by Bill Bryson
The notion was widely held to be deranged. Florida was, as far as anyone knew, a muggy, bug-infested swamp a long way from anywhere. But Fisher envisioned a great utopian city linked to the outside world by his Dixie Highway. The costs and logistics of building a resort in a distant swamp proved formidable, but Fisher persevered and by 1926 had nearly finished his model community, complete with hotels, a casino, golf courses, a yacht basin and a lavish Roman swimming pavilion (which featured, a trifle incongruously, a Dutch windmill). Then a hurricane blew it all down. Barely had he absorbed this blow than the stock market crashed in 1929 and the market for vacation homes dried up. Miami Beach did of course become a success, but not for Carl Graham Fisher. He ended his years living in a modest house on a side-street in the city he had built from nothing.36
At about the same time that the tireless Fisher was tempting fate in south Florida, the Secretary of Agriculture in Washington was deciding it was time to bring some order to American roads. He introduced uniform road signs – the octagonal red stop sign, the cross for a railway junction and so on – and instituted the system of numbering for interstate roads that is still used today. North-south highways were given odd numbers, and east-west highways were given even numbers (with major transcontinental routes ending in multiples of ten). Names were ruthlessly abandoned. At a stroke, highways lost much of their romance. The Lincoln Highway, completed only two years before, became US Route 30. The great Dixie Highway became the uninspiring Route 25. The William Penn became Route 22. Probably the most famous highway of them all, Route 66, never suffered the indignity of being stripped of its name for the simple reason that it never had one. It was not begun until 1926, in the post-name era. Its humiliation would have to wait until 1985, when the federal highway department removed all the Route 66 shield signs along its 2,200 miles from Michigan Avenue in Chicago to Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. Overnight this once great highway became a series of back highways and anonymous frontage roads.
III
As you would expect, it wasn’t long before people outside the automobile business discovered that there was money to be made from America’s growing tendency to take to the roads. In the mid-1920s a new expression entered the language: the drive-in.
The drive-in experience was not in fact exclusive to the automobile age. Around the turn of the century a brief craze arose among drugstores to provide kerbside soda-fountain service to buggies. But it took the long-range mobility of the internal combustion engine to really put the concept on its feet. The first modern drive-in is generally agreed to be the Pig Stand, a barbecue pit that was the brainchild of one Royce Hailey. It opened for business in September 1921 along the highway between Dallas and Fort Worth and was such a hit that soon there were Pig Stands all over the southern states and California. In 1924 a competitor called A&W, named for its founders, a Mr Allen and a Mr White, opened for business. Its main contribution to American culture was the invention of ‘tray girls’, who brought the food to patrons’ cars, saving them the emotional upheaval of having to be parted even briefly from their surrogate wombs.37
Highways became lined with diners, roadhouses, greasy spoons (first recorded in 1925) and other meccas of cheap, breezy service. In the early 1930s, a survey of the highway between New York and New Haven revealed that there was on average a gas station every 895 feet and a restaurant or diner every 1,825 feet.38 Every main highway had its famed establishments, like the Pig Hip Restaurant in Lincoln, Illinois, or the Cozy Dog Drive-In in nearby Springfield (whose proud boast it was to have invented corn dogs in 1949, though it called them ‘crusty curs’), both on Route 66. Some of these establishments were so successful that they grew into national chains, like the Servistation Café in Corbin, Kentucky, on the Dixie Highway, founded in 1929 by Harland Sanders*24 and which evolved into Kentucky Fried Chicken, or Dairy Queen, founded in Moline, Illinois, in 1945.
Though highway eating places were plentiful, there was about them a certain worrying unpredictability. In 1929 a young drugstore owner in Massachusetts named Howard Johnson decided that what America’s motorists craved was a safe, reliable uniformity of eating. He hit on the idea of franchising as a quicker, less risky way of building a chain. By 1940, 125 Howard Johnson’s restaurants stood along the eastern seaboard, two-thirds of them owned by franchisees, or agents as Johnson called them. Most of his establishments were built in a homy, neo-colonial style, with shutters on the windows, a rooftop cupola with a weather-vane, and upstairs dormers that had no function beyond lending the structure an air of cosy domesticity. Only the busy parking lot and bright orange roof – designed, naturally, to attract the attention of passing motorists – suggested that this was not the home of a well-heeled citizen. Johnson’s main breakthrough was to standardize the restaurant business. His operating manual – what he called ‘The Bible’ – dictated everything from the number of French fries per portion to how high to pour the coffee in a cup (to within three-eighths of an inch of the top), an obsession with detail that was to be copied with even greater success by Ray Kroc of McDonald’s, as we shall see in Chapter 20.
As motorists required frequent infusions of food, so they also needed a place to sleep from time to time. Throughout the late 1910s and early 1920s cabin camps or tourist courts – free-standing wooden huts, usually ranged in a semicircle and often given affectionately illiterate names like U Like Um Cabins, Kozy Kourt and Para Dice39 – began to appear on the landscape until by 1925 there were some two thousand of them, generally charging $2 to $3 a night, a price with which downtown hotels couldn’t compete. Variations on cabin camp and tourist court began to appear – tourist camps, motor courts, even at least one autel – but the first place to style itself a motel was the Milestone Motel, on Route 101 in San Luis Obispo, California, which opened its doors on 12 December 1925. (It is still in business, though operating now as the Motel Inn.) The term itself first appeared a few months earlier in Hotel Monthly magazine, in the same article in which motor hotel made its debut.40 By the 1940s, motel had largely driven out the older court and camp almost everywhere.
Very early on, it became apparent that not every customer was coming for a good rest. The FBI’s ever-vigilant J. Edgar Hoover gravely announced that America’s motels were ‘assignation camps’ and ‘hotbeds of crime’.41 That may have been overstating matters, but if they weren’t hotbeds, they certainly had them. A rather sneaky study by Southern Methodist University sociology students of the comings and goings at Dallas motels over one weekend in 1935 found that of the two thousand customers who used the city’s thirty-eight establishments most were registered under fictitious names and at least three-quarters were deemed to be having illicit sex. (What, one wonders, was the remaining one-quarter up to, and how did the researchers determine that it wasn’t sex?) Terrific money was to be made in the ‘hot bed’ or ‘Mr and Mrs Jones’ trade, as it came to be known. One establishment was noted to have rented out a particular room no fewer than sixteen times in twenty-four hours, or once every ninety minutes (clearly they don’t waste time in Dallas).
By 1948 America had 26,000 motels. Unfortunately, a good many of them were a shade sleazy. Kemmons Wilson, a wealthy Tennessee businessman, had been disappointed by the standards of motels he had encountered during a family vacation and decided to do something about it. In 1952 he opened a bright, clean, respectable establishment on Summer Avenue in Memphis, charging $4 for singles, $6 for doubles. Carefully avoiding the seedy connotations inherent in motel, he called it a Holiday Inn. Before long, Holiday Inns were going up at the rate of one every two and a half days. In 1954 Howard Johnson got in on the act, and soon big hotel chains like Hilton and Sheraton were pushing their way into the market.
But it was also a golden age for individually owned establishments – ‘ma-and-pa motels’ as they were known in the trade. The 1950s saw a wave of good-quality, privately owned motels, often L-shaped and generally built in the sleek style known as moderne. Increasingly they offered swimming pools, air-c
onditioning, ice machines, king-size beds with soothing coin-operated Vibro-Matic massagers, and other luxuries that made them considerably nicer than most of their patrons’ own homes. Often they were given names that were at least as soothing as the massagers: Sleepy Hollow, Restwell Motel, Dreamland Inn, Memory Lane Motel.
In 1925, at about the same time that tourist courts were evolving into motels, another venerable institution made its appearance on the American roadside: the Burma-Shave sign. Born in the early 1920s, Burma-Shave was a revolutionary product – the first brushless shaving cream that really worked – but before its distinctive signs began appearing along highways it was going nowhere. The name cannot have helped. Few people equated a country in Indochina with a smooth, close shave. (It was called Burma-Shave because it was a sequel to a liniment, Burma-Vita, which did contain ingredients from Burma, or at least from the Malay Peninsula.)
Then in 1925 one of the company’s travelling salesman noticed that gas stations were increasingly announcing themselves to motorists with a series of strident signs: GAS AHEAD ! CIGARETTES! EATS! STOP HERE! It seemed to work, and he put the idea to the head of the company. As an experiment Burma-Shave erected signs along two Minnesota highways near its headquarters. The first signs didn’t have a jingle. In fact, they could hardly have been less catchy. One read: GOODBYE SHAVING BRUSH !/HALF A POUND FOR/HALF A DOLLAR/VERY FINE FOR THE SKIN/DRUGGISTS HAVE IT/CHEER UP FACE/THE WAR IS OVER/BURMA-SHAVE, which was not only a trifle wordy, but a bit odd in its sentiments since the war had in fact been over for the better part of a decade. By the early 1930s the company was at last beginning to find its métier, and offering passing motorists such droll entertainments as: SHAVING BRUSHES/ YOU’LL SOON SEE ‘EM/WAY DOWN EAST/IN SOME/ MUSEUM/BURMA-SHAVE (1930); HE PLAYED/A SAX/HAD NO B.O./BUT HIS WHISKERS SCRATCHED/SO SHE LET HIM GO/BURMA-SHAVE (1933); HE HAD THE RING/HE HAD THE FLAT/BUT SHE FELT HIS CHIN/AND THAT/WAS THAT/BURMA-SHAVE(1934); WHEN CUTTING/WHISKERS/ YOU DON’T NEED/TO LEAVE ONE HALF/OF THEM FOR SEED/BURMA-SHAVE (1934).
As Frank Rowsome, jun., has put it in his engaging history of the Burma-Shave signs, The Verse by the Side of the Road, humour in advertising in the Depression years ‘was so scarce as to be virtually a trace element’.42 Burma-Shave became the exception. Its signs were virtually guaranteed to hold the attention of passing drivers for an average of eighteen seconds – far longer than any other type of roadside ad could count on. They not only effectively popularized the product, but by promoting highway safety and other timely causes like War Bonds they gave the company an air of kindly altruism, as here: DON’T TAKE/A CURVE/AT 60 PER/WE HATE TO LOSE/A CUSTOMER; PAST/SCHOOLHOUSES/TAKE IT SLOW/LET THE LITTLE/SHAVERS GROW.
Unable to come up with a steady stream of new verses, the company began holding national contests, paying $ 100 for each winning entry. At its peak, it was receiving over 50,000 entries a year. A few were decidedly daring for the times: SUBSTITUTES/CAN DO/MORE HARM/THAN CITY FELLERS/ON A FARM. Others were distinctly morbid: HER CHARIOT/RACED AT 80 PER/THEY HAULED AWAY/WHAT HAD BEN HUR. Or HE LIT A MATCH/TO CHECK GAS TANK/THAT’S WHY/THEY CALL HIM/SKINLESS FRANK.
Sites were selected with great care. They had to be level, straight, and not cluttered with other signs. They were perfect for the Midwest, though in fact they appeared in every state but four: Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Massachusetts. The number of signs, and the fortunes of the company, both peaked in 1955. At 60 m.p.h. or more the signs became hard to read even when spaced further apart. They seemed old-fashioned. Rent and maintenance for the signs cost $200,000 a year by 1960, and, besides, the two-lane highways were increasingly out of the mainstream. In 1963 the last of the Burma-Shave signs were removed. America was no longer a nation of two-lane highways. A golden age was over.
IV
In 1919 the US Army sent a convoy of trucks cross-country from Camp Meade, Maryland, to San Francisco, just to see if it could be done. It could, but only just. The trip took two months at an average speed of less than 7 m.p.h. The young officer in charge of the convoy was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Thirty-five years later, as President of the United States, he appointed a committee to study America’s transportation needs. As Kenneth T. Jackson has observed: ‘The committee considered no alternative to a massive highway system, and it suggested a major redirection of national policy to benefit the car and the truck.‘43 This should have come as no great surprise; the chairman of the committee was on the board of directors of General Motors. In 1956, in response to the committee’s urgings, Eisenhower signed into law the landmark Interstate Highway Act, inaugurating the construction of 42,500 miles of superhighway and kicking off an era when America would spend 75 per cent of its transportation funds on highways and a slightly less than munificent 1 per cent on mass transit for cities.
High-speed roads had already been around for some time by 1956. The first freeway (of sorts) was the fifteen-mile-long Bronx River Parkway, opened in the 1920s, with a speed limit of a then breakneck 35 m.p.h. The name parkway was significant. These roads were designed for leisure driving for the middle classes. Commercial vehicles were prohibited (and anyway bridge clearances were kept intentionally low to keep trucks and buses from sneaking on to them). They were lavishly landscaped and endowed with graceful curves and wooded medians to enhance their aesthetics. Billboards, gas stations and other roadside detritus were ruthlessly excluded. They weren’t so much highways as sylvan glades where you could exercise your car.
The great builder of parkways was Robert Moses, the New York City parks commissioner, who ironically never learned to drive a car. He presided over the construction of such roads as the Meadowbrook Parkway to Long Island, the Henry Hudson Parkway, and the Taconic Parkway through the Taconic River Valley. Built between 1940 and 1950, the Taconic was possibly the most beautiful American highway ever built, but already it was an anachronism. By 1950 Americans had stopped thinking of driving as something you did for fun. It was something you did to get to where you could have fun. For this new style of driving something new was needed: the superhighway.
One of the enduring myths of American travel is that the nation’s superhighways were modelled on Germany’s Autobahnen. In fact, it was the other way round. Dr Fritz Todt, Hitler’s superintendent of roads, came to the United States in the 1930s, studied America’s sparkling new parkways and went back to Germany with a great deal of enthusiasm and a suitcase full of notes. Most people’s first contact with superhighways were the models of Norman Bel Geddes’s hugely popular Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Designed to show the world as it would be – or as General Motors would like it to be – twenty-five years hence in 1964, the exhibit comprised a large layout of model towns, cities, and countryside, all linked by sleek multilane highways along which tiny cars glided with ceaseless speed and ease. It was remarkably prescient. (Futurama also had a linguistic impact. Before long American roadsides were graced with Shop-o-ramas, Fisheramas, a Kosherama or two, and at least one Striperama.)
Within a year, Bel Geddes’s vision was made reality with the opening of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, running 160 miles from just west of Harrisburg to just east of Pittsburgh. Designed primarily to provide work for the unemployed during the Depression, it opened on 1 October 1940. For the first six months it had no speed limits. Motorists could drive the entire length in two and a half hours – half the time it had taken on the old Lincoln Highway – for a toll of $1.50. Features that would soon become familiar all over America – clover-leaf interchanges, long entrance and exit lanes, service areas – astounded and gratified the 2.4 million motorists who came to experience this marvel of the age in its first year.
Two months after the Pennsylvania Turnpike opened, and two thousand miles away, American motoring passed another milestone with the opening of the first true freeway in – it all but goes without saying – Los Angeles when the mayor cut a tape and a procession of cars filled with dignitaries (three of which crashed in the excitement) rolled on to the eight-mile-long Arroyo Seco
Parkway. Despite the semi-bucolic name, the Arroyo Seco Parkway wasn’t a parkway at all but a sleek, brutally purposeful, eight-lane artery designed to move high volumes of traffic at speed. Pleasure didn’t come into it. The age of the freeway – a term coined by a lawyer named E. M. Bassett to distinguish this new kind of serious motorway from the poky, old-fashioned parkway – had begun. As if in recognition of this, the Arroyo Seco was soon renamed the Pasadena Freeway. Ironically, it was intended to lure shoppers downtown, rather than help locals flee to the suburbs.
Conventional wisdom has it that Los Angeles’s sprawl is a consequence of its extensive post-war freeway system. In fact, it was because the city was sprawling already that freeways were thought a practical way of connecting its far-flung parts. It sprawled because it had the finest public transportation network in America, if not the world, with over a thousand miles of rail and trolley lines.
Freeways in fact evolved slowly on the west coast, at least at first. As late as 1947, the whole of California had just nineteen miles of them. Then along came State Senator Randolph Collier, from the remote town of Yreka, as far from Los Angeles as you can get in California. For forty years he dominated the California highway programme, not just promoting the construction of freeways, but repeatedly blocking the funding of rail systems (which he called ‘rabbit transport’). By the mid-1950s most Californians had no choice but to take to the freeways. Today one-third of all the land in Los Angeles is given over to the automobile, and the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission has a larger budget ($4.5 billion in 1991) than the city it serves.44
