Kindness, Sadness and Beauty on US 20:
Questions and Answers Along America’s Longest Road
a memoir by
Bill Scott
Pure Heart Press
ISBN: 978-1-964277-97-4
210 pages, $18.95 (+ shipping)
Release Date: June 24, 2026
Kindness, Sadness and Beauty on US 20 / Bill Scott
$18.95
Bill Scott was a high school teacher for 41 years at two Catholic schools, St. Joseph Academy and Notre Dame Cathedral Latin, in the Cleveland Diocese. This began in 1982, soon after leaving Kent State University with degrees in Social Studies and Education. A Master of Arts from John Carroll University came in 2002. Bill was born in 1956 and managed to survive childhood long enough to meet his wife Arleen, who still agrees that he is worthy. She and her daughters, Clare and Emma, continue to accept his love for them.
Here you will find many examples of the tremendous beauty of the United States. You will also find the beauty of the kind people who live among us, and those who are sad, who deserve our loving care. You will read the words of a light hearted optimist with a bit of humor, courtesy of Irish ancestors who would tell a story when someone was feeling bad, or when a lesson was needed. There are stories here that might not seem to belong in this book, but they do.
For 21 days on US 20, and for eight more days on Interstates 80 and 90, with three more days in Portland, this writer documented much of what he saw and heard from the Atlantic to the Pacific. That resulted in this book about the daily actions of our fellow humans, such as artists, Native Americans, strong women, road blocking Venezuelans, an angry trucker in the woods, three psychics, a priest, a picnic group of young adults pondering their future, a Deadhead on a dance floor, a man living on the streets, a vintner and her dog, a clerk in fear of a forest fire, baseball fans at a field of dreams, motel clerks, and many cooks and servers with friendly folks in roadside pubs, restaurants, and cafes.
Those people, and many more, plus the many hours alone in the car and in forests, mountains, vast plains, and big cities, allowed time to think about America and its cultures and its democracy, family and the meaning of home, friendship, spirituality, life and death, the value of our past, and our value to each other. All of that, and then some, led to the book you hold in your hand.
Introduction:
Why Do This?
For most of my life, I hungered for the road. This was true even when I was a child. I liked seeing the differences between the places we visited and the various neighborhoods we lived in. My father would pack me and my siblings into the car to take us to a local park or library, sometimes just to grant our mother quiet time at home with the latest baby in her arms. For us, that, and visits to the homes of cousins, aunts and uncles, or grandparents, all over northeast Ohio, was travel. Only a car could allow that.
I took many road trips over the last 50 years locally, regionally, and across the United States, as soon as I had my own car and my own money. As of this writing in 2025, I have spent meaningful time in all but seven of the states. I’ve traveled alone and with others on the East Coast, West Coast, Great Lakes, Southeast, Southwest, and the vast Middle America. There was also a weekend in Toronto in the early 1980s.
The above is not unusual – but what I did in 2023 and 2024 was. I don’t know how many people have also done it, but when I told people what I was up to, the response was usually surprise, and sometimes envy.
Many years ago, I began thinking of an Atlantic to Pacific trek, using just one US route. By the time I was ready to retire from 41 years as a high school social studies teacher, I knew that the longest road in the United States had to be my choice. And I knew I had to write about it.
That road is US 20.
American history teaches us that Europeans who arrived on the North American continent began in the East and spread over centuries to the West. This is true, though it leaves out the fact that the new Americans, and the people that some of them enslaved, also moved from the South to the North, and the South to the West. And there were Europeans who started in the West and spread to the East.
When people moved from one place to another, roads were needed. Some roads were built for local travel. Some were built to move across a state. Eventually, the United States government saw the need for national roads. An easy way to do that was to link state roads together, fill in the gaps where needed, and a national road was born. All of them became US routes.
As more and more states were created in the West, travelers used roads that became what we call US 10, US 30, US 40, US 50, etc. While none of these roads were known by those numbers until 1926, the roads that were needed to travel from the East were available decades earlier.
US 20 was not created by the US government from east to west. It was born in the West in Newport, Oregon, and gradually grew east all the way to Boston. The length is said to be 3,365 miles. There are variations in that number, due to options available to drivers. In New York state, for example, there is US 20 and US 20A, which run parallel to each other. More on that later.
One of the places US 20 passes through is Cleveland. I was born there in 1956 at a hospital that still exists, on Euclid Avenue, a part of US 20. Throughout my life US 20 has been within walking distance from home, or a short drive away. For me, that is a significant nostalgia factor.
In the last few months of the 2022-2023 school year at Notre Dame Cathedral Latin High School (NDCL), where I worked for 34 years, I decided that this trip across America would be a retirement gift to myself. My students were excited. They wanted to know what social media sites I would be using to share my experience! I said there would be no social media. Meanwhile, Ali, my niece, made a strong case for me to use TikTok. No TikTok, I said.
Then came Emma. She is my second daughter. She is very nice, and quite persuasive. I stubbornly insisted that this book would honor the long tradition that words alone can tell a compelling story. Emma countered that if people could follow me online, they would be more inclined to buy the book. My students said the same.
I held my ground. I would not plunge into the strange world of social media. Emma compromised. She asked me to give my students her username for her Instagram and Facebook accounts. I accepted that, and some of my students took Emma’s information and passed it along. Emma invited her social media pals to follow this coast to coast adventure, and asked them to invite their friends.
The scheme worked like this. Every day on the road I sent a summary of my travels to Emma. We made it fun by having me send a song of the day from my Apple library, a bird of the day, and some photos of the day, all with brief explanations.
To top it off, Emma created a blog site for me, using again the “people will be more likely to buy your book” argument, and I caved. Clare, my first daughter, passed the plan along to her contacts. Then my sister Marilyn did the same. I hadn’t posted a single word and images of the great “Field of Dreams” movie raced through my head. “People will come. People will most definitely come.”
My teaching career ended in late May, 2023. I did not feel fully invested in this dream then, and my planned departure was three weeks away. I knew the route. I mapped each day, from Boston to Newport. I had a list of motels, a small list of interesting places to investigate, and a list of a few friends I might visit along the way.
Still, one thing was missing. I really did not know why I was doing this. I had repeatedly told myself that I had to. But why?