TRAVELS WITH MY FATHER

I CANNOT GO on a long road trip without thinking about my father. He was a highway engineer, a member of the first civil engineering class to graduate from Texas A&M that studied highway construction rather than railroad construction. That was in 1924. He went on to have a long career with the US Bureau of Public Roads. He was one of the architects of the Interstate Highway System, and he retired as a regional administrator of the Federal Highway Authority, with responsibility for all federally-funded highway construction in the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

My father was never comfortable in an office. He was happiest out on the road, looking at highway jobs. He frequently took me with him. Our drives together were our father-and-son time, and I learned a lot from them. Dad looked at the terrain with the eye of an engineer, and he tried to teach me to observe the things that he thought were important and to draw conclusions from them. When I was a child he showed me how to watch for the next water tower as we drove across West Texas together. He explained that West Texas towns large enough to have water towers were thirty miles apart, because West Texas counties were thirty miles square and the law required that the county seat be in the center of the county.

Once during a drive from Fort Worth to College Station, we drove over a rough place in the pavement, almost a trench, just north of Hillsboro. Dad slowed the car to a stop, backed up, and pulled over on the shoulder next to the deteriorating pavement. A fence line stretched away across the fields on both sides of the road. "You see what happened here?" he asked, pointing along the fence. "When they built this highway the right-of-way went right through this fence, and the contractor failed to fill the post holes properly after he took the fence down. Water got into them, the base failed, and now the pavement is failing." The lesson here was that not doing small things right at the start of a task will eventually cause big problems.

The area around Hillsboro was replete with landmarks for Dad, as he had been the federal inspector when US Highway 81 was paved through there in the late 1920s. He would always point out the first highway overpass in Texas, an iron truss bridge that had been moved from a defunct railroad to carry a county road over the highway just south of Alvarado. South of Hillsboro was a big white farmhouse that always prompted a story about a man who had been appointed to a responsible position in the Texas Highway Department during one of the Miriam Ferguson administrations, which were notable for political cronyism. When the man went to start his new job, Gibb Gilchrist, the state highway engineer, politely questioned him about his qualifications. "Well, sir," the man said, "do you know that big white house west of the road four miles south of Hillsboro?" Gilchrist said that he did, and the man said, "Well, I live there." Gilchrist said he didn't see what that had to do with his qualifications for an engineering job, and the man said, "Why, when you all built that highway from Hillsboro to Waco I went down to my fence every day and watched you. I know all about how to do it."

Dad told me stories about nearly every small town in West Texas, because he had built highways through most of them. Monahans was where, when Noah got forty days and forty nights of rain, half an inch fell. Post was where a café waitress once told Dad that of course the oysters on the menu were fresh; they came down every morning on the bus from Lubbock, didn't they? Sierra Blanca was where the sheriff once mistook Dad's black government car for a similar one being driven across Texas by Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, with near-fatal results. He used to say that he married my mother because he built the paved road to Nocona and she was at the end of it.

My father was born into the horseless carriage era, and he developed a profound respect for the lethal power of the modern automobile. His interest in highway design focused on ways of ameliorating that power. Tight curves and short sight distances are dangerous, but engineers often favor them since more generous curves and longer sight distances require more right-of-way and more earth moving. Dad was quick to point out the implications of this parsimonious approach, especially when we were driving across states outside of his region. He also disliked what he called "unnecessary signage." Too many signs, he said, distracted motorists and constituted obstacles that they might hit if they lost control of their cars. He was especially contemptuous of signs telling you that you were entering or leaving a particular watershed or national forest district. "Who cares?" he would say. The one type of sign that he thought was absolutely necessary were confirming signs, the signs that tell you that you are still on the right route when you are following a highway through a city and that are so often not there after the route has made a turn. Every time I drive through a city I can hear my father muttering, "No confirming signs....