‘Kicks’ on Route 40:
Writer Recalls San Pablo Avenue’s Role
In American Highway History

ALBANY - Wes Hammond and his friends enjoy driving down a road well-traveled, even if the road is not as famous as it used to be. In some places it’s not even a road anymore.

The thoroughfare in question? The storied Lincoln Highway, the nation’s first transcontinental road linking New York City to Oakland, including the last leg – San Pablo Avenue.

A writer with the Lincoln Highway Association, Hammond, 76, has been a lifelong transportation afficionado with special affection for the Lincoln Highway, which later became U.S. Route 40. A retired high voltage switching operator for Pacific Gas and Electric, he writes about highway lore, including the history of San Pablo Avenue, in the Traveller, the newsletter of the Lincoln Highway Association.

"The Lincoln Highway precedes Route 66 by about 12 years," Hammond told a group of Berkeley journalism students and historians at a Chinese restaurant in Albany last week.

"Of course, it rhymes much better to get your kicks on 66 than it does on route 40 or 50," Hammond said of the numbering system that replaced highway names in the 1930s.
American factories cranked out two thirds of the world’s automobiles in 1911 and just like today, there weren’t enough roads to drive them on.

So in 1912 Carl Fisher, founder of the Indianapolis 500, collected $10,000 each from many of the major automakers of the day (with Henry Ford a notable exception), and set out to build a single road from the Hudson River to the Carquinez Straits.

The Lincoln Highway was unveiled for the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair, although in some places the new road was just a line on the map instead of the continuous cement strip which connects today’s cities and suburbs.

Hammond said driving cross country was arduous. "It was dust in the summer and mud in the winter, not too different than taking a covered wagon across the prairie," he said in between spring rolls and soup.

Hammond brought along photographers from his private collection showing the long thin spokes of Model T wheels stuck in knee deep mud located in a spot where the map indicated road. Hammond also displayed photos of period hotels and rest stops in northern California in the earliest days of the highway, which once snaked from Sacramento to Stockton, then over the Altamount Pass to Oakland. With the completion of the Carquinnez Bridge on May 21, 1927 the same day Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris]] though, the Lincoln Highway turned along San Pablo Avenue, which saw a boom in business from Crockett to Oakland as a result.

Waiters cleared plates for the main course as Hammond recalled his uncle Clyde, who hauled stranded cars out of the wintertime mud that covered the Lincoln Highway between Sacramento and Reno.

"He charged ten dollars per haul," quips Hammond. "Compare that to a hundred dollars for a tow today."

Highway associations sponsored control stations—hotels, filling stations—anyplace along the road willing to offer resources to help drivers.

Joining a highway association meant easy visibility for any business on the roadway. Companies that helped build America’s 435 named highways—like Goodyear Tire—saw the roads as ideal for promoting leisure travel by car.

After World War I, America’s highways weren’t just for family road trips. Roadways became vital to national security.

In 1919 a caravan of army trucks, cars, and one tank set off down the Lincoln Highway for California, rebuilding each frail bridge which the tank collapsed, laying pavement from one end of the country to the other.

U.S. Army Lt. Dwight D. Eisenhower joined in the dusty, two month trek through America’s heartland. Later as President, Eisenhower would establish the interstate highway system.

A former navy electrician, Hammond’s love affair with the history of how people got from one place to another began with boats and ferries, then later railroads.

Lincoln Highway caught his eye five years ago. He edits "The Traveller," official newsletter of the current incarnation of the Lincoln Highway Association.

Now Hammond vacations driving down a road his grandfather helped pave, looking for the history beneath the pavement.