Blacktop

A letter from June 8, 2005

Today I will tell you of an experience I had back during “Ancient History”. Ancient History to me is anything that happened back when I was six years old!! Yes, there is such a thing as Ancient History but in school I never liked it very much. I don’t remember much about it except that it was DULL.

But here is my incident from my “Ancient History”. It happened in 1922 when I was six years old. The road in front of our house in Valley Forge was called “blacktop” or “macadam”. It was made of stones and tar. Apparently it had gotten smooth or worn and the decision was made to resurface it. This is the way it was done in those days.

Work is done on one lane at a time. A tank truck full of hot, gooey, sticky, slurpy, smelly tar moves slowly forward. As it does so there are nozzles on the back of the truck which spray this tar onto the road. Yes, it is a mess. A short distance in the back of this tank truck is another truck full of small stones (about as big as the end of my finger). This truck is following the tank truck but moving BACKWARDS. As it does so there is a release mechanism in the back end of the truck which discharges these small stones down into the fresh tar. These stones then become the new surface for the road. Down the road they go – one going forward, the other backward.

This is a new surface – it is no longer smooth and slippery. Automobile tires can grip this surface better. It was a good idea in its day but there are other parts of this story. It took a while for that tar (with small stones in it) to harden so far the next couple of weeks when you drove over it there would be a clatter of tar and small stones being thrown up against the underside of your fenders. And of course some of that tar got onto the tires!

But that is the way it was in 1922! Not all roads were “blacktop”. Some were pretty well packed down gravel. When Gifford Pinchot was reelected Governor of Pennsylvania he had a campaign slogan which went something like this “HE TOOK US OUT OF THE MUD”. Which meant that during his first term of office he pioneered the construction of “Blacktop” roads to replace the dirt roads so common in those days. Yes, he won reelection.