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Celebrating our two-lane highways of yesteryear…And the joys of driving them today!

mga707

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Everything posted by mga707

  1. The plant in the last picture is a common ornamental shrub around here (Tucson)! I think it's a variety of brittlebush. Are the Eureka Dunes the dunes that are in the northern part of Death Valley National Park? Never been to that part of the park--they look really cool. Like there should be a camel caravan trekking over them...
  2. Very interesting videos--thanks for sharing them here. I'm curious--is the main reason for the closures of the old underpasses and the rerouting because of traffic congestion or due to the probability that the old structures do not meet today's earthquake-resistance codes?
  3. Beautiful pictures! I've only driven this potion of 395 once, on January 1, 1994 (over 20 years--wow!), from Carson City down to Mono Lake and Bodie. There was no shortage of snow that winter. Bodie looked like the most desolate place in the world, with snow on the ground and the total lack of trees. But what a neat place to poke around in--it looks just as it did when the last residents departed back in the 1940s. Mono Lake looks great, glad it has recovered from it's near-death experience!
  4. Very nice--I've driven 61 down from Memphis to Clarksdale (to visit the Delta Blues Museum and Morgan Freeman's restaurant/juke joint across the street) but stayed on the 4-lane alignment. Also did go off on 49 just to cross the Mississippi on the bridge, but did not go into Helena/West Helena proper. Such an obviously poor area but I never met such uniformly friendly people anywhere in the USA. Enjoyed your pictures!
  5. Check out the comments to the article. Lots of folks wondering why the road crew plans to cover up the arch when the improvement project is finished. Have to agree!
  6. No, shakes are still a big thing for some chains. Many of Sonic's ads center on their 28 shake flavors. And Culver's just had a Labor Day promo with $1 regular shakes on that day. I managed to stop in for two of them on Monday! I've got one of the former--an Underwood from the 1920s--and many hundreds of the latter!
  7. This is like one of those "how many differences can you spot" pictures! 1) W. C. Fields has replaced the rearing stallion on the wall. 2) Both the stools at the counter and the table chairs have been replaced. The stools appear to be more deeply padded now. 3) The green drink mixer is either now gone or has been relocated to a spot out of the picture. 4) Not only is the pay phone gone but the bulletin board as well. Others?
  8. The individual serving cereal boxes! I used to love eating those as a kid right out of the box, using the perforations on the box to make it into a bowl.
  9. I know this is not the site for Interstate Highway discussions, but I was wondering if anyone knows if the part of the CKC across northern Missouri, from Hannibal over to I35, that follows US36, is or will become an extension of I72 (which presently has it's western terminus at Hannibal). The Tribune article was just about the Illinois portion of the highway, and did not mention anything about the Missouri part.
  10. That is a great postcard! If you squint your eyes and look very closely, it looks like there are two cars passing on another in the far background, right by the far utility pole (or poles--looks like two together) that can be seen to the right of the foreground pole. They're a little sharper, but far smaller, in the full postcard.
  11. Good advice, but I would definitely suggest one slight detour: When you get to the 120/395 junction at Mono Lake detour north a few miles and go to Bodie. The absolute best 'true' ghost town in the continental USA (there's one in Alaska north of Anchorage that rivals it). It is an amazing place and one can easily spend an entire day wandering around, being amazed that people could live for generations (until the 1940s!) in such a lonely, treeless, forbidding-looking place! It's probably a bit less forbidding-looking in the summer, but in the winter with snow on the ground (I was there on a New Year's Day) it is truly eerie.
  12. Yes, it was the Consolidated (later Convair) B-24 "Liberator". While the B-17 did fly well before the first flight of the Liberator, they were usually considered as contemporaries of one another. and yes, the B-17 did have a much "tougher" reputation than the B-24. The B-24's ace-in-the-hole, though, was it's substantially larger fuel capacity and, thus, longer range than the 17. For long-range bomb missions in Europe, such as the Ploesti (Romania) oil refinery strikes, the 24 was the only choice.
  13. Wow! Those are some great shots, and the writing's not bad either! I've done the south bank Columbia drive on US30, but not the north side. and I still haven't satisfied my Pig'N'Pancake urge, since they were so darn busy (Mt. Hood to the beach relay race) the last time I was in the Astoria/Seaside area. Have to get back there someday...
  14. Actually I had not...but it's a great site with lots of info on Alhambra and other former LA area airfields. Thanks--it's been bookmarked!
  15. Thank you, Dave! Both of the maps tell me a lot. The 1939 map tells me that by that time Garvey Ave. was the 60/70/99 alignment, as I suspected, and also tells me that the Alhambra Airport had already been closed by that time, as it is not noted on the map. It's location was the open square right above the word "Wilmar" on the 1939 map, with Valley Blvd. to the north and the tracks to the south. The railroad alignment is where the San Bernardino Freeway would later be built. It's interesting that Wilmar was known as "Ramona Acres" on the 1925 map. Also note that Grand Central Airport is noted on the map, up in the northwest corner, as it was still in use. Commercial carriers had all moved to either Burbank or Mines Field--today's LAX--by that time. The 1925 map is interesting in that Garvey Avenue had not yet been constructed, so the earlier 60/70/99 alignment could well have been Valley Blvd, which apparently was called El Monte Road west of El Monte at that time. Alhambra Airport did not yet exist (opened in early 1930) so again the site is the open square just above "Ramona Acres". Thanks for posting the maps--they're excellent. It is always neat to see old LA maps from "B.F."--before freeways!
  16. Hello everyone--I am researching the old Alhambra Airport in the town of the same name and have a question about the former alignment of US 60/70 (I believe US 99 also was on the same alignment, at least for a while). My question is, did the pre-freeway alignment of 60/70 follow Valley Boulevard, which ran along the north edge of the airport, or did it follow Garvey Avenue to the south? The old south boundary of the airport was the former streetcar track that was where the San Bernardino Freeway (Interstate 10) now runs, to the north of Garvey. The Alhambra Airport is a fascinating and largely forgotten place. It was constructed by Western Air Express and opened in early 1930. For it's day it was state of the art, with a concrete runway and a large hexagonal hangar in the northwest corner of the site, where a shopping center now exists. I believe, but cannot prove, that the shopping center sits on old airport tarmac. WAE moved to Alhambra from another long-gone airfield, Vail Field, which was in the City of Commerce (unincorporated in the 1920s), just west of Montebello. Alhambra airport had a short life, as Western ran into financial difficulty later in 1930 and was forced to divest itself of many of it's routes and aircraft (the infamous "Shotgun Marriage")by the Postmaster General and merge them into Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT), creating Transcontinental and Western Air (TWA). Another of it's routes it was forced to sell to American Airways, today's American Airlines. Both TAT and AA at that time used Grand Central Airport in Glendale (which Disney now owns and is planning to renovate into it's early 30s appearance), and the small part of WAE that was left independent, The LA to Salt Lake City route, was moved to Union Air Terminal in Burbank (today's Burbank Airport), where the United Airlines/Boeing System already operated. I am not sure when exactly Alhambra ceased to operate as an airport, but it was not long after the "shotgun marriage" of 1930. Incidentally, WAE survived, became Western Airlines, and operated fairly successfully until they bought by and merged into Delta in 1987. Anyway, just wondering if anyone is familiar with the old alignment(s) of 60/70 in the Los Angeles basin, and how it was routed through the Alhambra area. Thanks!
  17. Climbing over Teton Pass and dropping down into Jackson Hole is still quite a thrill even today, with a much wider--and paved--highway. Especially during a summer thunderstorm, as we experienced it in June of 09! It even turned into a summer thunderSNOWstorm at the top of the pass.
  18. Thank you Dave and Denny--it makes sense that only I can see my 'warning points' and cannot see anyone else's, Sure don't want them on my "Permanent Record" like that stuff from back in elementary school!
  19. What are they, why are they shown on my posts (even though apparently I have zero of them) and from what I can tell nobody else's posts?
  20. ...until you have to fill that monster up with $3 to $4/gal gas! She wanted a Ford, so I was giving her the closest current model to an open roadster from 1928. Even closer would be the 02-05 retro two-seater Thunderbird, which laid a huge sales egg. FoMoCo was about 15 years too late for a 50s retro T-Bird, IMHO (Apropos Lois Griffin line from "Family Guy": "Kids, these 50s diners were all the rage back in the 80s")!
  21. I think a Mustang convertible is the closest Dearborn spiritual descendant of that 28 'A' roadster!
  22. Thanks for the reply! I haven't been to the eastern side of VA/NC in way too long. Have to get back there sometime. Just to clarify in case someone's wondering, OBX stands for Outer Banks, the long, thin barrier islands that are separated from the rest of North Carolina by Currituck/Albemarle/Pamlico sounds. Long known as the "Graveyard of the Atlantic" due to the large number of shipwrecks, the Banks were also pirate/privateer (depending on which side of British maritime law he was operating under at the time) Blackbeard's favorite haunts. Arrrrr!
  23. Northeast North Carolina has both the Wright Brothers National Memorial near Kill Devil Hills and Fort Raleigh National Historic Site close by at Manteo. As I enjoy both aviation and early American History, both are of interest to me. The latter is the site of the "Lost Colony", and is particularly eerie as it is still unknown what exactly became of this pre-Jamestown attempt to establish an English colony in North America.
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