Thursday 20th February 1997

An episode of the hit TV sitcom “Seinfeld” titled “The Pothole” aired for the first time; it included a story line in which the character Kramer adopted a stretch of the fictional Arthur Burghardt Expressway through the real-life Adopt-a-Highway program. The roots of the Adopt-a-Highway program date back to 1984, when James Evans, an engineer for the Texas Department of Transportation, noticed litter blowing out of the back of a pickup truck he was driving behind in Tyler, Texas. Concerned about the growing cost to the government of keeping roadways clean, Evans soon began asking community groups to volunteer to pick up trash along sections of local highways they could “adopt.” Though Evans got no takers for his idea, Billy Black, the public information officer for the Tyler District of the Texas Department of Transportation, took up the cause and organized the first official Adopt-a-Highway program, which included training and equipment for volunteers. The first group to participate in the program was the Tyler Civitan Club, and on March 9, 1985, a sign was erected to indicate that the group had adopted a two-mile stretch along Texas’s Highway 69. Similar signs began popping up in the area as other groups volunteered to beautify their own stretches of highway. The program eventually spread to thousands of towns and cities across the U.S. and to such countries as Canada, Japan, and New Zealand.