The Ohio Turnpike in Vintage Postcards

Continuing our celebration of the 70th Anniversary of the Ohio Turnpike, here's an ample sample of vintage postcards featuring the iconic highway. I've included the postmark date when available.

As you can see, there were a variety of cards with a "Greetings From..." theme. 

1955

1956

1957

1959

1963

1965

The tollbooths appeared on a few.

1956

So did the original service plazas.

And of course, the turnpike itself appeared on the most cards. And as you'll see, the "Skyline Arch" located between the old Exits 10 and 11 was a favorite subject.

1959

1960

1966 - Interchange 5

Pub. by Howard Johnson "Host of the Highway"

Pub. by Howard Johnson "Host of the Highway"

1955

1962

Ohio Turnpike Opens Tonight at Midnight – 1955

The Ohio Turnpike opened 70 years ago tonight at midnight, marking October 1, 1955 as the official day that it opened. 

As the article below from the Lorain Journal of Sept. 30, 1955 notes, "The longest stretch of highway ever opened at one time anywhere – the 219 remaining miles of the Ohio Turnpike – will begin receiving traffic at midnight tonight."

"At that moment, the linking of the entire Ohio Turnpike (241 miles) with the Pennsylvania Turnpike (360 miles) will enable motorists and truck drivers to travel between the Ohio-Indiana line and the Delaware River just north of Philadelphia over the greatest mileage (601 miles) of continuous modern toll road in the world.

"Thus will come into being the major portion of the all-turnpike route between New York and Chicago. Already another 67 miles of that route is in operation south from New York City via the New Jersey Turnpike.

"Until the Indiana Toll Road is in operation travelers can gain access to the western end of the Ohio Turnpike by way of a direct connection between the turnpike and U. S. route 20 just east of the Ohio-Indiana line."

The Portland Cement Association took out a nice ad in that same edition, congratulating the Turnpike Commission, the highway engineers, the contractors and the public officials who made it all happen, and on time too.

I think it's pretty nice to live so close to the Turnpike. I can access the Baumhart Road interchange in a little more than 10 minutes from my condo.

While I often enjoy a leisurely, scenic drive on the old federal or state highways, sometimes I just want to get somewhere quickly and with as little hassle as possible. And that means jumping on the well-maintained Ohio Turnpike.

I just wish that more of the booths were staffed. 

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The Ohio Turnpike has been the subject of several posts over the years, including this two-part reminisce (here and here) by our pal Rick Kurish.

Ohio Turnpike Toll Booth Article – Nov. 28, 1971

If you spend any time on the Ohio Turnpike, you’ve no doubt noticed that there are many unmanned toll booths when you exit the highway – such as the lonely one at Baumhart Road. It’s an annoying trend, in which people lose their jobs to machines, and the public loses the personal touch of human contact. (You can also lose money; once in the past year I dropped two or three dollars worth of coins in the bin to pay my toll; none of it registered.)

That human touch is important. I’m sure many people have gotten directions from a toll booth worker, or perhaps picked up a useful brochure or map.

I still chit-chat with toll booth workers quite often, and a few have mentioned that the eventual goal of the Ohio Turnpike Commission is to eliminate them entirely. I can’t find confirmation of this online, but I would tend to believe it.

Anyway, this is all a prelude to the great article below, which appeared in the Journal on November 28, 1971. It profiles two “lady toll collectors” on the Ohio Turnpike, and what may eventually be a vanishing bit of American life. It was written by Staff Writer Glenn Waggoner.

Incidentally, the photo caption of the woman toll booth collector is incorrect. Her name (which is correct in the article) is Cathy Hales. At the time of her passing, her obituary noted that she had worked for the Ohio Turnpike for 20 years before retiring in 1982.

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The Women Who Man the Collection Booth

The Busy Life of an Ohio Turnpike ‘Toll Cookie’

By GLENN WAGGONER, Staff Writer

TRAILER number 893B8, wherever you are, the license plate you lost is resting in a window at Ohio Turnpike Gate 8 in Elyria.

“Somebody lost it on the pike,” says toll collector Mrs. Cathy Hales. “We put it up there so if they see it, they can claim it.”

Mrs. Hales seems like a gray and green uniformed lady matador, without sword or cape.

Armed with a smile and 37 kinds of turnpike toll tickets, she sees that the hundreds of hard-charging vehicles get the right tickets or change while passing through one of the plaza’s four traffic lanes.

Her long, narrow toll collector’s booth is an island in a continuous two-way stream of cars, buses, trucks and motorcycles all intent on getting somewhere else and viewing the toll stop as an inevitable, though brief, nuisance.

“DO YOU KNOW what we’re called?” Mrs. Hales asked, drawing a blank look from the reporter.

“Toll cookies. That’s what a driver once told me.”

Mrs. Hales, who has been a toll cookie for three years, says in a good day she will take 900 vehicles off the pike, if she’s working in an exit lane, and put perhaps 1,300 on if working an entrance lane.

“We can put them on faster, because we just hand them a ticket. Making change takes a lot longer,” she said.

Mrs. Hales has been handed a $100 bill by a motorist getting off the pike.

“It just looked like a ten with another zero.”

Working an exit lane, she may handle $600 or $700 in an eight-hour shift – and that’s a lot considering it’s mostly nickels, dimes and small bills.

And getting 900 vehicles off the pike means at least 900 reaches out the booth window, not counting bends for MG Midget sports cars and stretches for Mack diesel trucks.

Mrs. Hales finds that as a toll collector, she’s expected by motorists to know how to get about anywhere from anywhere.

“I ALWAYS GET Mansfield and Massillon mixed up,” she noted. “The other day I sent a lady east who should have been going west.”

Her lunch break over, Mrs. Hales left the roomy office area of the brick toll plaza building and resumed handing out tickets in the first entry lane.

Plaza supervisor Robert Cooper and his assistant, James Macartney, came in. Besides handling the paperwork and administrative tasks at Gate 8, both spell the toll collectors during breaks.

No “unauthorized personnel” are allowed in the toll booths during working hours, which are 24 hours  a day, year round.

Cooper pulled some figures from his files showing the exit ranked fourth of 17 Ohio Turnpike interchanges in amount of traffic handled in October – 260,956 vehicles got on or off.

To illustrate the increasing traffic, he said in October of 1958, 76,391 vehicles used Gate 8. Summer has been the high turnpike traffic season.

Cooper said 302,413 vehicles used the gate in August, considerably more than use the pike now.

Plaza 8 has 10 full-time collectors and five who work part-time. Each week the toll collectors change among three shifts, which are from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., and 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.

And each day, the toll collectors rotate from one lane to another, never spending two consecutive days in the same booth.

OF THE FOUR LANES, two are usually entrance lanes and two are exits, unless heavy traffic calls for an extra exit, leaving only one lane for entrance.

Another of the three lady toll collectors, Mrs. Ella Madden, came in for her lunch break as Macartney manned her lane.

Mrs. Madden was hired in 1968, the first woman toll collector at Gate 8. She was quoted by The Journal then as finding her job both interesting and enjoyable.

“It has been interesting. I like it just as well now as then,” she said.

Mrs. Madden was at a loss to point out an experience on the job that might be called her most unusual or bizarre.

“People are funny, period,” remarked Cooper.

“They do some strange things when they get in a car,” added Mrs. Madden.

She recalled one motorist who got off wishing to know if Akron was east or west – refusing to believe he was not at the Akron exit.

“There’s a man from North Olmsted who commutes here on a motorcycle and has a TV dinner on the back of his seat every day,” she said.

THE VEHICLES are classified for toll according to weight, although if a scale breaks down classification by number of axles is used.

Stowing her lunch box and heading for the door, Mrs. Madden added, “I’ve never run into a vehicle I couldn’t classify, and I hope I never do.”

Both Cooper and his neighboring supervisor for Gate 7 at Milan, Claude Latham, agree that motorists view the toll collectors’ job as dull, but say they’ve found it anything but bland.

“There’s something crazy every day,” said Latham. He told of a traveling circus that took a roadside rest by a turnpike plaza several years ago. An elephant was taken for a short walk, and he promptly sat down on the hood of a Volkswagen.

“Imagine trying to explain that to your insurance adjuster,” Latham joked.

Entrance lanes for cars have ticket dispensing machines, and Latham related how a toll collector at another exit was refilling the machine when two women in a car approached.

“Too bad there’s nobody here,” remarked the driver as she reached for her ticket. “I wanted to ask which exit to take for Cedar Point.”

“Take exit 7,” said the toll collector, who was unseen to the motorists.

LATHAM SAID the driver, slightly aghast, looked at the machine and then turned to her companion and said, “Isn’t that amazing?”

When wintertime auto trouble strikes on the pike, Latham said he’s had 10 people sitting in the plaza office, “waiting their turn with the wrecker.”

“But I’ve been with the turnpike since it opened, and only once was it closed that I know of,” said Latham.

“That was during the July floods in 1969, and water 2 1/2 feet deep came over the roadway just east of here. It washed a Greyhound bus off the road, so they closed it down,” he said.

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Here are a few vintage Ohio Turnpike postcards, courtesy of eBay.

Rick K. Remembers: the Ohio Turnpike – Part 2

Front page of the Feb. 19, 1953 Chronicle-Telegram
showing the two proposed routes of the Turnpike through Elyria
(Courtesy Rick Kurish)

Along with his warm memories surrounding the construction of the Ohio Turnpike, Rick Kurish also remembers the controversy about the route through Elyria. "Since I was only about 6 to 8 years old at the time, my interest in the turnpike dealt only with the ability to travel to desired destinations in a relatively short time. However, others, especially in Elyria, had concerns regarding the impact on the city of the proposed route.

"There was a northern route (which was finally adopted), and a southern route that basically went through the city of Elyria. It took several years to sort through all the pros and cons, and the inevitable lawsuits, before the route was finalized.

“The way the routes were described was kind of confusing. The Turnpike commission route, which was the southern route, went through the north side of Elyria, while the Elyria city-preferred route would have been in the area where Interstate 90 is today.

"I was surprised at the resistance of various elements of city government to the route proposed by the Ohio Turnpike Commission. The legal fight started almost as soon as the initial route was surveyed, and lasted until the fall of 1954 – only a few weeks before the first eastern section of the turnpike was set to open in November. Because of the dispute, the roughly four-mile section of the road through Elyria was the final section in Ohio to be bid out. The city fought the commission route virtually until they started pouring the concrete! I have a hard time seeing what the big deal was."

Rick found a pair of great ads sponsored by the Elyria Chamber of Commerce that illustrated the effort to fight the Ohio Turnpike’s planned route through town.

"The ads from the CT of June 30, 1954 and July 6, 1954, would seem to indicate that the fight over the route had become rather intense.” (I like how the Turnpike Commission is depicted as a blackjack-wielding goon.)

"The city of Elyria may have had a rough several years before the turnpike was complete, but I was happy,” noted Rick. "I could get to Cleveland in a half hour!"

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The December 1959 edition of the Rotarian magazine had a nice look back at the whole controversy.

It read, “In Elyria, Ohio, the proposed route of the new Ohio Turnpike was fought tooth and nail in 1954. The right of way was to skirt the northern part of the city, coming pretty close to an exclusive residential area, and it was from the wealthy and influential residents of this section that the most vocal opposition came. Much to-do was made of the “depreciation of valuable real estate” and the “withdrawal from the tax rolls of income-producing land” which, actually, was almost marshland.

“But in the end common sense prevailed and the proposed route went through as originally planned. “The immediate benefit,” says J. Grant Keys, who was Mayor of Elyria at the peak of the battle, “was the alleviation of a critical traffic problem on our streets. This alone was a gift which makes the other dividends pure velvet.

“The first of those was the immediate filing of plans for seven different housing developments along the proposed route. Thus, instead of reducing the tax rolls, the Turnpike promptly increased the ratables. And I was greatly amused to note that the lots which sold first for the highest prices were those immediately adjacent to the right of way!

“In the five years that have elapsed none of the dire prophecies have materialized: indeed, they have all been completely reversed. And today’s most avid promoters of the Ohio Turnpike are its erstwhile bitterest foes: the prominent industrialists, business and professional men who still live happily in the area which feared extinction, and whose advertising and promotion men busily extol the facility they fought because it has made Elyria 'the crossroads of the world.’”

Next: Move it!

Rick K. Remembers: the Ohio Turnpike – Part 1

Last month regular blog contributor Rick Kurish emailed me about his reminisces about the Ohio Turnpike, which would seem to fit in nicely with all of my recent posts about local highways. Rick also made me aware of an interesting controversy in the early 1950s regarding the Ohio Turnpike’s planned route through Elyria.

Rick wrote, "Over the years your blog has covered the opening of various sections of Interstate 90 across northern Ohio during the 1960s and 1970s. While I'm sure that I would be in the minority of your readers, my memory of travel in northern Ohio not only predates I90, but also the Ohio Turnpike!

"When I was in grade school, in the early 1950s, the turnpike was being planned and built and was an interesting topic to us kids. I can still remember the pre-turnpike car trips my parents would make to Cleveland with us kids. The best route was Route 254, and the drive seemed to take forever.

"When my grade school teacher told the class that after the turnpike was completed, you could be in Cleveland in about a half hour with virtually no stops or traffic lights, I remember thinking that would be the best thing ever!”

Rick had a ringside seat for the construction of the Ohio Turnpike.

"At the time the turnpike was being built, one of my uncles lived on Gulf Road in Elyria just south of the proposed route, and the future site of Elyria Catholic High School,” remembered Rick. "When the pike was constructed in that area, it required a fair amount of blasting to get through the sandstone bedrock. The blasting caused some cracking of basement foundations in the area, including my uncle's, resulting in claims and payment of damages.

"I remember that after the turnpike opened, my cousin and i would walk up the road to the Gulf Road bridge over the turnpike, and wave to the truckers, who almost always replied with a blast from their air horn. In that simpler time there was no chain link fence on the bridges, just a railing about two or three feet high, and no one worried about be hit by something thrown from the bridge.

"Good memories from over 60 years ago!”

Next: Controversy

Ohio Turnpike Signs That Time Forgot

On a Sunday afternoon in late December 2016, I had to make a trip to Elyria. On the way home, I shot this photo of some ancient street signs located where Lorain Boulevard meets Lake Avenue.

The Ohio Turnpike sign is a rare die-cut version that you just don’t see any more. The sign pointing in the direction of Midway Mall has seen better days too – much like the mall itself.

That’s a Family Dollar in the photo on the left in the background.

While preparing this post, I looked at an aerial on Bing Maps of where the sign is located. Strangely enough, the now-demolished former Greyhound station was still in the photo where the Family Dollar is now located.

I remember having to catch a bus at that Greyhound station, but I’ll be doggoned if I can remember when that was – and where I was going!

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I just dug through my photo files and came up with another one of those faded, die-cut Ohio Turnpike signs. This one (below) is located in Huron near the intersection of Route 6 and Main Street on the south side of the highway looking east. I photographed it in 2016.

Interestingly, the Google Maps view from 2013 shows a different sign (below). Maybe somebody clobbered it with their car, necessitating dragging the older one out of retirement as a replacement.