My Italian mother had some relatives living in Steubenville. A lot of Italians lived there.
Sometimes the relatives would come for a visit when I was a kid. Used to take them hours to get to our house. This was back in the day when we didn't have interstates. Now I think you can get here from Steubenville in under an hour.
I remember watching Martin singing on his tv show one time substituting Steubenville for some other city in a song. Can't remember the song.
As far as taking forever to get somewhere in the pre four lane interstate days, you can thank all the crooked pols who took money from city officials back in the twenties and ran the new interstate right through all the small towns. The original plan was to bypass the small towns, but the big shots in the small towns didn't want traffic to bypass all their town businesses.
So instead of being able to drive relatively non-stop from origin to finish with a few pit stops here and there, cars were forced to drive through many podunk towns to get from here to there.
The wife and I occasionally like to take two lane roads to get away from the heavy four lane traffic, but it's usually a pain in the posterior to get through the numerous small towns with their 25 mph speed limits and stop signs.
