So, here’s my complaint for the week

I am all for the bypass that takes U.S. 301 from near Francis Marion University to the south of town at the county Public Service Building where it turns left to share a road with U.S. 52.

It’s a nice bypass and an easy drive. It is not multi-laned all the way, but it has handy turn lanes and the shoulders are built so that a couple of more lanes can easily be added.

By a quick count that could be off one or two, I figure going through town on the old 301 route, one would encounter 13 traffic lights. Around the bypass, it’s only three, and it’s a little shorter. So it makes sense to run U.S. 301 that way.

My problem is that they did not number the old route through Palmetto and Irby streets U.S. 301A or Business 301 or something like that.

It just seems weird not to have a sign with “301” on it at the corner of Palmetto and Irby. That corner used to look as busy as Times Square before I-95 when many thousands of tourists’ vehicles made their way through on 301. And Florence was one of the main members promoting that highway back when it was the main north-south tourist route.

Somebody should do something about this. (And by the way, did you know there once was a movie named “Highway 301”?)

Speaking of that highway reminds me of my most nightmarish trip to New York which was in the early 1950s. My mother and an aunt and uncle were going there one summer to visit their sister. I was out of school and talked my way into the trip.

I assumed we would go up Highway 301 to Baltimore where it terminated at the time, then pick up U.S. 40, which was a nice dual lane between Baltimore and the New Jersey Turnpike which had recently opened. Then naturally we would fork over the $1.75 or so that it cost then to ride the Turnpike and would be in New York in about two hours.

Wrong. This uncle had made a road trip to New York once in the 1930s, and they had taken U.S. 1, which at the time might have been the only direct paved route. He considered it the only way to New York. (A big advantage of 301 over U.S. 1 was that it bypassed Washington.)

I had never been on the Turnpike, but I had read about it and saw a bunch of pictures in Life Magazine where it said you could make the 120 miles or so from the southern end of the road to the Hudson in about two hours. But the uncle was 20-something years older than I, so it was assumed that he knew better.

So we went to Cheraw and got on Highway 1. Then we drove through city streets in Washington that could have been avoided and the crowded, dangerous U.S. 1 from there to Baltimore that had been labeled the most dangerous and congested piece of roadway in the country.

In Baltimore I tried to talk them into going to the Turnpike, but the uncle said, determinedly, that he was not going to pay to ride on a road. I offered to pay, but we went on up a two-lane U.S. 1 to Philadelphia where we rode right by City Hall with its statue of William Penn atop and, I felt sure, through most of the traffic lights in the world.

Also we went through Trenton streets, New Jersey suburbs near New York and the Holland Tunnel. I had tried to divert us to the George Washington Bridge because we were going to
Westchester County, north of the city, but he had gone through the Holland Tunnel in the ’30s. So we went that way, then up Manhattan streets and finally to Port Chester, our destination.

It was well into the night when we got there and it had taken two long days. When the New York uncle asked which way we came, the S.C. uncle said proudly, “U.S.1 — all the way and the Holland Tunnel.”

The New York uncle nearly collapsed. “You should have come,” he said, “up 301 to Baltimore, U.S. 40 to the Turnpike and then the George Washington Bridge.” Right.

— Thom Anderson is a retired journalist who has 40 years experience with South Carolina newspapers, including the Morning News. He can be reached at .