From 1930 until 1972, the Old Mississippi River Bridge provided not only a faster, easier route to Louisiana than ferries of yesteryear, it also offered a way to have fun.

And even after the Interstate 20 bridge opened in 1972, “the old bridge” was the ingredient for pleasant memories for Jennifer Akers-Harper, 43, a native of Vicksburg, and others. Akers-Harper recalls spending summer days at the sandbars around the structure.

“With all the kids, it would be like a beach down there,” she said. “Back in the late ’70s and ’80s, it was a popular area to go waterskiing.”

Now, Akers-Harper said, she realizes how dangerous that was.

Accidents and vandalism have forced officials to close the sandbars, which are now mostly covered with weeds and trees. The only access today is by boat.

The bridge has also been a way for people to do things they couldn’t do in Mississippi.

“We went over and bought lottery tickets in Louisiana once a week” beginning in the early 1990s, said Louise Wood, 91. Wood is a native of Vicksburg who remembers the old bridge being built.

Until 1995, when the legal drinking age in Louisiana was changed from 18 to 21, teenagers, looking for freedom from the law in Mississippi, kept the bars busy in Delta, La.

Mittie Towne-Warren remembers hearing high school students talk about the good times they had on Thursday nights in that small town at the end of the old bridge.

“That was the big night to go to Daiquiri World and PJ’s,” the former high school teacher said.

Towne-Warren knows a little about the nightlife across the bridge herself. In 1999, she and her cousin took over a cocktail lounge in Delta called The Luck of the Games. A year later, they leased it to a Tallulah man. The Games, as it’s called, is still in business. It is a former convenience store located on land in Towne-Warren’s family for several decades.

“We call it a little Cheers bar because everybody knows you there,” Towne-Warren said.

For other people in Vicksburg, the bridge was simply a social link.

“We had friends who lived in Delta,” said Margaret Simmons, whose stepfather helped build the bridge. “They were the Longs.”

Simmons would drive her mother’s giant Buick Roadmaster, fearlessly, across the narrow bridge to visit those friends.

“It didn’t bother me,” she said. “I’d just look to the front and keep on.”