I suspect most people forced to drive across Pennsylvania on the Turnpike consider that to be a boring, unpleasant chore. I am not in that category and the opportunity for me to ride, as a passenger, the 270 miles east from Monroeville to King of Prussia on the ‘Pike’ on Friday, and to retrace the trip west on Sunday was a great thrill. The purpose of the trip was for us to attend my granddaughter Rachael’s graduation from Bryn Mawr, and to retrieve her belongings. Consequently, Beth and Mike chose to borrow my van, a request I honored in return for the right to occupy the “shotgun seat” both ways.
In the eighty-six years the Turnpike has been open, I have traversed the original portion hundreds of times. My storehouse of memories is packed full; combining that with the chance to see and learn new things makes such a journey very appealing to me. The fact that I was sightseeing while someone else was driving made it all the more enjoyable. At my age every adventure is a candidate for being my last opportunity to enjoy a specific experience – better take advantage of it.
We entered the Turnpike at Monroeville, cruising through the old, now unmanned, toll booths without a stop and immediately passed under a gantry full of cameras all aimed at my license plate — one more example of a boring, tedious job eliminated by modern technology. Eleven miles later we are at Irwin, the western terminus of the original Turnpike. In the early days motorists had to fight their way to and through Pittsburgh on Route 30 to reach the ‘Pike; the addition of the Parkway East and the Monroeville interchange was quite welcome.
The eight miles between Irwin and New Stanton are nondescript; the next fifteen miles, New Stanton to Donegal, are the exact opposite. This is the stretch for which my father, representing the Turnpike Commission, was Resident Engineer eighty-eight years ago during the original construction of the highway. This is the stretch where I rode around on bulldozers and pickup trucks on two glorious days in the summer of 1939 when he took me to work with him. Pretty heady stuff for an impressionable nine-year-old! There is the farmhouse of a gentleman whose farm was cut in two by the Turnpike; no amount of financial reimbursement could satisfy him. There’s the apple orchard where we poached a snack. There’s Mount Joy Cut, third biggest on the original ‘Pike’; my father’s office was at the top of the ridge on the north side. There’s the meadow where one of his co-workers landed a Taylor Cub following a weekend at home. There’s Jacob’s Creek, winding up Chestnut Ridge and providing the surveyors an easy route to the top. And, there’s the Donegal interchange. According to my father it was located there solely to humor the Mellons and their wealthy neighbors in Ligonier.
The original Turnpike poked through Laurel Hill with a single two-way tunnel. When traffic picked up dramatically after the War, this tunnel became a serious bottleneck. In the mid 1950s the problem was eliminated by bypassing the tunnel and making a massive cut at the summit. Beyond it, motorists now find themselves in the high plateau of Somerset County. In no time we see the seven wind turbines on a ridge just south of the highway. Two of them are not turning – maintenance problems? There, to the north, is the city of Somerset, dominated by its magnificent county courthouse. The eastern boundary of Somerset County is Allegheny Mountain. The bottleneck caused by its initial single tunnel was reduced by drilling a second tunnel parallel to the first. This solution is no longer adequate; the Turnpike Commission is seriously considering climbing farther up the mountain and replicating the Laurel Hill cut.
Through Allegheny Tunnel we now descend the southeast face of the mountain on a serpentine route and enter a vastly different environment in Bedford County. There’s St. John the Baptist Church on one side of the highway and the village of New Baltimore on the other, connected by an overpass, the one place motorists can pull off and park and walk to Mass. There’s the Turnpike Commission maintenance building Kegg. When we used to drive this route from Bridgeville to my father’s home in Franklin County, Kegg was the halfway point. There’s the spot from which we could see the Ship Hotel halfway up Allegheny Mountain before it burned down. I can still hear my father announcing proudly “I see the Ship Hotel” when he spotted it before Joe or me. There’s the Mann’s Choice covered bridge. In no time we are past Bedford and pulling into Midway for a rest stop. How many times we have done that and parked way over to the side so I could find some grass for our dog to use as a rest stop! The original Midway plaza was on the south side of the highway; a tunnel from a parking lot on the north side served westbound travelers.
Back on the road we negotiate the lovely gap in Tussey Mountain cut by the Raystown Branch of the Juniata River and cross the (ten miles wide) valley between Tussey and Wray’s Hill. Passing Breezewood brings back a host of memories. This is where my parents would leave the Turnpike and pick up Route 30 on trips to my father’s home. This is where a bus filled with newly inducted draftees left the Turnpike and headed south for Camp Meade on a dreadful September night in 1953. This is where my wife and I, three children, and a dog, in a Suburban pulling a camping trailer, headed south for vacation on the Outer Banks on many memorable occasions. This is also a good place for me to terminate this column; I will pick up my odyssey in a week or two.