Teacher's guide: Personal impact - For teachers - Interstate highways from the ground up

The recording

Play the Personal Impact oral history excerpt. Running time: 1 minute 11 seconds.

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Transcript

Life is a balance, and you take the good and the bad. And you have to make choices. Life is full of choices, and this to me was a choice. In my mind when I looked at the alternatives of leaving traffic where it was, and realizing the importance of the road system, I justified in my own mind. This road has to be built. When I look at it from a corridor standpoint, a 600-mile road from Columbus, Ohio to Charleston, South Carolina, I say, “Well, this is the only nine-mile section that’s not been built.” If we didn’t build it here, we would have had to move it over into the next valley a half a mile over and build it there. And we would have had these same type problems. It’s just a balance of choices that had to be made. In this case, I’m comfortable with the fact — and I think I always will be — that we had to do what we had to do. That we had to cut trees, and we had to put pipes in where there were beautiful little streams with waterfalls. I didn’t like to do that! But I had to do it.

Follow-up questions

What is the best reason you have heard so far for why they built this part of the corridor?
What is the biggest negative impact that was mentioned?

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