Pictorial history of the gasoline station in the United States and details about many of the companies which punctuated the roadsides with their buildings, including the Standard Oil, Cities, Mobil, Phillips, Gulf, Shell, Texaco, and Conoco.

This work is a study of roadside crosses in which the author presents the history of these unique commemoratives and their relationship to contemporary memorial culture.

Americana Readside Memories Whether cruising down the streets of Anytown, U.S.A., or taking the family on a cross-country ride, the highway and its many sights, sounds, and smells are part of the culture and collective memory of generations of Americans. This book brings together the defining elements of our love affair with the open road. It includes Tim Steil's entertaining trip along America's Main Street, the storied Route 66 that once stretched in glorious excess from Chicago to LA. Michael Witzel takes us back to a time and place where service-with-a-smile meant something, presenting a nostalgic look at the places where travelers filled their cars with gas and their bellies with good grub. The gas stations and drive-in restaurants of old offered their own special charm and personality, a far cry from the cookie-cutter feel of today's strip malls and "convenience stores." These icons of roadside America are colorfully illustrated here with vintage ads and memorabilia along with photos of the aging landmarks today.

The use of cars and trucks over the past century has remade American geography—pushing big cities ever outward toward suburbanization, spurring the growth of some small towns while hastening the decline of others, and spawning a new kind of commercial landscape marked by gas stations, drive-in restaurants, motels, tourist attractions, and countless other retail entities that express our national love affair with the open road. By its very nature, this landscape is ever changing, indeed ephemeral. What is new quickly becomes old and is soon forgotten. In this absorbing book, John Jakle and Keith Sculle ponder how “Roadside America” might be remembered, especially since so little physical evidence of its earliest years survives. In straightforward and lively prose, supplemented by copious illustrations—historic and modern photographs, advertising postcards, cartoons, roadmaps—they survey the ways in which automobility has transformed life in the United States. Asking how we might best commemorate and preserve this part of our past—which has been so vital economically and politically, so significant to the cultural aspirations of ordinary Americans, yet so often ignored by scholars who dismiss it as kitsch—they propose the development of an actual outdoor museum that would treat seriously the themes of our roadside history. Certainly, museums have been created for frontier pioneering, the rise of commercial agriculture, and the coming of water- and steam-powered industrialization and transportation, especially the railroad. Is now not the time, the authors ask, for a museum forcefully exploring the automobile’s emergence and the changes it has brought to place and landscape? Such a museum need not deny the nostalgic appeal of roadsides past, but if done properly, it could also tell us much about what the authors describe as “the most important kind of place yet devised in the American experience.” John A. Jakle is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Keith A. Sculle is the former head of research and education at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. They have coauthored such books as America’s Main Street Hotels: Transiency and Community in the Early Automobile Age; Motoring: The Highway Experience in America; Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age; and The Gas Station in America.

As a follow up to his well received first poetry book My Times in Rhymes, Paul goes beyond his own personal experiences to add a whole new dimension to his poems. He combines his thoughts and his life experiences with that of others to creaate a new outlook on love, life and the world around us.

Abandoned junk to some, the rusty old steel shells of vehicles are treasures to others, holding memories of a bygone era, or the promise of a pristinely restored, radically customized automobile. Automotive photographer Will Shiers has captured these dreams on film for over ten years, and this volume collects his images between two covers for the first time. Here are the beautiful husks Shiers has found in the United States fields and barns, shops, and salvage yards across States. Divided into five categories—General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Independents, and Special Vehicles—these wrecks and relics from 1910 to the 1970s come equipped with all the relevant information: history, model, location. The most comprehensive and beautifully photographed collection of abandoned cars ever published, this volume preserves for all time the exquisite skeletons of American automotive might.