The Fourth Commandment

Since its completion in 1937, the graceful, red-towered Golden Gate Bridge has borne a grisly charm for Californians bent on sure self-destruction. At first, they could also be sure of headlines as well as death. But by the time the score had reached 46 lives, San Francisco dailies gave them no more than routine paragraphs.

One morning last week two bridge painters saw something new. A hundred yards from where they were working, a little girl with straw-blond curls stood on a girder outside the safety railing. While they gaped in astonishment, she plunged into space. Then a man quickly climbed the rail and dived after her, even before the girl's body had struck the racing tide of San Francisco Bay, 220 ft. below.

Running to a car parked nearby, the painters found a note signed by August De Mont, 37, an ailing shipyard worker. "I and my daughter," it said, "have committed suicide." De Mont had had an appointment with a doctor that morning to take a basal metabolism test. He had not gone. With his five-year-old daughter, who had cried to go along just for the ride, he had driven straight to the bridge.

At home, in a neat stucco house in San Francisco's Mission District, waited Mrs. Carolyn De Mont, with daughter Carol, 8, who might have gone along with her father except that she was abed with the measles.

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