from the July/August 2000 issue of Bookmagazine.com
reprinted with permission

It began in Chicago and didn't stop until it reached Los Angeles. A twenty-four-hundred-mile ribbon of concrete and asphalt that in its heyday was dubbed the Main Street of America. The description is apt even today. Torn and tattered as it is, Route 66 connects the Main Streets of hundreds of American towns like no other road in the country. And it connects thousands of people to an America they can barely remember, to a time of hope and individuality they thought was lost.

As much as it connects those towns and people, the route also connects cultures — the booming, big-shouldered urban life of Chicago; the glitz of Hollywood; and the relatively slower pace of life in towns and cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma; Amarillo, Texas; and tiny Seligman, Arizona. It is perhaps not surprising that writers of all sorts—John Steinbeck, Michael Wallis, Douglas Brinkley—would be attracted to this road and its history. Others such as Whitman, Kerouac and Sandburg are connected with it because the rhythm of their words seems so in sync with the gentle rise and fall of Route 66.

"There are other two-lane blacktops out there and I am interested in them, but none are quite like Sixty-Six," says Michael Wallis, author of Route 66: The Mother Road and numerous other books. "It could not have come at a better time. It was born as the automobile was being made affordable by Henry Ford, and then it saw us through the Roaring '20s, the Dirty '30s when we paid our dues, the war years, and then the heyday years when we were celebrating America and wealth.

"Now it is in a new stage, a kind of retrospective time, when Americans and people from abroad are looking to the road to carry them on a journey into the past."

While Route 66 was officially born in 1926, when Congress commissioned it, its path had seen travellers for decades before. Like the Dixie Highway and other early paved roads, Route 66 was laid out to follow traditional migratory lines; unlike other highways of the day, though, it did not move along a strictly linear course from one spot to another. By following a succession of historic trails—the Pontiac Trail, the Wire Road, the Postal Highway, the Grand Canyon Route and the Mormon Trail—Sixty-Six loped diagonally across the country like a loosely draped ribbon. From the cold gray of Lake Shore Drive to the perennial sunshine of Santa Monica Boulevard, the ribbon tied together a succession of rural and urban communities, many of which had never had access to major national thoroughfares before.

The route ran through eight states—Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California—and it first made this connection at a time when the automobile, for better and worse, was beginning to stir the popular imagination.

"Automobiles influenced writers in their time as much as they influenced the general public," says Douglas Brinkley, author and director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans. "Emerson said, 'There is no truth but in transit,' and that really encapsulates America's love of the road. Being on the road is not just about who you are going to meet or what you are going to see, but how it will change you internally. Dreiser thought the car would free people from their nine-to-five shackles. What freedom, it seemed, to be able to get in a car and just drive away! At the same time, though, Booth Tarkington called the new creations 'metal demons.'

"Ever since then, writers have fallen into one of those camps. Steinbeck and Kerouac, the great muses of Sixty-Six, see the automobile as freedom, while writers like Henry Miller and Hunter S. Thompson were, and are, cynical about them."

There are, according to Brinkley, only two great transit arteries in the United States that have taken on mythological connotations: the Mississippi River and Route 66. And while Mark Twain is the muse and mythmaker of one, Steinbeck can claim the other. It was Steinbeck who christened Sixty-Six with its best-known nickname, The Mother Road.

Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, and set in the '30s when the nation was gripped in the Great Depression and the bread basket, the Central Plains, were literally being blown away with the wind. A brutal and lengthy drought had turned fertile dirt into dust and sent thousands of proud farming families on the road in search of not just a better life, but survival.

These families, identical to Steinbeck's fictional Joads, loaded their every possession onto ancient wrecks of automobiles with paper-thin tires and leaky radiators, and pointed their noses down Sixty-Six, eventually reaching the fabled land of California. It was always a journey of hope. Sometimes hope of a better life and hope of opportunity, at other times merely the hope that the rusting car would survive struggles up high mountain passes and across sunbaked deserts.

Steinbeck described the road then: "66—the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map, from the Mississippi River to Bakersfield—over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the Divide and down into the bright and terrible desert, and across the desert to the mountains again, and into the rich California valleys."

"We like to look back at the good times now, the nostalgia and kitsch of the road, but you can't paint a picture of some idyllic corridor," Wallis says. "What Steinbeck described was there, then and later, as well. Overheated radiators, speed traps, bad food, blistering heat and no A/C, questionable people—it was all there. But that is why the road endures, because you can find all these different periods tangible on Route 66. When I am out there on the road in Oklahoma, I can see the Joads. I can feel the hunger of their journey to the land of milk and honey. I can see and feel everything that happened there on the varicose and tattered strip of concrete and asphalt."

Steinbeck christened the road and solidified its place in the popular imagination. By the time World War II was over, the United States had weathered the storm and recovered from the Great Depression. Gas and rubber rationing was gone, and people had good jobs, money to spend and a little vacation time. It was before McDonald's, before Wal-Mart, at a time before the country became generic and when the road was a place for adventure.

Instead of grabbing a Big Mac at the drive-through, families stopped at places like Funks Grove, Illinois, for a bottle of pure maple syrup or Ted Drewes' Frozen Custard Stand in St. Louis. Between home (wherever that might be) and Arizona's Petrified Forest (one of the road's popular attractions), there were hundreds of restaurants, general stores and service stations where families disembarked for the adventure of seeing something new and different in the Heartland. From the first, the roadside stands were about economics and the entrepreneurs of the day did everything they could to lure the traveller off Sixty-Six.

Brightly colored billboards were a common form of advertising, as were the painted sides of big barns. Lester B. Dill, a motivated Missouri farm boy, used those billboards and barn walls to advantage when advertising his guide service at Meramec Caverns in Stanton, Missouri. For miles on either side of the turnoff for the caverns, he announced their allures with signs like "Greatest Show Under the Earth—Meramec Caverns." Later, he invented the most enduring of American advertisement forms when he started handing out bumper stickers with similar slogans. Other business owners along the way—from the Buffalo Ranch Trading Post in Afton, Oklahoma, to the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, Arizona—were equally ingenious in hawking their wares. Crossing the dry, cracked landscapes in New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California, it was not uncommon to see signs with skulls and crossbones, announcing the travellers' last chance to stop for water.

"The road has been a part of my life from when I was born — just as far away from Sixty-Six as Stan Musial could throw a baseball," says Wallis, who has since lived in seven of the eight Route 66 states and now lives in Tulsa. "Like for many others, it was our vacation road, and the process of travelling was part of the trip. The vacations began the minute my father backed the car out of the driveway and the wheels touched the road."

The road continued to be a main thoroughfare across the country well into the 1970s, though its demise began as soon as Dwight Eisenhower was elected president in 1952. The former general had admired the speed with which the German army could move men and supplies along the autobahns during World War II, and he was determined to see an interstate highway system built in America. It took five of those interstates—I-55, I-44, I-40, I-15 and I-10—to replace Route 66, but they eventually did. In 1984 it was officially decommissioned.

"The interstates were the death of all these blacktop two-lane highways," Brinkley says. "While wonderful for convenience, they lose quite a bit aesthetically."

Historians and preservationists — they call themselves "roadologists" — now refer to the late '40s, '50s and '60s as the heyday years for Route 66. These roadologists, and writers like Wallis, keep the road alive in its new incarnation as a kind of nostalgic tourist destination.

"I grew tired of people always talking about Sixty-Six in the past tense. I was sick of it, and I knew the road was still there," Wallis says. "In fact, eighty to eighty-five percent of the road is still there, and, more importantly, the people are still there—you can still get custard at Drewes' and Angel Delgadillo is still cutting hair in Seligman. Unabashedly, this book that I wrote, Route 66: The Mother Road, with a lot of fire in my belly, is a love letter to those people along the road."

The book is widely considered to have sparked the movement to preserve the road, turn it into a tourist destination and draw travellers from around the world. Wallis and other roadologists regularly receive queries on how to find the old road from places as far away as Tokyo and Berlin.

Whether from stateside or overseas, travellers all seem to be after one thing. Wallis puts it this way: "They are all dipping back to find America before it was homogenized, a place where all the people don't all look alike and smell alike. Some adventure on the road."