Where the old highway meets the interstate, at the narrowest point between the roads and the railroad, sits a meager cafe, an Amoco station, and a little community—two houses, three trailers and a horse corral, to be exact.
Before the highway was built, long before the freeway was even invented, this little community was just a switching station. And when Dad came with his father and family in June of ’47 to build a business there, it was called Brendell. Old timers still call it Brendell, but Grandad named it Crescent, for the bend the railroad tracks take along the flatland. It doesn’t resemble much of a switching station anymore. An extra row of tracks and old loading ramps are all that remain. Now it’s a truckstop whose backyard is cluttered with old cars—relics from the fifties and sixties, piles of ties, empty bomb boxes from World War II, and an assortment of someday useful junk that has found its home there.
