Chuck Flood

When Chuck Flood retired from a 30-plus year career as an information technologies project manager, he had no trouble deciding how to spend his newly-found free time. A longtime interest in historic highways, roadside Americana, ghost towns, pioneer trails and archaeology - set aside during his professional career - provided the answer: he delved into research and writing about places and things that are disappearing from the landscape. Vacations were planned around visiting abandoned sites; back roads over rough terrain were trekked to visit sites where only a few collapsed log cabins and rusty tin cans remained; miles of legendary highways such as Route 66 and the Lincoln Highway were toured in search of reminders of the grand old days of travel; urban streets were examined for hints of places that had come and gone. The challenge, as he sees it, is to portray a place as if it were a person; to bring it to life as one would write a biography of an individual. A member of the Lincoln Highway Association, the Archaeological Conservancy, the Oregon-California Trails Association, and the Montana Ghost Town Preservation Society (among others), he has authored several books in Arcadia's Images of America series - Washington's Highway 99, Washington's Sunset Highway, and Oregon's Highway 99 - along with numerous articles for magazines and periodicals, with several more in various stages of completion.