When at the age of 90, Francis Cutler Turner died on Oct. 2, 1999 at a hospice in Goldsboro, his passing apparently went unremarked in The N&O.
In one regard, that's not surprising. Frank Turner was a Texas native who had lived in Arlington, Va., for more than 40 years. As age and illness caught up with the widower, he relocated to Goldsboro to be near his son Marvin, a retired Air Force officer.
But Turner's death made national news, with coverage in The Washington Post and New York Times. If his was not a household name, even at the end, one might say it was a road he'd been down before: As the obituaries noted, Turner had been named by American Heritage magazine in 1994 among 10 people who brought about profound changes in this country while staying out of the limelight.
Within his field, Frank Turner was indisputably the king during his long career with the federal government. His field was highways, and his legacy was the interstate system - mostly constructed on his extended watch.
It is a legacy whose full impact is easy to overlook, so interwoven are our interstate highways into the nation's landscape, economy and culture. It's also one that continues to generate deep misgivings about how these gigantic arteries of pavement have shaped the places where we live and thus our very lives themselves.
Turner's story and much more is told in "The Big Roads," a new book by Virginia-based journalist Earl Swift, who spins the whole grand yarn of how this country's federal highways came to be. The story could be dry, it could be dull - but Swift seizes on strong characters and the conflicts they encountered to propel his narrative.
Along the way, he does entertaining riffs on American car culture, franchise joints from McDonald's to Stuckey's, chain motels and the interchangeable landscapes of highway exits that offer few clues as to whether we've gotten off the road in Connecticut, say, or California.
Turner (after supervising construction of the Alaska Highway) was the self-effacing but iron-willed engineer who, as head of the Bureau of Public Roads, took the interstate system from concept to reality - doing the hard work in the Washington political trenches to make it all happen. But the concept had been kicking around for quite a few years before bulldozers began moving dirt during the Eisenhower era.
More than a concept, in fact. By Swift's account, a prototype for the system was hatched under the close supervision of FDR. Thomas MacDonald - Turner's mentor and formidable predecessor, known far and wide as "the Chief" - was at the epicenter of that planning.
The aim was to trump the system of federal-aid highways dating from the Twenties (U.S. 1, 64, 70 and so forth) that first knitted the country together but that had become so congested, especially in and around cities, as to become intolerable. MacDonald had overseen creation of that system, too.
Dwight Eisenhower, shortly after he became president, told folks to get busy on designing a new, limited access highway grid - unaware that plans already existed. Funding was the problem. But eventually the necessary deals were cut and what became known as the Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways took shape, starting in the mid-Fifties.
As the asphalt and concrete corridors stretched across the country, they pushed into cities - often triggering a strong pushback from residents who didn't want to see their neighborhoods fractured and ravaged. The anti-expressway philosophy had a solid pedigree notably articulated by social critic Lewis Mumford, who deplored the highways' effects on the urban character and who hammered the point that more roads generate more traffic.
I'm still rather surprised to recall that I had a sort of worm's-eye view of these controversies. During the summer of 1967, in my first office job, I worked in the public and legislative affairs office of the Federal Highway Administration in Washington.
A principal task was to comb through each day's set of major newspapers and trade journals, make a digest of highway-related articles and distribute copies to a dozen bigwigs, from the secretary of transportation to, yes, Frank Turner (who went on to head the highway agency under President Nixon). I never met him but I was well aware of his place in the scheme of things.
The papers were full of stories about conflicts over urban highway routes - New Orleans was a hot spot, and in San Francisco, local loathing over a waterfront expressway was coming to a boil. Meanwhile, the wire service machine in the corner, the first one I'd been around, click-clacked reports of dreadful riots in Newark and Detroit and of a faraway war.
I hadn't figured it out yet, but I contracted the news bug that summer. And in another life, I might have gone on to attempt a roads book like the one Earl Swift has so skillfully crafted.
