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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY 1959 VW bus was enduring, but slow I recently sent a batch of my columns to our daughter, April, who lives in Portland, and asked her for suggestions for future pieces. She wrote back, "How about writing about our long trips to Los Angeles in that �59 Volkswagen bus, and how us kids would rock forward to "help" the vehicle make it over the Grapevine mountains?" I answered that I had written about those trips several years ago, but her note had helped me to recall other things about them. That old bus served us well in creeping up steep highways in the mountains, but it had only two forward speeds on an upgrade � slow and slower. When going downhill, we could keep up with the average speed of other cars quite well, but the next upgrade would invariably slow us down to a crawl again. All this was a bit of an irritant to some truck drivers who believed that the far right lane belonged to them. The drivers would have to pull around our position without losing momentum. We would usually catch up with them near the top of the incline because neither a tractor-trailer nor our bus could go much faster than 15 mph near the top of a very long hill. We began our yearly trips to Los Angeles with our three small children years before any of the freeways were completed in California. Our route was still good ol� Highway 99, which was still a two-lane road in many places in the 1950s. That road had its own peculiarities in Oregon as well as in California. Somewhere in a fairly small Oregon valley near Roseburg, the two-lane highway actually detoured around a tree. That�s right, it detoured around a tree! Ninety-nine went straight through the valley until it came near the tree. There it made a half-circle of about 50 yards, then went back to its straight trek through the rest of the valley. It could be as early as 1948 when I saw that, and I never saw it again. Old �99 was built along a ridgetop rather than down through the valley south of Canyonville, and there were about five or six switchback bridges from one side of the canyon to the other. Down in Northern California, little progress was made on the freeways until the late 1960s and �70s. Back then, there were a lot of "Big Orange" hamburger stands on the old highway. Each of the buildings was made to look like an orange and was its own best advertisement. There is still one of these to be seen on a frontage road north of Redding. Another successful roadside advertising program was for Burma Shave. It consisted of half a dozen signs, each about 24 inches long and 10 inches high, placed in succession. Each sign had one or two words on it, and together they were designed to make you laugh. The Interstates killed that ad campaign that had been successful for more than 50 years because the panels were too small to be read from a wide road at freeway speed. In the days when old 99 wound through every town, we slowly became aware that a fabulous salesman must have made a bundle of money in the �40s and �50s by selling fluorescent tubing bent into the stylized shape of champagne glasses. The kids began to notice how many of these clever signs were up and down Highway 99, and they started their own game of who could spot the most champagne glass signs. There were lots of other unusual advertising venues on Highway 99. The Richfield Oil Co. built a series of towers, each 100 feet tall, with the company name in neon on the tower. I was told that back into the late �20s or early �30s, a rotating beam on top was used as a visual navigation aid for both commercial and private pilots. Some other clever signs we have seen included a series along a highway in Idaho. Each sign seemed to make fun of the state. The sign that my wife, Nora, and I remember best said, "FREE. Fill your trunk with sagebrush. FREE." (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2000 Mail Tribune, Inc.