Someone wading around on YouTube found a 1959 film that takes viewers on a drive along U.S. Highway 30 from my hometown of State Center to Ogden. The Iowa Department of Transportation produced it to convince somebody – not sure whom – that a faster, wider, safer highway was needed. It’s like a “road trip” movie without special effects. Or actors. Or a plot.

You can see it at http://tinyurl.com/3oqypqh

For someone who was there, it’s fun to get a glimpse of everyday life 52 years ago; unfortunately, most of the video history from my childhood involves somebody getting assassinated. Nostalgia aside, the clip serves as a reminder of all the times that America managed to find the right answer to a big-picture question. Did we really need to go out and construct a new Highway 30?

We sure did.

In the long-ago world of 1959, people drove around in long, heavy, fin-laden cars that guzzled leaded gasoline. The film shows seatbelt-free drivers tooling along behind big trucks on the two-lane road, darting into the left lane to see if it’s safe to pass. I had forgotten how much real life used to resemble the films of the Three Stooges.

Unfortunately, the cameraman did not capture a semitrailer truck toppling into the ditch at Mahlow’s Corner, just northwest of State Center. It was a regular occurrence, surpassed in entertainment value only by barn fires and the time a natural gas tank exploded at the creamery.

He did, however, convey what it was like to be driving on a transcontinental highway and suddenly find yourself in the middle of Campustown at Iowa State University, or stopping for a school crossing in Boone.

This really was no way to move essential goods. Or get to Clyde Williams Field, for that matter.

The other thing that strikes me is how quickly things got done in those boom times. A mere three years after this film was shot, I liked to ride my bicycle out to watch the construction of new Highway 30. They don’t make summers like that anymore.

The good news is that we don’t need as many new highways now, and the better news is that what we mostly need to build is broadband capacity. I don’t know how many soldering irons are required for a thing like that, but it can’t soak up nearly as much fossil fuel or raw material as highway construction.

The bad news, of course, is that America is broke.

If you drive on old Highway 30 from State Center to Ames today, you pass a wind farm and an ethanol plant. Combine that with the old documentary, and it’s clear that we did many things right – we improved transportation routes, made our cars more fuel-efficient, developed alternative energy sources. And yet …

Look at those people living happily in the Eisenhower era. Imagine telling them that in 2011, the United States would be $14 trillion in debt, millions of people would be receiving food stamps, millions would be unemployed, and millions of homes would be in foreclosure.

“It was the Russians, wasn’t it?” they would say. “Did they undermine our way of life with their sinister but powerful Communist system?”

Well, not exactly.

Maybe we should have asked the Scandinavians how to do cradle-to-grave security instead of guessing at it. Maybe 12 aircraft carrier task forces is too many, or maybe the world’s policeman should at least send a bill. However it happened, it’s getting embarrassing. Here in Iowa, we can’t afford a full complement of state troopers. We’re starting to let blacktop roads revert to gravel. We traded railroads for bike trails.

Highway 30 probably will still be around 52 years from now, and it might be full of solar-powered hovercars. Unfortunately, the hovercars might be made in China.

Jim Pollock is the editor of the Des Moines Business Record. He can be reached by email at jimpollock@bpcdm.com