Still Getting Kicks on Route 66 : Buffalo burgers. Wigwam motels. The Long Horn Trading Post. On its 66th anniversary, thousands are rediscovering America’s favorite highway.

Mood makers have wrung every requiem from this castoff highway.

They have filmed its blind, boarded cafes and gas stations imploded by neglect. They have written of entire towns that became corpses and mourned for romantic stretches of two-lane America now entombed beneath interstates.

Some witnesses to this history say that when U. S. Highway 66 was decertified and its familiar shields clattered down in 1984, it reprised the mood of the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Littletown USA was stilled. Traffic stopped. Something essential died in millions of us.

What didn’t die was Route 66.

Because, say those who have denied the detour and continue impatient campaigns to recover the road, you can’t kill America. Nor, they insist, should this country be in any hurry to lose those days when people gave everyone the time of day and urgent travelers didn’t have to buy gasoline to use the restroom.

Of the 2,448 original miles of Route 66 meandering from Chicago to Los Angeles, almost 2,000 survive as frontage roads, business loops and redesignated local highways. Many wear “Historic Route 66” markers raised by preservation associations in every state laced by the famed diagonal.

The longest, continuous remaining stretch is a 157.8-mile arc through northwest Arizona, from Topock on the Colorado River, through gold mine country to Kingman, Hackberry, Peach Springs and dusty little Seligman. This lonely, typical, colorful, magnificently restored portion has been declared an Arizona historical monument.

Two years ago, the Route 66 Study Act authorized the National Park Service to determine what’s left, poke into public interest and evaluate the route as a possible historical trail.

And this year’s 66th anniversary of Route 66--celebrated by Rand-McNally with a new map of the old highway--has been an endless, eclectic road show.

A recent, typical skein included Europeans in rental cars, Japanese tourists by the busloads, cycling authors, and graying GIs on sentimental journeys to bleached shreds of their World War II training camps at the Kingman Air Base or the Mojave Desert.

Charles Kuralt journeyed this road for CBS while Emilio Estevez and Paula Abdul drove it on vacation. This month, two Chicago newlyweds in a ’65 Buick convertible rode Route 66 to Arizona’s Oatman Hotel, where Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent their 1939 honeymoon, while a pair of Los Angeles journalists pursued similar soul, mood and ancient adventures in a canary-bright Chevrolet Corvette.

Decay does, of course, plague this romantic old wriggle across eight states and three time zones.

Red’s Giant Hamburg--the sign painter ran out of room for the ers --in Springfield, Mo., where condiments included chili powder in Copenhagen tins. Closed.

Bagdad and Siberia, Calif. Disappeared.

The Roller Rink Restaurant in Rancho Cucamonga. Scheduled for demolition.

Arkey’s Barbecue in Fontana. Now an adult book store.

Yet most of Route 66, although a little awry, remains a kick.

You can still eat buffalo burgers at the Bagdad Cafe in Newberry Springs, Calif., find a fly swatter at the Long Horn Trading Post on the Texas Panhandle or buy moccasins for the whole family at Meteor City, Ariz.

Menus still don’t offer anything green. Don’t ask for Evian at Roy’s Cafe in Amboy, Calif., although tap water in plastic glasses doesn’t seem to have drowned business. Owner Buster Burris, 53 years at this spot and 83 yesterday, says his food, gas and motel business has climbed 25% in each of the past four years.

“In 1983, about 50 cars searched for Route 66,” explains Tom Snyder of Oxnard, an addicted roadie, free-lance writer, recovering psychologist and founder of the Route 66 Assn. “More recently, we’ve been putting about 10,000 cars a year down the road, and that’s a conservative estimate. By next year, 40,000 to 50,000.”

One of Snyder’s growth barometers is his 1990 book, “The Route 66 Traveler’s Guide and Roadside Companion.” It has sold 30,000 copies, is in its third printing and is being translated into German.

Another measurement is Snyder’s regular contact with cafe owners, motel operators, chambers of commerce managers, burger servers, barbers and small town mayors from the Pacific to Lake Michigan. “Merchants in tourist-related businesses are reporting increases from 10% to 70% and averaging 35%,” he says.

Much of this surge comes from a media binge.

Snyder’s guide and “Route 66: The Mother Road” by Michael Wallis are bibles for highway time travelers. Three more books are on the way. Japanese television has shown a three-hour Route 66 special, two American documentaries are in progress and a feature film--best described as “Thelma and Louise” face “Desperate Hours” on “Route 66”--recently finished shooting.

“Golly Moses,” says Angel Delgadillo, 62, an early savior of Arizona stretches of Route 66. “I’ve been interviewed by ABC and CBS and NBC and CNN . . . six different times by German television, three by French television . . . and three Japanese magazines, including their Playboy.

“You guys (journalists) have brought the people in, especially the European tourists, and that’s given this old road new life. My business is three times better than when Route 66 was open.”

Delgadillo’s business is barbering, and his shop in Seligman remains home of the $6 haircut-- Pinaud Eau de Quinine tonic six bits extra--with straight-razor shaves for $3. As founder-president of the Historic Route 66 Assn. of Arizona, he also sells Route 66 T-shirts, Route 66 pins, Route 66 bumper stickers, Route 66 caps and assorted shards of asphalt in plastic bags for anyone who might want to Own Your Own Piece of Route 66.

Delgadillo believes nostalgia and that overworked cliche about searching for simpler times clearly propel many to take the longer, slower way to Flagstaff. And don’t forget Winona.

Others say that when Americans got the fast, uncluttered travel they demanded from superhighways, they also discovered the penalty of zero contact with rural life--and the yawning boredom of vast stretches between interstate exits and microwave dieselburgers.

Now they are reconnecting with an America where motels remain tourist courts--or stucco wigwams from the ‘40s--and a portion of cafe pie is still a full quarter.

Dutch vacationers Guy Talemans and Nadia de Braekeler stayed overnight at the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, Ariz., where Route 66 starts groping for the New Mexico border.

“It was cute,” said de Braekeler. “But I never saw a tent with air conditioning. Not very wigwammy.”

Talemans said he stopped to experience something rarely available in the Netherlands: “American kitsch.”

Christon Hurst--wearing a Route 66 T-shirt and carrying a Route 66 guide inside the offices of the Historic Route 66 Assn. of Arizona in Kingman--said curiosity with this length of American lore persuaded him to spend two late-summer weeks on Route 66.

“I’ve followed stretches that didn’t go anywhere and been where cars shouldn’t go,” said the 38-year-old microbiologist from Cincinnati. “The best was driving through the Kaibab National Forest. Beautiful. Magnificent.

“The worst was Cuervo, N. M. One portion of the road was one lane and washed out, three feet across and 12 feet deep. I had to go off the road and drive around it.”

Hurst’s Kodak rate was about one roll of film a day. His Honda Accord was humming. He was fascinated by finding dirt roads, lonely spaces, and one Texas town that was no more than a crumbled grain elevator.

He also knows where he will spend next year’s vacation: “Anywhere on a fully paved road.”

There is an indelible mysticism to Route 66 because it was made a legend through the high talents of those who traveled it.

John Steinbeck, chronicler of labor migrations and poverty, knew the route as an escape road for Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl during the Depression. So “Grapes of Wrath” and the Joad family became burned into our guilt. So were Steinbeck’s phrases for Route 66: “The mother road, the road of flight.”

In 1946, a young composer and jazz pianist left Pennsylvania in a Buick convertible; Bobby Troup’s wife had a suggestion: “Why don’t you write a song about Route 40?” Troup was still thinking about that when he picked up Route 66 and headed for Hollywood.

Two generations of musicians, from Nat King Cole to the Rolling Stones, have since sung of going through Saint Looey and Joplin, Missouri . . . and Oklahoma City is mighty pretty. Meanwhile, Troup has joined Woody Guthrie and Merle Haggard as beloved balladeers of intriguing roads.

Years later, Sterling Silliphant, television producer and another East-West traveler, remembered the road when creating a backdrop for a television series. His “Route 66” ran from 1960 to 1964. It was about young drifters in a Corvette that was traded annually despite no visible improvement in the zero incomes of Tod and Buz.

Even though few episodes were shot on Route 66, it was the highway that mattered.

“It was a symbolic title,” Silliphant once said. “It’s an expression of going somewhere . . . the best-known American highway cutting across America. It’s the backbone of America.”

Beat author Jack Kerouac became another literary icon of the highway when he wrote of a thinking man’s lust for fast roads leading to a fine place and a good lady. The journey, the goingness should be the experience, the destination almost incidental.

Explains Snyder: “All the song writers, all the movie makers, all the writers who came from the Algonquin Hotel in New York to the Garden of Allah in Hollywood traveled Route 66.

“It was part of their life and they wrote from life.”

Snyder also believes that today’s Route 66 travelers remain impressed by those tales and vent their frustration with interstates by “transforming Route 66, this incredible slice of American history, into a destination . . . whereby driving the road actually becomes more important than where you are going.”

Snyder vividly remembers his first trip, his dad driving a 1946 Buick Roadmaster from Michigan to California: “My head is a collection of vignettes. The wigwams I never got to stay in. The road east of Flagstaff and being high on a plateau looking at the San Francisco peaks.

“And the mom-and-pop diners, and the farms, and cows that looked over fences and seemed perennially interested in the traffic. . . .”

Route 66 was christened in 1926. Sometimes dirt road, always awful traveling, it slowly enlarged to two lanes with progress determined more by weather than by traffic. Yet the road was vital from its beginning, the first highway linking Chicago with Los Angeles, with most state capillaries feeding into this national artery.

So Americans took to the road in their Model A’s and Studebakers and then their Volvos, braving back drafts from 18-wheelers and the heftier risks of french fries and medium-rare burgers sizzling in oil slicks.

With 60-mile days an average for flivvers with solid tires, it was hard driving. Single-file bridges, no shoulders and no center stripes made it damned dangerous.

Big bands played one-night stands along Route 66. Convoys of troops headed for World War II embarkation and desert training with Gen. George Patton made the road an olive drab ribbon.

In post-war years, Route 66 grew, was widened and smoothed into America’s Main Street, buzzing with people pursuing sunshine, new fortunes and Disneyland. It is by no coincidence that all Route 66 volumes--whether Snyder’s or Jack Rittenhouse’s 1946 “Guide Book to Route 66”--follow the highway from east to west, the prevailing direction of traffic.

It was President Eisenhower--impressed by the autobahns he had seen in Germany in World War II--who ordered a study that in 1956 produced the Federal Aid Highway Act.

It dictated a 42,000-mile spider web of interstate highways.

It scattered Route 66 and should have killed it.

But then came historians and myth keepers, dedicated to positioning history as Joseph Addison regarded legacies: As presents to the posterity of those yet unborn.

Thanks to these lobbies, a hundred places--with California and Arizona rich in such spots--remain where past energies of Route 66 continue to surge. Especially at dusk. Particularly where the only sounds are the flutter of discarded gas receipts and a freight whistle from 20 miles away.

Route 66 through California’s Cajon Pass once was a divided highway. Half has been shut down. Now two dead and broken lanes parallel the surviving side.

Here, off Swarthout Canyon Road, there’s a row of boulders and obviously cultivated spaces. In the ‘30s, this was a federal campsite shielding Okie migrants from angry Californians. Men were still insulted and beaten and tires slashed.

Others did not get this far. Out of money and hope, exhausted by heat and the endless highway, they walked into the boiling desert to die. It at least brought an end to something.

Through the pass to Victorville, rusted pumps outside gas stations rotted to their girders show prices of 23 cents a gallon. The main street through Oro Grande is a lonely lineup of a dozen dead stores. Amid such despair, logically, only the liquor store remains open.

And Doug Smith’s junkyard at Essex is stuffed with carcasses of cars, some dating to the ‘20s, that developed terminal problems on Route 66 and rolled no further.

Road ghosts populate Arizona.

Some Flagstaff motels still brag about being “American Owned,” as if that matters in polyglot 1992.

The Route 66 Post Office in Valentine, where America sent its cards to be postmarked every Valentine’s Day, closed three years ago. A biker murdered the postmistress for her purse and car.

Three decades ago, Oklahomans Mildred Barker, 67, and Vera Byers, 85, drove Route 66 to Truxton--a few miles east of Valentine. They still own, cook and wait tables at the Frontier Cafe, where the chicken-fried steak is equally durable.

In Winslow--as in Barstow and Needles--old Harvey House hotels stand as mission-tiled memorials to all those Harvey Girls who were forbidden to mingle with guests--mostly traveling salesmen. They married the drummers anyway.

Indeed, let us not forget Winona.

Composer Troup picked the town because, frankly, Winona coupled to Arizona is a much smoother rhyme than Two Guns or Holbrook.

Today, Winona is guarded by a closed bridge over a dry river and that seems to bode ill. But nearby is a newer, stronger span leading Route 66 through a cozy timber town of horse ranches, rural mail boxes and too many junked cars.

For those who grow clammy out of cellular telephone range of Los Angeles, there are a hundred Route 66 landmarks in the big city.

At route’s end, the Belle-vue Restaurant still stands at Ocean Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard. Then Trader Vic’s and the white-flanked Wilson’s House of Suede and Leather on Santa Monica at Wilshire. Also Barney’s Beanery, Hollywood Memorial Cemetery, the Eastman Kodak building and the Formosa Cafe near Warner Bros.

Like the old road they bracketed, these places exist as living curiosities.

But wait.

Late afternoon on an empty stretch of two-lane near Chambless in San Bernardino County, a Ryder rental truck rolls past Stephen’s Market. It pulls a flatbed trailer carrying a station wagon with Iowa plates.

A family is heading West with all it owns.

Route 66 is again for real.