The Lincoln Highway

We’ve been traveling The Lincoln Highway much of this trip. I knew of it, but there is a lot I didn’t know about it until I began to read about it. It was the first road across the entire United States of America. It was conceived in 1912, dedicated October 31, 1913, and was the first national memorial to President Lincoln, predating the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. by nine years. Initially it was 3,389 miles long, going through 13 states, stretching from Times Square, New York  City, to Lincoln Park in San Francisco, CA. It was created by using existing roadways, many of which were unimproved; only over time did it become a paved highway coast to coast. To a great extent it was initially a public relations triumph more than an actual roadway, but it did create a route that could be followed from coast to coast, and almost immediately, many intrepid travelers sought to follow it. When federal highways were given numbers in the 1920s, much of the Lincoln Highway was given the number U.S. 30, from Philadelphia, PA to Granger, WY. The eastern and western ends have other route numbers (U.S. 1 in the east accounts for much of it, and U.S. 40 in the west). Our travels on the Lincoln Highway have been primarily in Nebraska and Wyoming, but also in Indiana.

As one can imagine, the existence of this highway was an economic boon to the hundreds of little towns through which it passed. It encouraged the creation of other national highways and eventually is thought to have been, in part at least, an inspiration of the Interstate Highway System of the 1960s; one of the earliest travelers of the Lincoln Highway was a youthful Dwight Eisenhower, who as President championed the Interstate Highway.  Unfortunately, the Interstate System, rather than being a boon to small towns, has proved in many instances to be the death of them because it has bypassed them, and sucked development away from Main Street to the exit ramp. We have seen a multitude of instances of this in our travels.

A great deal of history and lore is attached to the Lincoln highway, a National Lincoln Highway Association supports and promotes it, events are held along it periodically to celebrate anniversaries.; devoted followers can trace virtually every foot of it (though much of it is now I-80). If you want to know more, check out Wikipedia and other articles on line. I acknowledge my dependence on the Wikipedia article.

Yesterday as we were going along I-80 between Cheyenne and Rock Springs, WY (where I am writing this in an Econolodge), we passed this monument, which marks the high point of the Lincoln Highway east of Laramie:

The Amazing Corolla

 The view from the back seat

 The Corolla in Columbia, MO

We're traveling in a 2001 Toyota Corolla that has over 315,000 miles on it. Ellen just had a new clutch put in before we left - replacing the original. Now it drives like a new car. The other amazing thing is that despite the fact that it is winter, we have snow tires, we're going 65 m.p.h, running the heater all the time, it's getting 38 m.p.g. In the summer it gets over 40 m.p.g. The other peculiarity is that we took out the front passenger seat when I had knee surgery a year ago, so that I could sit in the back seat and stretch out my legs, and now we've gotten so accustomed to it, that we've kept it that way. There are a lot of advantages. It is very handy for me to have things next to me on the back seat instead of having to reach into the back from the front seat to get something. We keep the food box in the well of the front seat which I can also reach easily when we want a snack in the car. I read aloud a lot while Ellen is driving, and my voice carries fine into the front driver's seat. Every now and then I drive, but Ellen does most of the driving on our trips, which she is happy doing. We just toodle along in our amazing Corolla and are having a wonderful time.

Katie the photographer

We've just had a lovely visit with my granddaughter, Katie Shay, who is a freshman at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau. We met her at her dorm last evening, heard all about her recent trip to New York City, saw her album of photos from that trip, then went out to eat in neaby Jackson, MO at the Tractors Bar and Grill where her friend Brad is a waiter and had a good meal there -- huge portions, reasonable prices, tasty food! Katie is a vocal performance major and photography minor at SEMO, so she is really busy with voice lessons, piano class, photography class, dance class, plus French and English, making costumes for theatrical productions, wow! It was great to have a chance to see her in her setting, see her room, meet her roommate, all that. Now we're headed for Columbia, MO where my daughter Betsey (Katie's mom) lives.

Bears and Packers

Boy, we have hit the Chicago area at just the right moment! Tomorrow is what is being billed as the biggest sports event in the history of Chicago! Imagine it! And we're here! The Chicago Bears meet the Green Bay Packers Sunday afternoon to decide who will go into the Super Bowl. The streets will probably be deserted after 3pm everywhere. Sports Bars will be overflowing, and there will be game parties in literally 100,000s of homes. The amount of snack food that has been purchased and will be consumed staggers the imagination. It must run into the $10 millions. Meanwhile Rahm Emmanuel has built a commanding lead in the run-up to the mayoral election. Wow, what a time to be alive!

Earlier today I went with Jerry Hochburger (my brother Stewart's ex wife Maggie's husband and our host), to help with what was billed as a work party to "clean out the undercroft" of their Episcopal Church in Batavia, IL. I had imagined a basement area crammed with an accumulation of church junk from over the years - old hymnals, relics, files of old sunday bulletins, leftover church bazaar items, Sunday School curriculum books long rendered obsolete. I was wrong. It all had to do with one large wide-screen TV set - not working, I presume -- which needed four people to get it up out of the basement into a pickup truck. Now this thing was HUGE -- maybe five feet wide, and almost as tall, and heavy. We had to open an old bulkhead that looked like it hadn't been used for a decade, rusty, overgrown with weeds, and of course covered with snow. The concrete steps leading up out of the bulkhead were dirty and covered with an old plastic. The wide-screen TV had absolutely nothing one could really get a good grip on, and it turned out that this work "party" was me, Jerry, the sexton, Joe, and a woman named Hannah who opted out of wrestling with the TV. So the four-man job turned out to be a three-man job. Jerry and I thought this TV was a piece of junk headed for the landfill. But Joe seemed to have other ideas. He seemed to want to get it out unscratched and upright. This was not easy to do! But we managed it, and got it into the back of his pickup in one piece. We suspected Joe was going to see if he could get it working. Maybe he was hoping to use it for a Bears-Packers party tomorrow. It would sure be the ideal screen for a football party!

After that job was done, the work party seemed to be over. There was a little sweeping to do, but we were out of there a half-hour after we arrived. The ride back to Jerry's house we went along the Fox River on Route 31 through Geneva and St. Charles. What an amazing route that was -- one beautiful riverfront mansion after another, interspersed with parks, nature reserves, vistas of the river, and the occasional quaint village center with lovely shops, old brick and stone Victorian era buildings.A very different view of this area from the usual one we have seen, which is one shopping mall after another.

And all of it so different from our Vermont life.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

We're near Lodi, OH this morning, having spent the night in a Super 8, snug and warm while the snow fell outside. We traveled from Swarthmore, PA yesterday, the second leg of our January-February western trip.We got off to sort of a late start from home on Wednesday -- Ellen had a new clutch put into the Corolla -- the original clutch lasted for over 310,000 miles! - but we couldn't pick up the car until Wed a.m. because of snow. So we left home after noon, but still got to Swarthmore by 7p.m., where Wallace Ayres hosted us in her lovely home. Thursday we went along the PA Turnpike all the way to OH and then on I-76 to the motel. It started snowing lightly by about 4p.m., and by 7p.m. was getting pretty slick -- Ellen was glad to stop. Today it is sunny and it should be ok driving to Bartlett, IL. Monday we're going to Columbia, MO and it looks like there may be snow showers then too, but after that it looks like clear sailing to WY. Yesterday I worked on a mailing to my "annuitants" in the car -- I am what is called the Annuitant Visitor for the Pension Board of the United Church of Christ, which means I keep in touch with 45 or so retired UCC clergy in Vermont. I should be able to finish up that mailing today and get it in the mail. I also read aloud from our biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which we read only in the car on a trip. We've been working on it over a year. What a complex and fascinating person, mostly misunderstood. His philosophical work was sort of the end of philosophy in a way, and no one, especially his philosopher friends (like Bertrand Russell) really wanted to hear that. People have taken from him what they have wanted to hear, but he himself tried in both his thought and his personal life to be scrupulously honest, which was not an easy thing for him or his friends. There is much in him to be admired.

Miracle of the Internet

Something amazing has happened which is probably not that unusual anymore but still seems remarkable to me. A woman in France was cleaning out the home of her aunt who had passed away in a village in Normandy, and she came upon a WW II U.S. Army/Navy Prayer Book/Hymnal. Inside the front cover was an inscription: Rev. Barney C. Crockett, with an address in Minneapolis, and a line that said in French: "write after the war." To make a long story short,she put out a request for information about this Barney Crockett which eventually found me, mainly through Ancestry.com networks. I responded that Barney Crockett was my father, and in due time I received the prayerbook in the mail. It prompted me to research where my dad actually was in Normandy and I found a fair amount of information and some photos. He was mainly north of St. Lo in the village of Cartigny l'Epinay, on the grounds of a chateau belonging to a M. Pagny. I have photos of the chateau, and what I think is M. Pagny's daughter, plus some group shots in front of the chateau and some of dad. I will post these photos later. I still have to learn if the woman who found the book has any connection with M. Pagny. But what a small world we now live in!

Photo 1 below is my father, Chaplain Barney C. Crockett
Photo 2 is the chateau belonging to M. Pagny near Cartigny l'Epinay