Connecting Texas: True Tales of the People Who Built Our Highways and Bridges. This item is unavailable.Connecting Texas: True Tales of the People Who Built Our Highways and Bridges

American roads are about destiny as much as they are about destinations. They link us to each other today, but back at beginning of the twentieth century when the national road system was just starting, the success of our roads undeniably linked the nation with its destiny, its history, and its unique future. Millions of motorists get into their vehicles every day to go to work or school or any one of hundreds of other places. But most of us don't think about the roads; we just jump in our cars and go. We don't give much thought to the people and the hard work and grit it took-and continues to take-to build and maintain these essential arteries that we take for granted. This book will change our perspective. Our roads today are a long way from the Model T days, when the early contractors used mules and fresnos to build roads and bridges that literally got people up out of the mud and across uncrossable rivers. But it didn't happen overnight. In Connecting Texas, readers will get to know the inspiring and entertaining stories of the giants and the ordinary people who gave Texas a road system that is the envy of the country

Gary Scharrer first experienced the full benefits of roads at a younger age than most. Both of his parents grew up on dairy farms, and Scharrer was eleven years old when he first started driving farm machinery on rural Michigan roads. He enjoyed running tractors cutting and baling alfalfa hay and cultivating navy beans and corn. He paid his way through college working on Great Lakes freighters that hauled taconite iron ore pellets from the northern shores of Lake Superior to the steel mills in Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo. He lived and worked as a deckhand on the freighters--some as long as 1,000 feet--seven days a week. Other cargoes included coal, gypsum, sand, and limestone. Back then, he didn't know that limestone could be used in making road base. For most of his career, Scharrer worked as a newspaper reporter covering Texas politics and public policy issues, and for nearly thirty years, he reported from the Texas State Capitol Bureau for the San Antonio Express-News, the Houston Chronicle, and the El Paso Times. During that time, he won five Texas Headliner Club awards. Scharrer got his start in journalism as a sports writer and sports editor at Michigan State University's student newspaper and went on to become sports editor of The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel (Grand Junction, Colorado) and editor of the Frankenmuth News (Frankenmuth, Michigan). In 1987, he was a reporter at USA Today in Washington, D.C. After forty-three years as a journalist, he joined the staff of Texas Senate Finance Chairman Tommy Williams (R-The Woodlands), before landing at the Associated General Contractors of Texas. Scharrer's work on Connecting Texas reflects his longstanding interest in highway transportation. Scharrer presently divides his time between Frankenmuth, Michigan, where he lives with his native Texan wife, Gay, who is a retired schoolteacher, and Austin, Texas, where he spends time with his son, Ryan, and his daughter-in-law, Anne Marie.