Earl Swift > Quotes

“One evening I sat in on the congregation’s annual meeting with its district superintendent, Alexander B. Joyner. It opened with testimony from Hoot Pruitt. “We’re blessed to have our pastor, because he knows how to get people in line—not in a rough way, but in a gentle spirit,” he said.”
― Earl Swift, Chesapeake Requiem: A Year With the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island

“urbane-looking fellow in a sharp gray suit, expensive-looking tie, and dress shoes.”
― Earl Swift, Chesapeake Requiem: A Year With the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island

“recent scientific papers suggest that Egypt’s great pyramids might be made not of carved blocks of stone, as long thought, but of limestone-rich concrete cast in place. [back]”
― Earl Swift, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

“office inaugurated Rural Free Delivery in 1896, which promised home mail service on roads passable enough to permit it—a mighty popular idea among rural farmers, who until then had viewed good roads and the taxes they required as schemes favoring big-city dandies on their bikes.”
― Earl Swift, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

“Prominent magazine editor and opinion shaper Albert Shaw noted that bad roads “are so disastrously expensive that only a very rich country, like the United States, can afford them.”
― Earl Swift, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

“spartina”
― Earl Swift, Chesapeake Requiem: A Year With the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island

“urbane-looking”
― Earl Swift, Chesapeake Requiem: A Year With the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island

“Cyclists thus found their hobby not as pleasant as it could be, to say the least, and the League of American Wheelmen committed to doing something about it. A year after Fisher opened his store, the league launched a magazine, Good Roads, that became an influential mouthpiece for road improvement. Its articles were widely reprinted, which attracted members who didn’t even own bikes; at the group’s peak, Fisher and more than 102,000 others were on the rolls, and the Good Roads Movement was too big for politicians to ignore. Yes, the demand for roads was pedal-powered, and a national cause even before the first practical American car rolled out of a Chicopee, Massachusetts, shop in 1893. A few months ahead of the Duryea Motor Wagon’s debut, Congress authorized the secretary of agriculture to “make inquiry regarding public roads” and to investigate how they might be improved.”
― Earl Swift, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways