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By Root 2586 0

same time that the tireless Fisher was tempting fate in south Florida, the Secretary of Agriculture in Washington was deciding it was time to bring some order to American roads. He introduced uniform road signs – the octagonal red stop sign, the cross for a railway junction and so on – and instituted the system of numbering for interstate roads that is still used today. North-south highways were given odd numbers, and east-west highways were given even numbers (with major transcontinental routes ending in multiples of ten). Names were ruthlessly abandoned. At a stroke, highways lost much of their romance. The Lincoln Highway, completed only two years before, became US Route 30. The great Dixie Highway became the uninspiring Route 25. The William Penn became Route 22. Probably the most famous highway of them all, Route 66, never suffered the indignity of being stripped of its name for the simple reason that it never had one. It was not begun until 1926, in the post-name era. Its humiliation would have to wait until 1985, when the federal highway department removed all the Route 66 shield signs along its 2,200 miles from Michigan Avenue in Chicago to Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. Overnight this once great highway became a series of back highways and anonymous frontage roads.

III

As you would expect, it wasn’t long before people outside the automobile business discovered that there was money to be made from America’s growing tendency to take to the roads. In the mid-1920s a new expression entered the language: the drive-in.

The drive-in experience was not in fact exclusive to the automobile age. Around the turn of the century a brief craze arose among drugstores to provide kerbside soda-fountain service to buggies. But it took the long-range mobility of the internal combustion engine to really put the concept on its feet. The first modern drive-in is generally agreed to be the Pig Stand, a barbecue pit that was the brainchild of one Royce Hailey. It opened for business in September 1921 along the highway between Dallas and Fort Worth and was such a hit that soon there were Pig Stands all over the southern states and California. In 1924 a competitor called A&W, named for its founders, a Mr Allen and a Mr White, opened for business. Its main contribution to American culture was the invention of ‘tray girls’, who brought the food to patrons’ cars, saving them the emotional upheaval of having to be parted even briefly from their surrogate wombs.37

Highways became lined with diners, roadhouses, greasy spoons (first recorded in 1925) and other meccas of cheap, breezy service. In the early 1930s, a survey of the highway between New York and New Haven revealed that there was on average a gas station every 895 feet and a restaurant or diner every 1,825 feet.38 Every main highway had its famed establishments, like the Pig Hip Restaurant in Lincoln, Illinois, or the Cozy Dog Drive-In in nearby Springfield (whose proud boast it was to have invented corn dogs in 1949, though it called them ‘crusty curs’), both on Route 66. Some of these establishments were so successful that they grew into national chains, like the Servistation Café in Corbin, Kentucky, on the Dixie Highway, founded in 1929 by Harland Sanders*24 and which evolved into Kentucky Fried Chicken, or Dairy Queen, founded in Moline, Illinois, in 1945.

Though highway eating places were plentiful, there was about them a certain worrying unpredictability. In 1929 a young drugstore owner in Massachusetts named Howard Johnson decided that what America’s motorists craved was a safe, reliable uniformity of eating. He hit on the idea of franchising as a quicker, less risky way of building a chain. By 1940, 125 Howard Johnson’s restaurants stood along the eastern seaboard, two-thirds of them owned by franchisees, or agents as Johnson called them. Most of his establishments were built in a homy, neo-colonial style, with shutters on the windows, a rooftop cupola with a weather-vane, and upstairs dormers that had no function beyond lending the structure an air of cosy domesticity. Only