The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

by Earl Swift

  The party had no radio. It was dark. It was snowing. It was well below freezing and getting colder. The children huddled in the back, their toes and fingers growing numb, for " probably close to a couple hours," Marvin Turner, who was ten at the time, later recalled. Finally, headlights appeared, moving up the highway from the south.

  It was Turner in his government car. Once he'd checked on the children, he walked around to the truck's cab, where the driver sat reeking of alcohol. Turner stood five foot six and weighed all of 138 pounds; just the same, he pulled the man from the truck with one hand and threw him against the vehicle's side, then yelled for someone to get him a rope, that he was going to tie the guy to a tree and leave him.

  The Turner children had never seen their father lose his temper, let alone contemplate homicide. The teacher gently suggested that perhaps it wasn't a good idea. Turner, regaining his cool, fired the man instead.

  Frank Turner proved so indispensable to the Corps of Engineers that in 1944 it requested his services indefinitely. By the end of the year he could boast that the highway bordered on the civilized. " There will be no difficulty at any season of the year," Turner wrote, " for a tourist to drive from any point in the United States directly to Fairbanks or Anchorage, Alaska, in an ordinary passenger car, with no special equipment." That winter, despite heavy snow and bone-cracking cold, the highway was never closed for more than four hours.

  The job finished, the Turners drove home to the D.C. suburb of Arlington, where they discovered that the widening of the Lee Highway, U.S. 29, was slated to carve so deeply into their corner lot that they would lose a porch; a door opening onto the structure would be just a handful of feet from the curb. Frank was philosophical about it; they simply wouldn't use the door.

  They were not inconvenienced for long. On his return to the office, Turner was told that he wouldn't be getting a job in one of the bureau's district offices, as expected. Impressed by his obvious skills as a logician and diplomat, the Chief had chosen him to oversee the reconstruction of war-ravaged roads in the Philippines.

  Freshly vaccinated against tropical diseases, he arrived by military cargo plane in November 1946 to a country in ruins. He had to " rebuild 3,500 kilometers of road and about nine hundred bridges each year," he figured, in a program that crowded " into four years what normally would be about a twenty-year schedule of operations." Turner recruited a force of American engineers and put them up in a village of Quonset huts and apartments abandoned by the navy, which he transformed into a comfortable, fully self-contained American suburb. He claimed one of the biggest Quonsets, a three-bedroom model near the front gate, and sent for reinforcements. Mable and the kids pulled into Manila Bay on a freighter out of San Francisco.

  It was not an especially easy place to live. Crime and political violence were chronic worries; the compound was twice ringed by barbed-wire fence and guarded around the clock by armed soldiers. On or off duty, travel beyond the city limits was " rough," Turner told the Chief. " When overnight stops are involved the traveler will find that it is not safe to travel after dark, that it is hard to find a 'suitable' place to sleep, and that it is almost impossible to find a clean place to eat," he wrote. " Amoebic dysentery is very prevalent."

  On the job, corruption was a persistent enemy. In October 1948, he caught wind that contractors were being strong-armed into hiring " certain favored individuals," as he put it, and " additional persons not considered to have been required for the efficient prosecution of the work"—behavior that deeply offended Turner, whose years of efficiency studies and fieldwork had ingrained in him the expectation that the public should get an honest dollar's work for every dollar spent.

  In one of his son Jim's most vivid memories of the Philippines, the Turners were driving from Manila to Camp John Hays, an army weekend getaway in the mountains, when they came upon a crew rebuilding a bomb-cratered road. Turner got out to speak with the foreman, and when he returned, Jim could see that he was upset. All of the contractor's vehicles displayed tags reading " On Test," Turner fumed. They were being passed off as experimental, which enabled the contractor to duck paying for license plates. The government paid him good money to do a job, and he was cheating it. And if he cheats on that, Turner said, he might cheat on the big stuff.

  In April 1949, the State Department asked to borrow him from Public Roads to oversee all nine agencies involved in the Philippines rehabilitation program. Again, he excelled. Ambassador Myron Cowen nominated him for a government medal, testifying that he'd " done a superb job in all respects." The heads of all the American agencies in Manila lauded the " mild-mannered son of the Lone Star State" in a resolution: " You have carried out your trust and have never let us down," it read. " The words ‘above and beyond the call of duty' come to mind." And as Turner's assignment neared its end, the Philippine government's public works director wrote that his advice had been " of incalculable value," and that his " sympathetic understanding has contributed largely to the speedy rehabilitation of the highways and bridges of my country."

  His stints in Alaska and the Pacific imbued Turner with skills that would prove vital in the years ahead. He learned statecraft, how to bridge divides between cultures, both regional and organizational; he learned how, with careful organization and planning, even Herculean tasks could be broken into their component parts and accomplished; he was called on to apply his training in imaginative ways, to surmount engineering challenges unknown to Public Roads at large; and not least, he became expert at stretching a dollar.

  But the assignments were to prove more important to highway history for what they taught the Chief, for in his eyes, they boosted Turner high above his contemporaries. They made a star of the very sort of worker who's all too often overlooked for promotion: the infinitely capable and universally respected guy who's too shy, too frumpy, too beige to excite the boss.

  Beneath his diffident exterior, Frank Turner nursed an adventurous streak and revealed it on the trip back to the States. Weeks before his stint in Manila ended, he asked his daughter, Beverly, to plot a grand, six-week course home, a westbound route through Asia and Europe, most of it by air, with stops at major sights and cities. At 8:06 A.M. on July 2, 1950 (the time recorded by the detail-oriented Frank in a travel diary almost wholly devoted to weather, exchange rates, and roads), the Turners lifted off in an Indonesian DC-3 for Borneo, then Surabaya ( " clean neat town, fair size, large busy port, good harbor—concrete buildings and red tile roofs—good airport with asphalt runways"), then Jakarta and Singapore.

  Turner's entry for Bangkok: " Settled hotel bill—double room 50 ticals per person per night—three at 45 each—meals 15 ticals for breakfast, 12.5 to 18 for lunch and 16 to 20 for dinner—all plus 20% government tax. Hotel bill=1861 ticals plus laundry 99 ticals. Sightseeing trip Saturday 420 ticals, car hire about 40 ticals per hour for 5-passenger car. Rate of exchange 21.77 at Bank of America today."

  In New Delhi, Turner hired a car for the 122-mile excursion to the Taj Mahal. " Road fairly well aligned," he reported. "12 ft width of asphalt surface treatment with bricks showing on edges looks like original road may have been of brick. Lined completely for entire length with large trees both sides of road. Follows river valley—fairly flat, no grades." In Calcutta, son Jim wrote in his own diary, " We took pictures mostly of the traffic."

  They visited the Holy Land and rode camels in Egypt, explored Athens, and drove out of Rome to the Appian Way—precipitating a two-hour monologue from Turner on how ingenious the Romans had been, and a frequently aired complaint from Mable that they could go nowhere without a lecture on highways.

  Once back in D.C., Turner wasted little time getting the family settled in a rented house and returning to the bureau, where Thomas MacDonald, impressed by Turner's knack for problem solving with little guidance or money, named him his assistant. An unknown engineer in Arkansas ten years before, Turner was transformed, at age forty-one, into one of the bureau's most influential leaders. It must have been a
pparent to others in the organization that the Chief was grooming him, an impression bolstered with the news that Turner would, as part of his duties, oversee the bureau's foreign programs—highway building in Turkey, Ethiopia, Liberia, and the Chief's pet project, the Inter-American Highway linking the United States and South America.

  At about this point, Turner went home to Fort Worth to visit his parents and found a surveyor's stake in their front yard. The couple had moved out of Frank's boyhood home years before but had not strayed far; their bungalow on Colvin Avenue was just a few blocks to the south. Now Texas was turning the old Meridian Highway, U.S. 81, into a limited-access expressway; at Colvin it would be depressed so that Morningside Drive, a short block farther south, could pass overhead, and on either side of this ditched highway would run an access road, to which the expressway's ramps would link.

  The Turners' corner lot sat smack in the right of way that Texas highway officials had drawn up a year before, and right where northbound traffic would soon be whizzing. The parents of a high-ranking federal highway official were about to have a superhighway blast through their front door.

  We have to move, Turner's mother told him.

  Yes, he replied. It appears so.

  Carl Graham Fisher — cyclist, autoist, and speed demon, and the father of America's first web of long-distance motor roads.

  Library of Congress

  The fearless Fisher poses at the wheel of a race car in 1904. Five years later in Indianapolis,he learned the hard way that horse-drawn road technology wasn't up to the demands of high-speed auto traffic. Chicago History Museum: Chicago Daily News/SDN-002710

  All photos courtesy of the Federal Highway Administration unless otherwise noted.

  Thomas Harris MacDonald at the turn of the century, when he left home for Iowa State and began his career as America's greatest road builder.

  Courtesy of Lynda Weidinger

  A common scene in the early years of automobility: horses running side by side (and nervously) with motor cars.

  Herbert Fairbank, MacDonald's ideological right hand. His vision of how superhighways might ease congestion in the cities — and wipe out slums at the same time — helped launch the interstate program before World War II.

  MacDonald takes a break to shoot pictures on a trip out West. Almost painfully formal,"the Chief" was rarely without a jacket and tie, even while camping and hiking. Courtesy of Lynda Weidinger

  Short, shy, and the very antithesis of flash, Frank Turner spent years laboring as a public roads engineer before his work on the Alaska Highway brought him to the Chief's attention — and launched his rise to the bureau's top.

  Caroline Fuller MacDonald (right) poses with her lookalike sister, Jane, outside the MacDonald home in College Station, Texas. An unheralded influence on U.S.highways for three decades, she married the Chief after his dismissal.

  Courtesy of Lynda Weidinger

  Dwight Eisenhower receives the Clay Committee's report, which was fated to suffer an icy reception in Congress. Lucius Clay stands at far left;beside him is the committee's secretary, Frank Turner.

  Army trucks roll over one of the loops of the AASHO Road Test near Ottawa, Illinois. The experiment, the grandest of its kind ever attempted, yielded valuable data on the relative merits of various pavements.

  San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway, a double-decker eyesore that separated the city from its famed waterfront and passed just feet from the beloved Ferry Building.Th e highway's sins provoked the fi rst shot in the Freeway Revolt of the 1960s.

  Though intended to handle the traffic of the mid-seventies, early urban interstates seemed to breed new users and fi lled with cars far ahead of schedule. Here, Chicago's Northwest Expressway in 1961.

  Joe Wiles of Baltimore: Quiet and capable,this scientist and family man helped lead opposition to highways that promised to uproot thousands of citizens..

  Courtesy of Carmen Wiles-Artis

  The shape of things to come: A classic cloverleaf marks the intersections of Interstate 280 and Stevens Creek Road in San José, California.

  The land-gobbling nature of superhighways was particularly apparent in cities, where the fat ribbons of concrete claimed thousands of homes and businesses. Here, Interstate 70 swoops into downtown Kansas City, slicing through a neighborhood along the way.

  The juggernaut: A construction crew lays down the bed of the future Interstate 94 in North Dakota, 1967.

  In an exercise repeated some 55,000 times throughout the system, workers bridgethe Alamosa River near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, for Interstate 25.

  From the air, the interstate system's curves and overlaps achieve a beauty often lost at ground level; witness the interchange of interstates 5 and 10 in Los Angeles.

  11

  YEARS LATER, FRANK TURNER described his role on the Clay Committee as " developing the papers, the numbers and all of the mechanics—what do we want to do, how do we do it, how do we find it—and converting all of those into proposals which the president would then transmit to the Congress." As encompassing as that sounds, it understates his actual duties. He was the chief source of statistics and technical background for the committee, the explainer of why things were as they were and what had been tried, successfully and otherwise, in years past—the font to which the members turned again and again to check their assumptions and ideas. He was the recorder of meetings, the writer of letters, and the author of every draft of every paper the group produced. He was the chief of the committee's staff, which was drawn from the bureau's ranks. He also served as liaison with an advisory panel of industry experts, who brainstormed ideas the main committee might consider. Turner also described himself as " kind of a glorified gofer" but admitted that in this " very ‘hey you' type of organization, very informal," it was the " gofers doing the actual work."

  General Clay had three main assignments: determine what kind of highway system the country needed, find out how much it would cost, and decide how to pay for it. In addition, he was to work with the governors' committee to ensure that whatever he came up with was OK by them. The first question, as far as Turner and du Pont were concerned, was decided—improving primary and secondary roads and building the long-planned interstate system would do the trick.

  The money question would be answered by a study already under way at the bureau. Though incomplete—the inquiry wouldn't be released until months after the Clay Committee's work was finished—it showed that the nation's road and highway needs over the coming ten years carried a bill of about $101 billion. That was for all roads and highways. Of that total, the bureau reckoned it would cost $23.2 billion to build the interstate system laid out in 1947, not including the segments yet to be designated in and around cities. Clay accepted the bureau figure and chipped in another $4 billion for the city segments—a token amount, as the committee knew; it was careful to say the $4 billion would cover " only the most important connecting roads and is not intended to meet the total needs in this category." That qualification was soon forgotten; the estimated cost of the interstate program soon became lodged in the public consciousness as $27.2 billion.

  The remaining three-quarters of the $101 billion would bring America's other three million miles of road up to a condition " adequate for traffic demands in the year 1974,” as Clay put it, when the load carried by highways was expected to be about half again as great as that of the mid-fifties. Left unchanged, state and federal taxes and fees over the construction period would bring in about $47 billion, so the committee had to find new sources for some $54 billion.

  The general was undaunted. His committee " accepts as a starting premise the fact that the penalties of our obsolete roads system are large and that the price of inefficiency is paid in dollars, lives and national insecurity," he said. He had to succeed, and damn it, he would.

  For two days in early October, a procession of auto industry, trucking, and road-building spokesmen testified before the panel. The Automobile Manufacturers Association urged
" special emphasis" on the interstate system. AASHO suggested that the feds pay the whole interstate bill to assure a quick finish. The committee heard from John Bragdon, too, via a barrage of memos on the virtues of—once again—toll financing, as well as his own scheme for an interstate system of 26,000 miles that would bypass urban centers. Clay paid him little mind; though turnpikes were the rage at the time—some 5,242 miles of toll superhighways were open, being built, financed, or authorized in twenty-three states— he'd come to share the bureau's view that few could pay their own freight.

  Instead, Clay favored bond financing for the new highways. Advisers warned that the idea would face a rough reception in the Senate, where Virginia's Harry F. Byrd, chairman of the powerful Finance Committee, was known to be pathologically opposed to bonded debt. The Great Uncompromiser paid the counsel little heed.

  So it happened that the committee recommended the creation of a Federal Highway Corporation, its board appointed by the president. This corporation would exist only to issue bonds and, over a ten-year period, use the proceeds to pay the states for the cost of building the already-designated interstate system. The bonds would be paid off with outlays from the treasury equal to receipts from the federal taxes on gasoline and lubricating oils.