WIDE BIRTH: MAPPING OUT THE TURNPIKE EXPANSION

Road’s early days easily seen in their rearview mirrors

By: Dick Brinster
   Hightstown Mayor Bob Patten remembers walking and playing along the New Jersey Turnpike.
   And his former teacher and later colleague at Hightstown High School recalls his time on one of the roadway’s construction gangs.
   Memories for both are rekindled now that the highway is going to be widened for a 30-mile stretch that will include Interchange 8 in neighboring East Windsor.
   "We used to jump the fence," said Mr. Patten, a boy of about 9 when the highway was finished in 1952. "It was easy to go across the turnpike, easier than going down to an overpass."
   Ken Eiker, now 76 and living in Monroe, also remembers the time when farmland became asphalt, and a few years later he worked on the last widening project in the area.
   "That was the summer of 1955, when they were widening it from two lanes to three in each direction," he said. "It was strictly a summer job, and I was paid the princely sum of $2 an hour which actually was good money in those days."
   But it would be hard to argue that he didn’t earn every cent of it.
   "I was low man on the totem pole, and I was the gopher, and one of my jobs was to operate a jackhammer, and that was a lot of fun," Mr. Eiker said facetiously."
   Mr. Patten lived on a rise over what became the turnpike, and vividly recalls a winter storm a few years after the roadway opened.
   "The snowstorm was so severe that the cars stuck on the road were under drifts," Mr. Patten remembered. "People were coming up the hill to our house, just trying to get out of the cold.
   "There was no electricity because of the storm, but we had a fireplace. People were just hanging around hoping to get warm."
   Mr. Eiker also recalls hanging around — albeit above the active roadway. With jackhammer in hand he had to blast away at concrete that needed to be removed from overpasses to allow for widening of the road.
   "Occasionally you had to just hang out there on a little platform with cars maybe 25 feet away," he said. "Just hang out and chip away."
   That might seem tame compared with another of his jobs, standing inside forms set up to accept and spread the new concrete while hoping not to be buried in the wet stuff. He said concrete careening down all around him was something that got his attention.
   "I’m 6-foot-4 and weighed about 200 pounds, so I didn’t have a lot of room to move around in there," he said. "You just kept moving up toward the top by stepping on reinforcing rods."
   He didn’t have as much fun as the mayor, who recalled the thrill of looking in both directions from overpasses and seeing a brown ribbon of dirt — later a black line of asphalt — stretching as far as the eye could see.
   Mr. Patten also remembers the first crash scene he witnessed on the road.
   "I was the first to get there, and nobody was hurt," he said. "It was one of those old station wagons that had wood on the side.
   "It had overturned and practically disintegrated."
   He doesn’t recall ever having a close call when running across the road or playing alongside it in the first year or so after the Turnpike was opened with two lanes in each direction.
   "There was very little traffic, and it was easy to do that," Mr. Patten said. "Try doing that now!"