‘Highway’s Like Family’ : Still Getting Their Kicks on Route 66

The highway that John Steinbeck called the mother road--U.S. Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles--vanished from the maps of America four years ago, when the last stretch of Interstate 40 was completed outside Williams, Ariz.

But so what? Maybe the romance of Route 66 was only a myth in the first place.

Certainly the desperate Okies who fled through here in the 1930s found no romance in these way station towns with their flashing signs that said “EAT” and their auto courts with names like “Rest Well” and “El Sereno.” Oklahoma City, despite what Bobby Troup’s song says, never was “mighty pretty” and who would have ever heard of Winona if it hadn’t rhymed with Arizona? Remember the popular 1960s TV series named for the old mother road? Most of it was filmed in Oregon and Florida.

Not a Single Traffic Light

Get your kicks on Route 66? Why not on the interstate instead? It goes faster and straighter, stretching from Chicago to the Pacific without a single traffic light, five connecting super highways that allow you to speed in air-conditioned comfort right through the franchised soul of America without having to see its people or touch its towns or feel its heartbeat.

Ray and Mildred Barker’s Frontier Cafe and Motel sits on the shoulder of what had been U.S. 66 in Truxton, one of the many towns broken by the new interstate. Their only customer, a local rancher, finished his coffee and drifted out. Barker, 62, pulled down the shades and locked the door. It was 7 p.m., and with no rooms rented that night and no traffic on the ghost road, he didn’t bother to turn on the neon “vacancy” sign outside.

“Before the road changed,” he said of Interstate 40 that runs 20 miles south of Truxton, “I’d say we had 10,000 vehicles a day passing here. Then all of a sudden, and I mean all of a sudden, when they opened the bypass, we dropped to about 300, and that was mostly locals. We worked two shifts with nine employees. Now it’s just my wife and me, with our daughter helping out, and we close up at 7 instead of 10.

Few Complaints

“Complaints? Not really. You may not make a lot of money, but you still eat, you have a bed, you have warmth. All in all, I don’t know that a man needs much more than that. I can always look around and find people a lot worse off.”

“You know,” his wife said, “I’ve lived along 66 all my life. Sayre, Oklahoma . . . Grants, New Mexico, and here. This highway’s like family.”

From behind the cash register, she took out a guest register she had started in a stenographer’s notebook. In it were the names of recent travelers from Switzerland, France, Holland, England--people who had paused in their journey to find America’s most famous road West.

Nobody, of course, ever thought of Route 66 going East, and perhaps that is precisely why the highway captured a restless nation’s imagination. It wasn’t the road itself that mattered as much as what lay at the end, an El Dorado of orange groves. Sweeter water, greener fields, gentler breezes. It was, as Jack Kerouac wrote, the symbol of existential wandering and back roads culture: “A fast car, a coast to reach and a woman at the end of the road.”

Designated Route 66 in 1926 and fully paved in 1934, the country’s first transcontinental highway stretched from the corner of Jackson Boulevard and Michigan Avenue in Chicago to the intersection of Ocean Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard in Santa Monica. It spanned 2,200 miles and passed through three time zones, eight states and 55 towns. From the wheat prairies of the Midwest, it crossed the Mississippi, climbed Missouri’s Ozark Mountains, meandered through the Texas Panhandle, followed the westward wagon tracks across the New Mexico and Arizona deserts and found its way over the Colorado River and into California near Needles.

‘Refugees From Dust’

For the dispossessed who fled Oklahoma’s Dust Bowl in Steinbeck’s 1939 novel, “The Grapes of Wrath,” this was the path of people in flight. “Refugees from dust and shrinking land,” Steinbeck wrote, “from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. Sixty-six is the mother road, the road of flight.”

Jim Scott, who has logged 38 years and 4 million miles on the open road, swung off Interstate 40 the other day and headed into Seligman, Ariz., on what used to be Main Street, U.S.A.

The 137 miles of Route 66, now a state highway, that run from Seligman west to Topock on the California border represent the longest drivable stretch of the original highway left in the country, and Scott brought his trailer truck to a hissing stop outside Angel Delgadillo’s one-chair barber shop. The shop was open but deserted, so Scott walked into the grocery store next door, where the barber’s brother, Joe, was passing time playing his guitar, accompanied by his friend Bob Lee on the fiddle.

‘Get the Feel of It’

“Hell, I love 66,” said Scott, who makes the 449-mile haul from Victorville, Calif., to Winslow, Ariz., three times a week. “I still come over it every now and then just to get the feel of it. I saw every mile of that interstate being built and what it’s done is make things impersonal. Anyone can herd a truck up and down the freeway, but I remember when you had real respect as a trucker.

“We took care of each other, we sat together in the cafes. You never pulled back into a lane without blinking a thank you on your lights. And if someone was broken down along the road--man or woman, it didn’t matter--you offered help. Now we don’t even stop. Things have gotten so uncourteous, it’s unreal. People’ll throw you the birdie today and honk to make sure you see it. Far’s I’m concerned, the whole damn world has changed.”

If the world is the interstate, Scott is probably right. But if it’s the back roads, where people are poorer and less hurried, then those in need still do not stay strangers for long. “I’m learnin’ one thing good. Learnin’ it all the time, ever’ day,” Steinbeck’s Ma Joad said. “If you’re in trouble or hurt or need--go to poor people. They’re the only one’s that’ll help--the only ones.”

Town Aids Cancer Victim

Charlotte Lopez would say that’s still true. She lives in Williams, Ariz., on the old 66, and last year her son, Ernest, a cook at Rod’s Steak House, was stricken with cancer, requiring a bone marrow transplant. The town, responding with bake sales, yard sales, collection buckets in every cafe and a charity dance, raised several thousand dollars that enabled Lopez to be with her son during seven weeks of treatment in Omaha. Ernest Lopez is home now, and on April 10 the town was planning to throw a surprise party in the Rodeo Barn to honor the ex-cancer patient on his 25th birthday.

Long before there was a Williams--named for trapper and guide Bill Williams, killed by Indians in 1849--the path of what would become Route 66 already was part of Western history. Parts of the old highway followed the ancient Osage Indian Trail, and Pere Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet traversed the route in exploring the upper Mississippi in 1673. During the California Gold Rush, Capt. Randolph Marcy and Lt. James Simpson were ordered to “make, and report, a reconnaissance” from Ft. Smith, Ark., to Santa Fe, N.M., “in direct reference to the future location of a national road,” and they came this way, too.

Eight years later, in 1857, Lt. Edward Beale pushed the exploration of a national road farther west, to the California border, with 70 camels imported from Arabia and Egypt. “I look forward to the day,” he wrote, “when every mail route across the continent will be conducted . . . with this economical and noble brute.”

Then came the first telegraph lines to penetrate the Southwest territories--for a long time this passage was known as the “Wire Road”--and then the settlers in covered wagons and finally, first in Model T’s, then in luxury liners with radios and sweeping fins, the new generation of Californians. They motored west past Burma Shave signs and red barns whose painted sides advised, “Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco,” and a billboard outside Albuquerque that displayed a sweating skull and the words: “700 Miles Desert . . . Water Bags, Thermos Jugs, Ice.”

“It was the year after the war and my wife and I were driving from Pennsylvania to California, in a 1941 Buick convertible I’d bought with the royalties from my first song, ‘Daddy,’ ” said composer Bobby Troup, 69, who now lives in Encino. “The family had music stores in Lancaster and Harrisburg that I could have gone into, but I told my mother I had to find out if I had any talent and there were only two places for a songwriter to go--New York and Los Angeles.”

Somewhere, back in the early miles of the journey, his wife, Cynthia--he would later marry singer Julie London--suggested he write a song about Highway 40 and Troup shrugged. “Then later, out of Chicago, when we realized we’d be following the same highway all the way to California,” he recalled, “she whispered, kind of hesitantly because of the put-down on the first suggestion, ‘Get your kicks on Route 66.’ ” He had two stanzas and the melody written on a road map by the time they got to Los Angeles, where Nat King Cole soon recorded the song, making it part of America’s musical lexicon:

Won’t you get hip to this timely tip

When you make that California trip.

Get your kicks on Route 66 . . .

Blurred Whoosh

Along Interstate 40 now, the traffic moves in a blurred whoosh: Peterbilt and Mack semis from places like Scranton, Pa., and Archbold, Ohio; RVs with snowbirds escaping the frozen North; salesmen (who used to be called drummers) bypassing the little towns in favor of the next city 100 miles or more down the road; cars moving so fast that the drivers appear faceless. Now, instead of billboards advertising Ted’s Root Beer and chili at the Longhorn Ranch Cafe, the road signs say “Littering Highway Unlawful,” or “Los Angeles 467 Miles,” an easy day’s drive with stereo music all the way.

Angel Delgadillo, 60, the barber in Seligman, can hear the traffic’s steady, muffled roar so maddeningly close, and he mutters: “All those cars, thousands of them, and how do we get them off the interstate and into Seligman?” Business, he says, has dropped 70% since “we got bypassed. It was like they put a gate up at the east and west ends of town. Remember how it was the day Fitzgerald Kennedy, the President, was killed? Traffic everywhere just stopped moving all of a sudden. Well, same thing happened here when we got bypassed.”

U.S. 66 used to turn off Main Street onto Railroad Avenue in Seligman. “Hard to believe,” Delgadillo said, “but I can remember when this was a busy street.”

Nothing remains today of the cafe his grandfather, Camilo, built and ran on Railroad Avenue. Nor of Bud Brown’s pool hall next door. Nor of Frank Smith’s convenience store. All that stands in good repair is the Harvey House hotel, next to the train station. But it has been boarded up since 1954, its grassy courtyard now weed-dead, and when the Southwest Chief passenger train out of Chicago moves through Seligman each night just before midnight, it is only a silvery blur, hurtling toward Los Angeles, acknowledging the town with nothing more than a wailing salute of its whistle.

Although many miles of Interstate 40 follow the old Route 66, the transcontinental journey across America’s back roads and through its small towns has been dying, mile by mile, since 1956. That was the year President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a law creating the 42,500-mile interstate system at a cost of $27 billion, giving birth to a network of nameless superhighways, one of which federal bureaucrats in the East dared designate Interstate 66. It goes from Washington, D.C., to just beyond Riverton, Va., a total of 65 miles, and no one has ever written a song about it.

Thirty years before the interstate’s creation, the government had started assigning route numbers to named highways amid much criticism, with odd numbers given to north-south roads and even numbers to east-west ones. The lowest even number (Route 2) went to the most northern road, from Maine to Idaho, the highest (Route 96) to the most southern highway in Texas. The road from Chicago to Los Angeles--known at various times as the Postal Highway, the Ozark Trail and the Will Rogers Highway--got the mellifluous designation of 66 simply because that was the next number in geographic sequence.

Robbed of Romance

Complaining that the numbering system would rob the open road of its romance, the New York Times editorialized: “The traveler may shed tears as he drives the Lincoln Highway or dream dreams as he speeds over the Jefferson Highway, but how can he get a ‘kick’ out of 46 or 55 or 33 or 21!”

The quiet road out of Seligman winds west through Hackberry, where the one-room schoolhouse has an enrollment of six, past Kingman’s “air-cooled” Beale Hotel where Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent the first night of their honeymoon in 1939, over Sitgreaves Pass with its roadside ruins of old cars, service stations, even towns, and into Oatman, a one-time mining community where wild burros turned loose by prospectors years ago still roam the main street.

In these towns of the past, the requiem for a highway is carved in buckled cement. But don’t start the funeral procession yet, because a funny thing has started happening. Although the black and white shields that marked the mother road may be gone forever, Route 66 is making a comeback as a state highway in Arizona and as a chunk of nostalgia everywhere that American travelers don’t want to surrender.

Queries on Road’s Existence

“Hardly a day goes by that someone doesn’t flag me or one of the other officers down and say, ‘Hey, is this the old 66?” said the marshal in Williams, John W. Moore.

Indeed, the Auto Club of Southern California says 66 is once again the most asked-about route among callers, and a new arrangement of Route 66, by the English group Depeche Mode, recently shot up to No. 16 on the request charts of station KIIS in Los Angeles.

The Route 66 TV series that ran originally from 1960 to 1964 is finding new audiences with reruns on cable, and Tom Snyder, an Oxnard hypnotherapist who founded the Route 66 Assn. four years ago, says he knows of about 50 articles, five books and a major motion picture about the highway that have been done recently or are planned.

In Kingman, Jerry Richard has tapped into a gold mine with his Route 66 Distillery, a saloon and restaurant where 1940s and ‘50s memorabilia--road signs, gas pumps, water bags, posters and a Wurlitzer jukebox with 78 rpm records--celebrate the defunct highway. Over one corner booth is a black and white promotional picture of two young men, Martin Milner (who in real life was married with four kids) and George Maharis, TV vagabonds who traveled the highways in a 1955 Corvette as Tod Stiles and Buzz Murdock. Among those they met along the way were Robert Redford, Lee Marvin, Alan Alda and Rod Steiger.

“The show was so popular not because it was a period piece,” said Milner, who now lives in Del Mar, “but because it captured the desire in people--or least their imagined desire--to pick up and move and know wanderlust and be free spirits.”

Sensing that all this nostalgia translates into tourist dollars, Arizona last November designated Route 66 from Seligman to Topock a historic state highway. It will maintain the road, mark it with double-six route shields and place signs along Interstate 40 to remind travelers there is still an alternative to motoring West at 65 m.p.h.

If you ever plan to motor West

Travel my way, take the highway that’s the best.

Get your kicks on Route 66 . . .

Last week about 200 Arizonans who live along the road of flight--and who are members of the recently formed Historical Route 66 Assn. of Arizona--gathered at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Topock, near the California line. Billie Jo Trammell of Oatman said the association’s balance stood at $1,155, including interest of $7.14; Angel Delgadillo outlined plans for a weekend celebration of street dances and barbecues, to which Bobby Troup and Will Rogers Jr. had been invited; and Paul Field, 66, of Topock said the renewed interest in the old highway could really put the forgotten towns of Route 66 back on the map.

The Joad family of Steinbeck’s fiction had $40 left when they drove past the “shattered stone debris” of Oatman and slipped through Topock. They crossed the river bridge that still stands on the western edge of town--though now it is used only to support a pipeline--and on the other side entered California. But as for so many others before and after the Joads, there really was no El Dorado. The dream had been only a dream. Behind them lay the terrible white-rock cliffs of Arizona, ahead the scorching, empty desert. It was not at all like the pictures Tom Joad had seen.

“Wait till we get to California. You’ll see nice country then,” Pa Joad said.

“Jesus Christ, Pa!” Tom said. “This here is California.”

Times researcher Nina Green contributed to this story.