Word: highway
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ideal when one is on some freshly built stretch with not a car in sight, and the obsolete when the sign says FREEWAY ENDS and the car is dumped onto a truck-jammed road bearing the telltale black-and-white shield that identifies the old federal-aid highway system. Interstate 40, for example, turns into Route 66, once famed in song and legend, and now a dreary bore lined with signs like SEE GILA MONSTERS 1 MILE...
...good roads also have a cost in monotony. The antiseptic highway stretches on and on and on. The green-and-white signs are the same. The little clusters of commerce-at-the-cloverleaf are eminently the same. Even the jargon on the menus of the identical restaurants ("char-broiled steak smothered in mushrooms sauteed in fresh country butter") is the same. Yet, happily enough, as the freeway driver highballs from one similar place to another, leisurely and nostalgic souls who want to sample the color and culture of America's side roads can do so readily...
Invariably, another kind of nostalgia rears up whenever new freeways are about to be carved into the countryside-the sensation that Nature is being suffocated beneath spans of concrete. "In many parts of the country the building of a highway has about the same results upon vegetation and human structures as the passage of a tornado or the blast of an atom bomb," protests Critic Lewis Mumford, one of the foremost save-our-trees esthetes. In San Francisco, Folk Singer Malvina Reynolds became so angry with the California Highway Department that she wrote a song...
Suits & More Suits. The Florida accident occurred in 1963, as State Legislators James T. Russell and David C. Anderson were driving home to St. Petersburg from a session of the legislature in Tallahassee. On U.S. Highway 19, Russell's 1962 Corvair Monza went out of control and overturned, hurling Anderson out the door. He died six days later...
...winter of 1956-57, a New Yorker and his wife driving along a highway got stuck in a snowstorm. They found shelter in an ice-cold disused builders' shed on the side of the road...