Thanks to Bill Roe for allowing us to use his company's office space for this meeting.
The meeting started at 1. The recording secretary was almost an hour late, but luckily, so were some other people who got caught in a traffic jam, so it didn't matter. :)
Norm Root talked about how he was upset with the fact that the Henry Joy monument in Wyoming was moved from its original location to a rest area along I-80, to discourage vandalism, which was frequently occurring at the original site. Norm thought the original site should have been better maintained. Other chapter members commented that at least the monument is being maintained at all.
After a short break, our featured speaker, George Clark, showed off his vintage postcard collection, showing scenes along the Lincoln Highway from decades past. He had a whole slew of them.
We then talked about the realignment of the Lincoln Highway from its original alignment to the present I-80 corridor, and why it happened in 1927 (because the opening of the Carquinez Bridge in 1927 made this alignment feasible).
Mary Salazar mentioned that the next chapter meeting would be on Saturday, January 12, probably in Sacramento.
Bruce Nemenoff from Reno briefly talked about the Transcontinental Highway Exposition, sponsored by the city of Reno in 1927. He hasn't been able to find much information about it, and he asks that anyone that may have any information contact him at:
The rest of the meeting was about the national conference, which this chapter is hosting next June. Norm Root ran the meeting.
Wes Hammond said that the next two chapter newsletters would be extra large, to accomodate information about the conference and a general membership questionnaire. He also said that he found a different printer for the newsletter which will cut the cost of printing almost in half.
Norm said that the amount of logistics and the level of detail needed to run a conference was just amazing. For example, at previous conferences, the organizers gave attendees gift bags from the local visitors' bureau. During the tours, the organizers had to check people's badges to make sure they had paid for the tours, and had to carefully manage time for the tours (this included blowing horns to tell the tourists to reboard the buses).
There will be two tours during the conference, one east of Sacramento into the Sierra Nevada, and one west of Sacramento to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Jack and Cleona Duncan looked into bus companies for the tour. The company that they looked into will drive on dirt roads, but the buses won't be cleaned between the two tours, so they may look into another company for the second tour. Norm Root and George Clark will take care of logistics for the west tour.
As for money, Norm said that the national association pays for the entire conference; they have a separate fund for it.
Jim Armstrong is in charge of booking hotel rooms for conference guests. He will book about 50 rooms for guests.
Next, Norm and Mary talked about the rooms for the conference itself -- which rooms the hotel has available, how many rooms we will need, what the functions of the rooms would be, and security for the rooms' contents.
We further discussed the logistics of the tours. When would restroom breaks be? Should be provide snack chests? Will we need portable toilets at the more remote stops?
We also talked about printing materials for the conference and the tour.
We talked about the west tour in more detail. One idea was to go from Sacramento south along the 1913 alignment to Livermore, stop at the Lincoln Highway Garage, then drive to Lincoln Park in San Francisco, where a concrete marker replica would be set, go over the Golden Gate Bridge (for the out-of-towners), and then take the 1927 alignment back to Sacramento. We could eat lunch at the Veterans' Hospital in San Francisco.
There were concerns that we would not be able to do this within a day. The route through Livermore may have to be sacrificed. Others pointed out that driving in San Francisco is slow: it could take 40 minutes just to go from the western end of the Bay Bridge to Lincoln Park. And it turns out that none of us had had much contact with the City of San Francisco lately, so we didn't know whether we would still be allowed to set the marker in Lincoln Park.
So in the next 30 days, we would find out if the marker could be set. If not, we would have time to include the loop from Livermore to Oakland. Otherwise, we would have to drop it.
The meeting was then adjourned.
Respectfully submitted,
James Lin
Recording Secretary
Copyright © 2002 by the Lincoln Highway Association. All rights reserved.
Maintained by James Lin <jlin@ugcs.caltech.edu>