Читать книгу RVs & Campers For Dummies - Christopher Hodapp - Страница 26

For an idea of early 1930s cross-country auto travel, watch one of the funniest of the W.C. Fields comedies, It’s a Gift (1934). The scenes with Fields and his family camping out along the roadside in auto camps are a pretty accurate representation of a trip from New Jersey to Los Angeles on one of the early U.S. routes of the period, where motels and restaurants along the way were a convenience that couldn’t be counted on.

So, the federal government decided to get in the road-building business. A young officer on the trip, Dwight Eisenhower, never forgot his battle to cross “Darkest America.” Later, as a famed general during World War II, he saw firsthand the Autostrade in Italy and the Autobahn in Germany, the great European “superhighways,” and he wanted something similar for the United States.