BROTHER ROAD: Part 1 of 2; Booming along the great American interstate highway network.(News)

Byline: KEVIN A. WILSON

There were no parades or festivities June 29, 1956, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 launching the greatest public works project in history: construction of the National Interstate and Defense Highway System. This network of more than 46,000 miles of limited- access highways linking Ameri-ca's population centers coast to coast is often taken for granted today, but that stroke of a pen forever changed the nation, just as Eisenhower predicted it would.

It was an accident of history the interstate system was born in the middle of a demographic phenomenon known as the postwar baby boom. The highways would grow alongside those babies born from 1946 to 1964-so you might call it our Brother Road. It rhymes with Mother Road, the label John Steinbeck gave U.S. Route 66 in his landmark 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. And it reflects our less-reverent relationship.

Steinbeck also wrote, in 1962, that the great highway project would make it possible to travel "from New York to California without seeing a single thing.'' He said this in Travels with Charley: In Search of America, describing I-90 from Erie, Pennsylvania, to Chicago. It was part of Steinbeck's 10,000-mile journey around the country with his poodle Charley, and while he appreciated the highway's expedience-allowing him to reach his westward destinations before winter set in-he also swore off the interstates.

Few driving enthusiasts would have shared Steinbeck's principal complaint, that it took too much concentration on driving to go as fast as the interstate demanded. But among the many criticisms of the highway system-its uniformity, its cultural homogenization-it is the deterioration of regional distinction that is the most enduring. Steinbeck's complaint formed the thesis behind William Least Heat Moon's 1983 book Blue Highways, and is echoed most recently in Pixar's Cars.

Many baby boomers have seen much more of America than our parents did, because the interstates brought it within reach. The network had been in the planning stages since 1939 and the routes were pretty much established by 1944, so states had started construction before the 1956 highway act put up 90 percent federal funding. Half the system was completed in the first decade, and the highways had become so much a part of the country that President Lyndon Johnson created the Cabinet-level Department of Transportation in 1966. Our Brother Road was growing almost as fast as were the boomers.

From the perspective of a kid growing up in suburban Detroit, we quickly found that I-75, for instance, put Florida within easy reach. Chicago, which had once required most of a week's vacation time for travel along Michigan Avenue (the same road in Detroit and Chicago), was suddenly available for weekend adventures thanks to I-94.