Below are some samples of old transcontinental-highway advertising, out there for all to
see, and really far more risque than what we see today. Certainly there was a higher
percentage of travelers then who were lone men, a time when traveling was very difficult,
but many families made the treks too. I suspect that the open road was thought of as more
of a just-deal-with-it-dude sort of place, a no-man's land where anything could happen,
and where it did. Today we think of our highways as little removed from our living-rooms
- a place we own and control - where our internalized socio-guilt rules, and our internal
desires are buried ... only to surface in most passionate and/or destructive ways.
Signs had threatened 750 miles of barren desolate desert roads for days, and you didn't know if
your car would just stop and leave you alone to die, and then, to man or woman or even child
came this relieving indication of real civilization ...
The battle of the states for highway business on the road to California (circa 1927) was certainly real too...
...Out on the open road as billboard ... always exaggerated a bit ...
... and once safe in Winslow (home of "com'on baby, don't say maybe ..") its just a clothing store, but...
At a gas station along route 66, you ask directions (highway signing was most-poor back-then) and they just give you a free map of the next state you'll need to traverse ...
Ethyl was the original "premium" fuel for a premium price: a marketing idea that enabled charging an extra penney or so per gallon. Chevron still has a cutesy name for the product, at ten times the price. And incidentally there were plenty of Ethyl jokes back-then: "I'll never talk to Jack again: can you imagine! ...He said to me that last night he had Ethyl in my own car! The nerve...."