The South Bend Tribune from South Bend, Indiana • F1

TI SUNDAY 1 2fl Sunday 1 I IT Prepare to plunge into travel and JU20051, 1 I I I I VU1jU1 nature guided by those in the know. SZT I 111 II I I Index Strength and deautv rS Tonight's Sky F3 The draw of Michigan's Upper Travel Briefs F3 Peninsula's waterfalls. F3 Nature Bound F3 INDEX Books F7 Back in Time F8 MONDAY IN FOOD The Carriage House celebrates 30 years. MOOR OR LESS BILL MOOR Can a sting from a bee set you off? Photo providedBERNIE HEISEY Travelers along the Lincoln Highway, named after our country's 16th president, got a big welcome at Chicago Avenue on the west end of Goshen in 1914. On the Road agaiN Today's motorists should tour Lincoln Highway, groups say By JEREMY D.

B0NFIGLI0 Tribune Staff Writer Brian Butko, author of "Greetings From The Lincoln Highway America's First Coast-To-Coast Road." Photo provided im Gambrell remembers Carl G. Fisher, an Indiana native, dreamed up America's first coast-to-coast road in 1912. Photo provided the trucks. Those roaring bulky WIS trucks. The ones revving idea in 1912 when automobiles were becoming more than a novelty for the very wealthy.

Farmers were using the horseless carriages to transport crops. Families became enamored of lazy Sunday drives. But, in those days, travel was limited to the dirt and gravel paths in the towns in which they lived. In the same age that saw the Wright Brothers fly for 12 seconds and the Panama Canal connect two oceans, anything seemed possible. So why not a highway that connected all of America? "No other road had the backing of so many industrialists," says Brian Butko, author of the new book "Greetings See R0ADF2 their engines as they struggled to make it up the hillside near his family's Columbia City, farm.

"As a boy, I'd just sit there on the bluff and watch them build up speed," the 67-year-old Gambrell says of the Lincoln Highway route that connected New York to California, slicing through Indiana along the way. It was the 1940s, and the Lincoln Highway, touted as the first coast-to-coast road, was still part of the landscape. It had been born three decades earlier, from a simple Idle thoughts while washing off all the really sticky coins that have been riding around in my car's cup holder: It doesn't matter how old you are, a bee sting still hurts like the dickens, doesn't it? And after such a sting, do any of you feel like I do and want to take it out on the entire insect world? Not really fair to the moths, is it? When is the last time you saw a kid riding his bike with a baseball glove hanging off his handlebars and a baseball bat balanced on top of them? Did you ever see the movie where Daniel Boone has to run through the Indian gantlet? (Whack, thunk, ye-ouch!) Doesn't it look a little like the Tour de France riders going up the mountain passes and the crowds closing in around them? Can you imagine that kind of close contact in any other sport? And despite what you may think of the French, have you ever seen so many postcard-perfect scenes as the ones from the Tour coverage on the OLN channel? Who's the oldest neighbor you know who is still bold enough to run through the lawn sprinklers on these hot summer days? Been to Chicago lately? How did you make it back so soon? Do you ever think there will be a time when the "Darn Ryan" isn't being improved, widened or turned into a parking lot? When you go through an automatic toll booth, do you secretly worry that the arm is never going to go up and that 3,000 other motorists are soon going to be honking at you? Who uses a bookmark and who just guesses where you left off in a story having to reread several pages before you come to the spot? I thought the TV show "Medium" really looked corny, but I've watched a couple of reruns, and it really isn't that bad, is it? And the heroine's family is pretty cool, isn't it? Can you believe that you now can get updates on your favorite baseball team's progress via your cell phone with different rings for different kinds of rallies? For the Cubs, do you think they play any kind of dirges for late-inning collapses? What we really need over at Stanley Coveleski Regional Stadium is local ownership, right? So anybody want to lend me a few million bucks? Did you see the front-page story last week about our South Bend mayor losing 10 pounds since winter? I guess that wasn't one of the bigger news days, was it? Anybody else dragged enough garden hoses around your parched yard that you figure you ought to be working on the back of a hook and ladder? Can you believe that I persuaded my younger son to take piano lessons as a kid by telling See M00RF2 Photo provided This arch once spanned a brick section of the Lincoln Highway entering Fort Wayne. Photo providedRUSSELL REIN Howell's Indian Village Tavern, west of the South Bend Regional Airport, was once a popular tourist draw along the route. Lincoln Highway timeline 1914: The first section of the Lincoln 1912: Highway is paved at a Moose Indiana native Lodge-sponsored event at Carl G.

Fisher, Mooseheart, III. 1992: On Oct. 31 LHA is reformed in Ogden, Iowa, as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the interpretation and preservation of America's first transcontinental automobile road. 1921: Federal Highway Act passes providing half of the funding to upgrade 7 percent of each state's roads to create "interstate" highways. Named highways begin to disappear.

1940: The original section of the Pennsylvania Turnpike opens, rendering the parallel portion of the Lincoln Highway obsolete. 1935: As a final act, LHA publishes its official history: "The Lincoln Highway: The Story of a Crusade That Made Transportation History." 1927: LHA officially disbands on Dec. 31 after agreeing to mark the highway one last time as a memorial to Abraham Lincoln. builder of the Indianapolis Having raised only half of the Speedway, pledges it sought, Lincoln Highway proposes a Association (LHA) turns to local transcontin- government funding to complete ental coast-to- the road, encourages communities coast to pave roads along the route and highway. mark them as the Lincoln Highway.

1917: LHA places cast-iron Lincoln Highway marker at each state-line crossing. 1922: The Lincoln Highway's Ideal Section is completed between Schererville and Dyer, Ind. I I 1999: LHA dedicates its new national headquarters in the restored H. I. Lincoln Building in Franklin Grove, III.

1913: On July 1 Lincoln Highway Association (LHA) is formed in Detroit, with Packard Motor Co. president Henry Joy at the helm. 1956: The Federal Highway Act of 1956 authorizes the rebuilding of the nation's interstate highway system with limited-access expressways. 1915: LHA publishes its first edition of "A Complete and Official Road Guide of the Lincoln Highway." Sixteen miles of concrete Lincoln Highway are constructed in St. Joseph County.

At West Washington Street in South Bend, the Hotel Oliver hosts motorists along the original route. The 1925: The Association of American Highway Officials develops a numbering system for interstate roads. The Lincoln Highway is split among different federal highways. 1928: The Lincoln Highway abandons its earlier route through northern Indiana and is relocated between Fort Wayne and Valparaiso through Marshall County. I 1913: In September, the Proclamation Route of the Lincoln Highway is announced, including stops through Camden, N.J.; Ogden, Utah; and the Colorado Loop from Big Springs, to Denver, to Cheyenne, Wyo.

The Studebakers were among a large number of industrialists who supported establishing the cross-country road. (The Studebaker National Museum will move from its current site at 525 S. Main South Bend, along the old Lincoln Highway route, into a new facility on Chapin Street in fall 2005.) LINCOLN structure was torn down in 1967 to make way for the American Bank Building, which today houses a Holiday Inn. On Sept. 1, 1928, Boy Scouts across the country erected nearly 3,000 concrete posts memorializing the Lincoln Highway.

HIGHWAY Tribune GraphicJOHN STUMP Sources: "Greetings From the Lincoln Highway" by Brian Butko; Lincoln Highway Resource Guide; "Indiana: A Guide to the Hoosier Indiana" by Jerome Pohlen; The Lincoln Highway Association; Lincoln Highway Museum; Tribune file MAGENTA BLACK EDITION 50R.