Highway name trend traveling in fast lane

DRIVING HONORS

From staff and wire reports

A drive from Missouri's Bootheel to its northwest corner easily can fill an eight-hour day, even if you are quite familiar with the way.

You head north over the Sgt. Rob Guilliams Memorial Bridge toward the Trooper James Froemsdorf Memorial Highway, follow the Rosa Parks Highway to the American Veterans Memorial Highway, also known as the Circumferential Expressway.

From there, you connect to the Mark Twain Expressway and pass over the Blanchette Bridge. Then head west to the George Brett Super Highway, pass under the George Brett Bridge, and head north again along the Sgt. Robert Kimberling Memorial Highway.

For those of you not familiar with the names, here's a route that might make more sense: Take Interstate 55 to Interstate 270 in the St. Louis area. Then follow Interstate 70 to Kansas City and go north on Interstate 29.

Names and numbers

By name or number, the highways are the same. But until recently, they were known only by their numbers.

For 60 years, from the 1920s to 1980s, Missouri's highway commissioners refused to allow anything but numbers on state highways. Names, they said, would be too confusing.

Then highway commissioners broke with tradition to name a Kansas City highway after one of their own -- former highway commission chairman Jay B. Dillingham.

Now more than 50 segments of state highways and bridges are named after people or events, almost all of which were approved in the past five years. The stretch named for Froemsdorf, a highway patrol trooper killed in the line of duty, will be dedicated at 11 a.m. Thursday at the Perry County Courthouse.

But Highway commissioners are trying to slow the naming trend.

Earlier this month, the Missouri Highways and Transportation Commission adopted a policy refusing to initiate the naming of more highways and bridges unless specifically approved by the legislature.

"In recent years, the requests have really been coming in," said Jeff Briggs, a spokesman for the Missouri Department of Transportation, which recommended the policy change to commissioners. "Once a few signs were up, more people were aware of it" and started bringing naming proposals to the commission.

Highway commissioners weren't always aware of the people for whom the road or bridge was to be named, Briggs said. But after a little education, the proposals often were approved.

"A lot of these folks were locally significant," he said, "but the highway commission was pretty hard pressed to make a decision on whether this was a person of statewide significance."

Take, for example, the proposal to designate the U.S. 160 bridge over Bull Shoals Lake as the Jarrett Robertson Memorial Bridge.

Perhaps you haven't heard of Robertson.

He was a major general in the Army who served two tours in Vietnam and died in a helicopter crash in Germany nine years ago, said Bill Cook of Theodosia, who led the effort to honor his childhood friend and owns a marina near the bridge. A granite marker was dedicated during a ceremony over Memorial Day weekend.

Remembering Froemsdorf

State Rep. Pat Naeger led the effort to name a 6-mile stretch of Interstate 55 in Perry County after Trooper James Froemsdorf. Froemsdorf was fatally shot in 1985 -- one of 22 highway patrol officers to die while on duty during the past 70 years.

Naeger said he was inspired partly by the 1999 decision to designate a 5-mile stretch of Interstate 70 in St. Louis as the Mark McGwire Highway. The St. Louis Cardinals slugger had set the single-season home run record just the year before.

"If Mark McGwire can get a highway named after him, certainly one of our dedicated public servants who was killed in the line of duty can have a section of interstate named after him," said Naeger, R-Perryville.

Others must have agreed.

Naeger's legislation honoring Froemsdorf was amended this year to include the naming of six other highways and bridges, half of which also honored deceased law officers. All of those designations are to take effect Wednesday.

Among the newly named roads is a 16-mile stretch of U.S. 136 from Bethany to the Mercer County line designated as the Babe Adams Highway.

Charles Benjamin "Babe" Adams was a star baseball pitcher in the early 1900s, spending almost his entire career with the Pittsburgh Pirates and winning three games in the 1909 World Series against Detroit.

He was born in Tipton, Ind. But some longtime residents of Mount Moriah, Mo., say Adams was raised there.

"There a lot of people in Mount Moriah were looking at the highways and noticed they were being named for famous people," said state Sen. David Klindt, R-Bethany, a co-sponsor of the highway naming bill. "So, along with about half the other people, we decided to go ahead and name a highway."

The recent legislative tendency to name highways and bridges may mean there will be little practical effect as a result of the highway commission's decision to stop initiating new names.

So Klindt said his colleagues must remain cautious when using their road- and bridge-naming authority.

"We do have to be somewhat careful that this thing doesn't get out of hand," he said. "If we're going to name them, they need to really contribute something to the state."