Callahan formed Callahan Bros., a Mechanic Falls-based business that specialized in bridge building and sewer work.

“It was a pleasure. I really enjoyed the work,” Callahan said. “We would line up the men and make it go.”

The brothers built bridges across the Penobscot, Connecticut and Merrimack Rivers. They built the international bridge between Lubec and Campobello Island, New Brunswick. 

“That was a very difficult job,” he said of the bridge that spans the Lubec Narrows, home of some of the world’s largest tides. “Looking back, if we were offered that job today, I would tell them ‘no.'” 

Callahan Bros. also built the James B. Longley Memorial Bridge in 1973. The bridge connects Lewiston’s Main Street with Auburn’s Court Street. 

Callahan was born in Lewiston in 1918. He attended five different grade schools.

“That’s the worst thing that could happen to a kid,” Callahan said. Sometimes, he would jump to a school where he was ahead of his classmates and other moves left him behind his peers. “I was so lost,” he said. 

After his mom died, he slept on friends’ couches until moving in with his uncle two years later. He lied about his age to get a job at the Libby Mill and also worked in a local shoe shop. 

It wasn’t until Callahan was given the books that he realized the power of reading. “He taught himself to read,” Nancy Callahan said. “He started to read everything he could get his hands on.”

A hurricane that hit the Atlantic coast in 1938 had a silver lining for Fred Callahan. The floods that followed wiped out nearly every bridge from Worcester, Mass., to Springfield, he said. 

Callahan started building bridges rather than laying grade on road projects. 

“To this day, he reads all the time,” Nancy Callahan said.

Callahan learned the hard way, according to his granddaughter. “He did not go to college, but he went to the school of hard knocks. . . . He has always had that philosophy that if you did not know the answer, you went out and found it.”