Interstates & Autobahns

 

Funny how digging around net can frequently trigger memories that mesh with some of your own experiences.  

Upper left:  The A4 - A555 German Autobahn exchange south of Köln photographed from the air by the Allies in 1945 right at the end of WWII.  I recalled that Eisenhower and our fathers came home holding respect for what the Germans had built and vowed to upgrade our own highway system to match what they had seen during the war.  The first Interstate Highway Bill dates to 1956 and construction of about 37,000 miles of new roadways started shortly later.  I clearly recall my father talking about the German highway system after the war...he had spent some time aloft trying to destroy them.

Upper right: A 1953 shot of the Los Angeles intersection of the Harbor and Hollywood Freeways.  This was a few years before the start of the Interstate system construction and only a few years after WWII, when there was very little build up of the Los Angeles basin area.

Lower center:  My 1956-57 sixth grade class in Richland Hills.  Note the chalk artwork on the blackboard at the back of the room--it's one of the highway interchanges we were then starting to build all over the country.  

The teacher's name was Rhoda H. McGeHee and she was quite a teacher.  She was one of only two 6th grade teachers at the time and she ran her class as a kind of open laboratory.  There was no formal lesson presentation, as I recall...although I'm sure there must have been some.  Her method was to let the kids determine where there own interests lay and set them out on a project in that field.  The highway chalkboard project was one for our budding artists--I wasn't one of them !  However, the impression is timely, isn't it?

During and before those same early to mid-fifties years, Walt Disney broadcast his Sunday night shows and didn't we all wait anxiously to see what would be served up each week?  I liked the cartoons...especially Scrooge McDuck, Donald, and Goofy.  Motor Mania, a 1950 production, was one of my favorites and it shows Disney's impression of the growing highway situation in Los Angeles just at the beginning of the post WWII building boom. Texas wouldn't start their rush to build until sometime in the mid-1960s.  So, we wouldn't learn how these things would clog our cities until some years later than LA. 

Adios

Texas & Colorado Burning

This year (2012) it's Colorado on fire such as this one just above Colorado Springs bearing down on the USAFA in the foreground.  Another one at least this large, or larger is burning just west of Ft. Collins a few miles north of this point.  Say a prayer for the folks...a number of our classmates, friends, and their families live in this area.

(first published 9.25.11)  This picture was taken just a few miles SE of Austin a couple of weeks ago. Last I read, there were almost 2000 homes destroyed, I think rural mostly. If you have ever read through a construction contract, you may recall the term, "Act of God". This a picture of one of them. Nothing much mortal man can do about this kind of event.

In California, fires of this magnitude are relatively common. I got surrounded by one of them many years ago while working an outdoor project. The Borate (dunno if they still use that stuff or not...red liquid) bombers zooming overhead, dropping their red loads down on the flames. It was quite a show. In those days, they used leftover WWII B-17s, now I think they use jets that are able to skim water from a lake as they fly over. Don't think any of them were available for this Texas fire.
It's a scary spectacle up close. Bob Dillard can be found through a Google search commenting on some similar large fires that swept through his area out in west Texas last Spring (IIRC)...seems to have made a believer of him...kind of like staring into the belly of the beast.

God, Save Us

1950 – 1960 Family Vacations

Dad came back from WWII to a new wife, a new baby, and with a driving desire to earn a college degree. He earned that degree in just 3-years and started working for a power company in south Texas. Within a couple of years, he was recalled to the Air Force for Korean War service, served an additional 18-months, and settled in Ft. Worth about 1952. He and mom were raised in Dallas.

As a child of the Depression, until WWII, dad had never ventured any further than SW Arkansas where his ancestors had settled about 1836. At age 31 he was finally free of military service and wars, and had accumulated both an opportunity and money to take his first real vacation, so we drove from Ft. Worth to Mexico City…in August 1953. It’s about 1200-miles to Mexico City, it’s very hot in August, and the car was NOT air-conditioned because dad was frugal and air conditioners were expensive then. That was 57-years ago and I have never forgotten that trip. I have never been hotter in my life!

We took turns soaking a hand towel in an ice chest, then draping the wet towel over our faces and letting the hot air blow on it, the theory being...evaporation cooling. It was better than nothing, but not much better. For the driver there was no relief. Besides being HOT, I don’t recall much about the trip other than narrow rough roads, widely separated gas stations, small villages, and no road food until we got to Mexico City. I think we had some lunch meat in the ice chest.

In working on the past few entries about early DFW roads and their fairly primitive state in the early 1950s, I thought about how miserable those Mexican roads must have been. Once in Mexico City, we turned the driving over to cabs and tour guides and enjoyed our stay. With the current conditions in Mexico, I wouldn’t want to give that trip a try today.

Dad was part of that generation who wanted to see as much as they could and for some of them, it was an opportunity to brag to their neighbors…remember all those travel stickers folks used to attach to their rear windows and bumpers? Dad wasn’t in to that, but he was a full-bore, long-range vacation driver. During my childhood, I recall us taking 2 other driving vacations, one to Colorado in 1955, and another to the Northeast as far up as Quebec in 1958. That last one was something like 6,500 driving miles which provided no time to see or do anything but drive. When we got home from that 2-week vacation, we were exhausted.

Since it was an early-life obligatory holiday in-law visit, I won’t describe the trip home from Ohio to Dallas to spend Christmas 1951 with the grandparents. That one was in dad’s first car, a 1950 model with NO heater—he had bought it in south Texas just after college and didn’t want to pay the extra money for the heater...he didn't see the need for it in south Texas. He hadn't anticipated being recalled to the service and sent to Ohio. I’ve never been colder in my life than on that trip.

After I hit the teen years, I declined any further travel opportunities with dad and when I started my own family we did things differently. We found places we liked to be, got there by the best practical means, and stayed put to enjoy the places we liked.

As I studied some of the old roadways, I marveled that so many people charged out on those early roads and drove such long distances. For the WWII generation, I think it was some kind of endurance contest. About 25-years later, I think it was this same bunch of people who fueled the motor home fad, that for a time clogged the roads with big slow-moving vehicles.

In the early 1970s I drove coast to coast several times and have made other long driving trips for various reasons, but I’ve never really enjoyed them much…I get bored. Nowadays a lot of our roads are in bad repair and many of them cut through dangerous neighborhoods. Most of the Interstate highways are about 50-years old, so the neighborhoods they cut through are no longer new—you have to choose your stops with more care. Too bad…it was much better in the late 1960s as the Interstates were completed and into the 1970s when there still wasn’t much traffic on them compared to now. Take a look at the 1977 film, Smoky and the Bandit, for a pretty good illustration of 1970s road conditions on the Interstates and secondary highways. Ah, those Targa tops.





HAMF

Toll Road – DFW Turnpike

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We called it the Toll Road at our house and when it opened in 1957, it really shortened the time it took to go into either Ft. Worth or Dallas. I was driving it when I was 13 or 14, with the parents in the car of course. There was a Howard Johnson’s service center about mid-way to Dallas, near the Arlington turnoff, Hwy 360 (HJ is the wide area at left in the 1957 picture above--the view is west toward Ft. Worth). Mom loved their fried clams and I think they were on a special on Wednesdays, so we ate out there frequently. For me, it was an opportunity to drive in a relatively safe environment…there was very little traffic in those early days on the Toll Road. It took us maybe 10-15 minutes to drive out there.

The nearest crossing is Hwy 360 (Watson Rd.) and the next crossing to the west is Hwy 157 (Collins Rd.). On the left (south) side adjacent to Toll Road just this side of Collins is where the ball park sits today. Six Flags was also built on the left (south) side of the Toll Road just on the other side (west) of Hwy 360. Going right (north) on Hwy 360 in this picture would take you to the west side of Greater Southwest Airport. Today that same road would take you into the south entrance of DFW. To the left a short distance on 360 is UT-Arlington. It goes without saying that everything in sight in this picture is completely built out today and has been for years.

A deal had been cut to get the road built and the deal was that once it was paid for by the tolls, the tolls would be dropped and the road turned over to the State. That day came in early 1978 and despite a spirited opposition put up by entrenched factions of the Turnpike Authority citing the need to keep their professional cadre of toll road experts together for future use, the toll booths came down as scheduled. It took just over 20-years to pay off the construction costs.
The 1965 map below shows the DFW area as it was just as we left EHHS for whatever life had in store for us. Current maps are readily available online if you want to compare with later development throughout the next 40-years. This site has a fine collection of HQ scans of old DFW area maps and other Texas cites. If the link fails, try enclosing the following terms in quotes and Google: Old Road Maps of Texas

Adios

Early DFW Maps

These 2 maps illustrate the DFW infrastructure in 1913 and in 1954. In the intervening 41-years the Dixie Highway followed by US 80 was built and the Interurban ended its service.

The 1954 DFW map shows the new SH 183 and a fair amount of the secondary roads that existed between the cities. This was the oldest map I’ve found showing the entire DFW area. Other maps dated 1950 and 1942 were separate pages for each city, indicating to me that there simply wasn’t enough of substance between the cities to warrant including the detail on a combined map.

My own recollections as a young boy in 1954 are that there were mostly wide open spaces between the cities and also between the 2 highways, 80 & 183. Later maps are readily available at various specialized websites which would show the area filling in. However, this 1954 map illustrates about the last year a map could be drawn still showing so much open space between Dallas and Ft. Worth.

In the 1920s to the 1940s you would have used either US 80 or a series of country roads to drive between the cities. Note that Lake Arlington does not show on the 1954 map as it wasn’t filled until 1957. Our trips to the grandmothers’ houses were taken on SH 183 to Loop 12 to Buckner and down to White Rock; or, down Harry Hines right through the center of Dallas on Commerce and out Grand Ave. to Garland Rd.

Adios

Old Highways - Learning to Drive

In doing the reading about the old DFW Interurban rail line for the previous piece, I ran across a number of opportunities to answer some long unanswered questions about roads and highways around the DFW area that I recalled from childhood. My road memories predate the D-FW Turnpike, I-820, LBJ, the Airport Freeway, and all the Interstate Highway system.

After WWII Air Corps service and further service during the Korean War, Dad bought his first house east of Ft. Worth just off Hwy 183. A few years later, he built his move up house near EHHS. My grandmothers, both widows, lived in Dallas; one in Oak Cliff and the other near White Rock Lake. Many of our Sundays in the 1950s were spent visiting one or both of the grandmothers, so I had plenty of road time on the old highways at an early age.

Two uncles lived in Corpus Christi and since that meant a free place to stay when we wanted a beach vacation on Padre Island, we made that long trip numerous times before the Interstates were built. I recall seeing old sections of abandoned highway pavement running beside the existing roadways and often wondering about them. Dad’s answers were always clipped and none too informative. I don’t think he knew much about the old roads himself…in his Depression-era childhood there wasn’t much money for elective motoring.

The old roadways shown above are very similar to the abandoned bits of pavement I recall seeing as a boy. One of my first cross country trips as a new driver was on the highway west to Weatherford about 1961, which was then still one of the original brick roads, like the left one above…and rough as a cob—I remember it well. Most of the remnants of the later concrete pavement, I recall seeing in the Meadowbrook-Handley area along Hwy 80.

Like the Interurban, the old highways were put down and obsolete before our time. What we saw was the post-WWII transition from the early 2-lane U.S. highway system to 4-lane divided highways, which then gave way to the Interstate limited access system we’ve been using since the 1960s. All those highway right of ways essentially used the same routes originally laid down starting about 1915. The 1957 Turnpike was an exception as it was laid down on an entirely new right-of-way. Both the Turnpike and 183 were huge improvements over our old Hwy 80, and effectively replaced the old Dallas-Ft. Worth Pike.

The maps below show the first 2 iterations of the highway (Hwy 80/East Lancaster) that passed through our Eastside neighborhood. The first route was called the Dixie Overland Highway and dated to 1915-1927. It was privately funded. Starting about 1926, the Dixie Highway was made a part of the U.S. highway system and renamed U.S. 80.

I think TX 183, today's Airport Freeway, was the earliest 4-lane divided highway built between Ft. Worth and Dallas and the first new highway built to augment U.S. 80 between the two cities. I remember riding my bike alongside it in the mid-fifties and it was a 4-lane divided highway then. A few years later, after getting my drivers license in 1961, I recall driving to Dallas on 183 and it being a nice, quiet country drive. This was before Cowboy Stadium, DFW Airport, or much of anything else was built beside it. I’m sure there was a turnoff to Arlington somewhere out there, but until reaching Loop 12, there just wasn’t much traffic.

“Old Highway 80” as my dad called it, was a different story. Since it had been in service for about 40-years when we attended EHHS, a lot of commercial building had taken root along its path through Arlington and Grand Prairie. I drove to Dallas on 80 a few times and recall it as a slow, stop and go effort dotted with a lot of stop lights. I also recall seeing a lot of 1930s vintage gas stations.

Believe it or not, I really learned to drive when I was 13 or 14. Dad’s new house wasn’t quite ready when school at Meadowbrook started, but he wanted me to start the year there, so he rode shotgun while I drove the 2-lane back roads through the Trinity River bottoms between NE Ft. Worth and Meadowbrook. There was nothing out there then, so the roads were very quiet. It was there that I got about 30-minutes of driving time each morning and learned to keep the car going straight. By the time I was 16, I had quite a bit of time behind the wheel…imagine trying to do that today!

Adios

Handley & the Interurban

In 1900 the Ft. Worth population was 27,000, Dallas – 43,000.

In 1930 the Ft. Worth population was 164,000, Dallas – 260,000 (+500%)

I’m not sure I knew in ’63 there had been an Interurban rail line that ran through Handley, but until doing a little study for this piece I really never knew what an Interurban was. The Ft. Worth – Dallas line started in 1902 and shut down in 1934—well before our time. If any of our parents recalled it, it would have been from their childhood.

It was a 29-mile electric line that whisked passengers along at 5-mph during its early days, but had upped the speed to about 65-mph by the 1920’s. The Handley power station out by Lake Arlington was initially built to feed the power needs of the rail line, not in its present configuration of large generating units, of course, but the 2 older, small units at the north end of the power block might have been used for the rail line. They’re no longer running.

Highway 80, or East Lancaster as we knew it in our neighborhood, started out as a portion of the Dixie Highway that ran from Los Angeles to Savannah. The Dixie Highway was constructed over a period of years from 1915 – 1927. The Interurban predated the highway by a couple of decades and no doubt was the principal means of transportation between Dallas and Ft. Worth.

The picture collage above shows some net grabs of the Handley-Ft. Worth area involving the Interurban. The park was built by the traction company as a tourist attraction at its Lake Erie which was later made a part of Lake Arlington at the northern end. Lake Erie was initially built to provide cooling water for the power station condensers.

The picture below shows a restored Handley business district as it likely looked before automobiles whizzed by.

All Aboard