by Earl Swift
In the resulting tussle, not a lot was accomplished. Exasperated, the president decided to delegate the task yet again, this time to the governors of the forty-eight states, who were meeting in July 1954 at a lakeside resort in New York's Adirondacks. This was a politically daring move, seeing as how governors had been agitating for years for Washington to get out of the highway business, or at least to drop its tax on gasoline, which in 1954 stood at 2 cents; they preferred that the taxes be collected instead by officials of the individual states, who didn't need the bureau or anyone else telling them how to use the money.
Ike didn't reveal the subject of his address ahead of time, explaining that it would be " informal." As it happened, his sister-in-law died shortly before he was to head to Lake George, prompting him to send Vice President Richard Nixon in his place—so that for one of the highway-related events for which he is best remembered, and can be granted credit for truly making a difference, Eisenhower wasn't even present.
Nixon had more than mere notes on which to rely. The president gave him a well-crafted speech observing that the country had " a transportation system which in many respects, it is true, is the best in the world, but far from the best that America can do for itself," and that highways were " inadequate locally, and obsolete as a national system." By way of explanation, he offered a neat summary of the network's history:
It is obsolete because in large part it just happened. It was governed in the beginning by terrain, existing Indian trails, cattle trails, arbitrary section lines. It was designed largely for local movement at low speed of one or two horsepower. It has been adjusted, it is true, at intervals to meet metropolitan traffic gluts, transcontinental movement, and increased horsepower. But it has never been completely overhauled or planned to satisfy the needs ten years ahead.
Now, what are the penalties of this obsolete net which we have today? The first, most apparent: an annual death toll comparable to the casualties of a bloody war, beyond calculation in dollar terms. It approaches forty thousand killed and exceeds 1.3 million injured annually.
And second, the annual wastage of billions of hours lost in detours, traffic jams, and so on ... amounting to billions of dollars in productive time ... Third, of the civil suits that clog up our courts, it has been estimated that more than half have their origins on highways, roads and streets.
Inadequate highways also retarded industry and, of great and growing concern in 1954, failed " to meet the demands of catastrophe or defense, should an atomic war come." But a solution was at hand, the vice president declared: " A $50 billion highway program in ten years is a goal toward which we can—and we should— work."
No one in the room had seen this coming, besides the guy at the dais. The president believed, Nixon rolled on, that America needed a " grand plan" for highways that enabled fast and safe long-distance travel, connected farms to their markets, and loosened urban bottlenecks—and which, to the extent possible, paid for itself. He asked the governors to study the matter and recommend action to get such a system started.
The governors' initial reaction was a blend of anger and confusion. They'd been blind-sided, challenged on a matter they were on record as opposing. It was only after a flurry of White House clarification (that, for instance, the $50 billion of which Nixon spoke was new money, piled on top of the billions already spent on Federal Aid) and back-room reassurance (that the states would have a leading role in developing this highway system) that two days later the conference adopted a resolution of support and backed it up by appointing a seven-man committee to do as the president had asked.
Eisenhower hedged his bet. Over the following month, he created two committees on the same topic within his administration. He asked Sinclair Weeks to pool representatives from various departments into what became known as the Interagency Committee; among its members was John Bragdon, who was still espousing the glories of tolls and a national highway authority. That group would offer ideas and support to the second panel, this one comprising citizen-businessmen and led by an old friend, retired army general Lucius D. Clay, the president's deputy during the postwar occupation of Europe and overseer of the heroic, 324-day Berlin Airlift of 1948–49. Its official name was the President's Advisory Committee on a National Highway Program, though Washington preferred the shorthand " Clay Committee."
Lucius Clay, hawk-nosed and towering, was both supremely self-confident and, thanks to a long career in the officer corps, accustomed to getting his way. Colleagues mockingly compared him to a distant forebear, the nineteenth-century senator and diplomat Henry Clay, who'd won renown as " the Great Compromiser." General Clay was " the Great Uncompromiser" or, alternatively, " the Kaiser." Even Eisenhower found him overbearing at times, writing in his diary that Clay's " usual tactics" were " aimed at overpowering all opposition and at settling the matter without further question."
Clay had a lot on the ball, however. He had a photographic memory, for one thing, and the ability to retain and later retrieve numbers, dates, and facts at will. He also had a strong engineering background—his prewar commands had included big construction jobs—and a gift for organization on a grand scale, which he had demonstrated so convincingly during the airlift. At its height, his answer to the Soviet blockade of West Berlin supplied food and supplies to the population at the rate of four planes a minute. That triumph overshadowed his insistent push for the postwar reconstruction of Germany, which helped spawn the Marshall Plan.
Clay had retired from the army just after the airlift, had come home to a ticker-tape parade in New York City, and had since taken over the chairmanship of the Continental Can Corporation. He'd also helped Ike corner the GOP's presidential nomination and had wielded great influence in selecting the president's cabinet. No surprise, given the styles of both men, that Eisenhower left the membership of the Clay Committee up to the general. Clay selected a builder, a banker, a manufacturer, and a union boss.
Not a highway man among them. For that expertise, the committee would come to rely heavily on a bureau up-and-comer, a Thomas MacDonald protégé named Francis Cutler Turner.
Even at gatherings of men in the highway field, short, bespectacled Frank Turner could be easy to overlook. A teetotaler and homebody, quiet to the point of reticence, he found social events more wearying than the thick satchel of paperwork he carried home most nights, and he tended to blend into the wallpaper of any room he entered. But he had an almost superhuman capacity for work, and in 1954, Turner was midway in a career without equal in the history of American roads. Starting with his appointment to the Clay Committee's staff, it would be he, more than anyone else, who would midwife a conceptual network of superhighways into the concrete and steel octopus that now spans the continent.
Born in December 1908 to an engine man for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, Turner had spent most of his childhood in Fort Worth, in a hipped-roof shotgun shack in a working-class neighborhood sandwiched between the Meridian Highway, two blocks to the east, and the rail yards just to the west. It was an unadorned upbringing, one of hand-me-down clothes and barefoot afternoons and sweating out the Texas heat in the shade of a tiny front porch.
As a boy he spent a few weeks each summer in Oklahoma, visiting his paternal grandfather on his farm east of Lawton. The surrounding roads were unimproved dirt; after a rain, Frank would help run a split-log drag over the ruts, sometimes driving the mules, otherwise standing on the drag to give it more bite. Once a year, the Turners would hitch a county-owned blade to the family tractor, to grade the roads and pull the ditches. Which is to say that even before he was out of grade school, Frank Turner had worked on roads and had experienced their limitations firsthand.
His grandfather, an educated man who recognized the change then sweeping the country, often remarked that roads were " the coming thing," and that if he were a young man starting out, he might look into the highway business. That reinforced what Frank was hearing back home, where he sometimes joined his father aboard a steam locomotive
in the yards. Linnaeus Turner steered his boy away from his own life's work, saying: Careers in the railways, Francis, they're not looking good. The lines have all been built. But, roads— that's where the future lies.
Soon enough, Turner could see that for himself. Fort Worth's dirt streets were crowded with automobiles when he started classes at North Texas Agricultural College, a local satellite of what's now Texas A&M University, and even more so when he transferred after two years to the main campus in College Station. The highway engineering curriculum did not inspire confidence: " The books that I studied in college," he would remember, " they talked about gravel roads and how to build a gravel road and how to build a macadam base" and were busy with " pictures of horse-drawn equipment." But in the spring of 1928, Public Roads sent a man around, as it did every year, on a hunt for talent. The bureau's man impressed Turner, and he the bureau's man; the following year, his last at A&M, he received word from Thomas MacDonald that he qualified for appointment as a junior engineer, making $2,000 per year.
Turner accepted. When he left the college in June 1929, the east end of campus was a construction zone. An administration building was to go up at the head of a grand new avenue onto the grounds. A college laid out on an axis defined by its railroad station, in a town that took its name from the depot, was reorienting itself to the automobile.
A quarter century later, Turner had worked virtually every sort of engineering job the bureau had to offer. Days out of college, he'd reported for duty with the bureau's Division of Management, and an assignment as an observer and analyst. Issued a 1927 Ford Model T touring car, he'd studied road-building jobs all through the West. " We would sit on the side of the bank there with a clipboard and a pencil and a stopwatch," he recalled late in life, " and time the movement of [a] shovel, digging, swinging, loading it in the truck and then back. What did he do there? How far did he swing around? What effect were these movements on productivity? How many cubic yards did he move? How many truckloads did he move in an eight-hour period?"
On a job in Victoria County, Texas, he reported that a poor hauling road so slowed the trucks supplying a concrete mixer that the machine was idled about two and a half hours a day—wasting $112.50 of the government's money, which Turner figured would have covered the cost of fixing the road, with plenty left over. The spring of 1930 found him testing the strength of concrete mixed in larger batches. He moved on to jobs in Santa Cruz, California, and Sheboygan, Wisconsin, others in Wyoming. It was an exciting time to be building roads. New machines were coming online that could carve great notches in previously impenetrable mountains, fill hundred-foot-deep ravines—accomplish in weeks what would have taken years in the days of horse wagons.
And it was an exciting time off the clock, as well. In December 1930, Turner married his longtime sweetheart, Mable Marie Nanney, a fellow Baptist and the daughter of a railroad man. The two made a good couple; Frank was content to listen as others did most of the talking, and Mable, while shy in groups, enjoyed talking to Frank. He was prone to smile with his eyes; Mable laughed for both of them. Neither touched alcohol. And both were optimists; the motto under Frank's senior picture in the Fort Worth Central High yearbook had read, " Everything is for some good." She was pregnant in a matter of weeks; their daughter Beverly was born while Turner was conducting a study in California.
In the summer of 1933, he was transferred to the bureau's outpost in Little Rock,* where he had responsibility for about a third of Arkansas and found that the partnership envisioned in Federal Aid legislation was flesh-and-blood reality. When a highway project existed only on paper, Turner would venture into the boonies with a state survey engineer to eyeball route alternatives. They would whack through thicket and swamp side by side, gauging the lay of the land, discussing what they saw, how a road might work better here than there, and together arrive at a recommendation.
He would team up with the Arkansas specialists in design and construction the same way, the pairing usually so harmonious that a bystander would be hard-pressed to tell the federal man from the state. Sometimes Turner and an Arkansas engineer would be on the road for two, three days at a time, visiting multiple job sites, and more often than not they would share a car, take all their meals together, stay at the same hotels. Patient, judicious, Turner became a great ambassador for Federal Aid. He avoided pulling rank, never assumed the final word on any decision. As far as he was concerned, it was the state's road, and it would be Arkansas' lot to live with the finished product; he was there merely to help get it built. He and the state man might disagree about a detail now and then, might even " argue loud and vociferously," as he put it, but they would eventually reach some solution that worked for both. This was, after all, engineering. It relied on a logical framework, on mathematics and measurement. On numbers.
The bosses took notice. Turner was praised for his " unusual capacity for work," for handling " a large volume of work in a most commendable manner," for his energy and thoroughness. In 1935 he won promotion to assistant highway engineer, and later to a post as top maintenance inspector on Federal Aid jobs in and around Washington.
Then, in March 1943, Turner was summoned north, to the wilds of British Columbia and the Yukon Territory, and to a leading role in the biggest Public Roads undertaking to date. An army of soldiers and civilians had been up there for nearly a year, hacking a two-lane, all-weather road out of the wilderness, extending the North American highway system from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, a tiny farming town five hundred miles northwest of Edmonton, to Alaska, until then reached only by air or sea. Mindful that the sprawling territory was open to Japanese attack, the U.S. and Canadian governments had hatched a plan for the Army Corps of Engineers to build a pioneer trail, more or less the first draft of a more substantial highway that Public Roads would lay down with the help of fourteen thousand civilian contractors.
It wasn't long before each side wore on the other's nerves, and it was in the name of patching things up—or, as he put it, " effecting a closer liaison with the [army] to expedite completion of the highway"—that Turner was dispatched on a field inspection in mid-August 1943. His first morning in the Yukon, he stopped in at Public Roads' Whitehorse office to find the resident engineer, Frank E. Andrews, deeply unhappy that an outsider had been sent to do what he reckoned he was already doing pretty well. Andrews was even unhappier that the assignment had been given to some backwoods Arkansas greenhorn who knew nothing about anything, and he told Turner flat-out that he didn't want him around. Turner's reply testified to his soft-spoken tenacity, not to mention restraint. " I said that I appreciated his frankness in telling me where I stood," he reported to his boss, " and that I was confident I would operate in a manner which would force him to revise his opinion of my ability to handle this assignment—that I considered his statement a challenge—and that I accepted it with enthusiasm and much interest, knowing the disadvantage under which I was operating with him."
That got the attention of the higher-ups. Three weeks later, at the War Department's request, he was loaned to the army to help organize its efforts and, after a breakneck second building season and with the " finished" highway 96 percent complete, was kept on as a consultant. By that time, Mable had joined him; after a few months she returned for the couple's children—daughter Beverly now had brothers Marvin and Millard, or " Jim"—and the reunited family settled in Blueberry, a maintenance camp of tarpaper shacks and Quonset huts fifty-two miles up the highway from Fort St. John, itself no thriving metropolis.
Few people called the camp by its name; it was " One-oh- one," a reference to its distance from Dawson Creek. Mileposts were Turner's doing, a tribute to his father's stories about his runs on the rails: " Down at 820,” Linn Turner might have said, or, " When we were coming up on 671,” and his fellow engineers had nodded, understanding the exact spot he meant. Railroads had long used mileposts to mark their routes, as well as every bridge and tunnel, every siding, every town, and their crews mentally logged the
mileposts of dangerous crossings and notorious curves; the numbers were far more precise and far less wordy than trying to pinpoint a place by nearby town or landmark, especially when reporting a wreck or damage to the track. Adapting the system to the highway had seemed natural—as it would, years later, on the interstates. So the maintenance camp at Fort St. John became 49, and the base camp at Whitehorse, 911. Everyone on the highway soon knew Milepost 1221.4 was the boundary between Alaska and the Yukon. And for better than a year, 101 became home.
The family's hut was insulated with sawdust. The cookstove was wood-fired, and the fridge was a wire cage nailed to a tree outside. Another shack served as one-room schoolhouse, church, and community center. Groceries took a week to arrive by truck. And camp life was not without its dangers: though Turner might deadpan in a report that recent days had been " quite cool" before revealing that he meant " from minus 15 to minus 38,” the weather could kill.
In December 1944, all of the children at 101 piled into a carryall and took off for a Christmas program in Fort St. John, chaperoned by a driver and a schoolteacher. While the children watched the show, the driver slugged from a bottle outside. Headed back to camp, he missed a curve, ran off the road, and plowed the truck into a snowbank.
