Old Highway 395, Part 4: Pomerado Road/Historic Route US 395 in Poway and Rancho Bernardo (1935-1950), Lake Hodges Crossing and Old Highway Trail (1935-1955)

This junction is the intersection of Pomerado Rd and Scripps Poway Pkwy, but this expanded alignment and intersection wasn't part of US 395 either.

His later life was plagued with strokes and multiple heart problems, requiring a pacemaker and open heart surgery and eventually leading to his death of cardiac arrest in 2002. Grotesquely, his death was nearly as colourful as his career, as son and business manager John Henry Williams flew his body to a cryonics company in Arizona and had his head and body separated and placed in cryonic suspension. His wife protested, stating he had wanted cremation, but John and Ted's daughter Claudia produced an informal "family pact" on a stained napkin declaring Ted's changed intentions. Despite the strange circumstances surrounding its creation, the "pact" was found legally sound; Ted today remains on ice at the facility, and upon John Henry's death of leukemia in 2004, he joined his father there shortly thereafter. Ted Williams Tunnel in Boston is also named for him, designated in 1995.

Ted Williams Parkway is also the surface continuation of CA 56, the west-east arterial for northern San Diego city proper, and the CA 56 freeway is in fact named the Ted Williams Freeway. CA 56 is the most direct inheritor of the old Select Arterial 680, which was to be built with county money to connect Interstates 5 and 15; this project fizzled due to coastal opposition and the funds were redirected to CA 56, which does connect I-5 and I-15, and CA 56 was opened between those points in 2004. CA 56 is supposed to connect to CA 67, but no one knows when, and CA 56 today stops at I-15 where Ted Williams Pkwy begins.

Both the freeway alignment of US 395 (more in Part 5) and the old Pomerado routing crossed Lake Hodges roughly here, shown during the construction of the bike bridge which is still under way. Ironically, the bike bridge will look an awful lot like the old one did, as depicted in the 1940s Frasher Foto postcard at right. This was the first crossing of the Lake, built in 1919 as the Bernardo Bridge (here is a 41K archival postcard of the Bernardo Bridge, probably taken in the late 1920s) and signed originally as CA 71 with the first signage of state routes in 1934, to become US 395 just shortly afterwards.

Lake Hodges is named for Walter E. Hodges, the private secretary to the president of, and later a vice president himself of, the legendary Santa Fe Railroad (the terminus and original station in San Diego still stands). Today's Rancho Santa Fe was one of the land purchases he helped engineer (then San Dieguito Rancho), but hit financial disaster with a massive local flood in 1916. The Railroad wanted to sell, but there were no reliable sources of water and potential buyers passed. Hodges was swayed by Colonel Ed Fletcher, a local development booster (Fletcher Parkway in La Mesa and El Cajon is named for him) who was similarly affected by the flood, to erect a dam on the San Dieguito River that would ensure more dependable water management after an idea by Fletcher's friend William G. Henshaw (the Henshaw in Lake Henshaw). The railroad president was similarly impressed and approved the project; it was finished by 1918 at a cost of $350,000 but had hardly the effect on land prices that the Railroad had hoped. In return for his expensive failure, Hodges was functionally demoted to a sinecure in 1919 from which he retired in 1930; Fletcher, on the other hand, flourished and his relations with Hodges were by all accounts sour thereafter.

Because of its unusual origins, Lake Hodges is notorious for widely variable lake levels including and "down" to nearly nothing. This has put a real cramp in the style of the boosters of the Lake Hodges Monster myth ("Hodgee"), but who knows -- maybe there's a cave in there somewhere. It would be hard for such a creature to hide in the very shallow Lake that US 395 crossed in 1947, however, as shown in the image at right (this image is from my archive of a defunct Hodgee fan site; I apologize for the uncredited photo as I don't know from where it came originally).

Continue to Part 5