HISTORY : Miles of Memories on Route 66 : The road is cracked and the interstate has bypassed it. But many still gather to motor back and recapture the romance of the highway.

Robert Waldmire has traveled Route 66 end to end more times than he can count. He drove to the annual gathering Saturday of the California Historic Route 66 Assn. from Hackberry, Ariz., in his orange Volkswagen bus, “my mansion on wheels,” which he has decorated with hand-painted maps and pasted with stickers and postcards--66 postcards, of course.

Waldmire was at the group’s meeting at the Aztec Hotel in Monrovia (on Route 66, of course) to sell his pen-and-ink drawings of the highway, the fruits of four years traveling and drawing its interconnected roads.

His father invented the corn dog on a stick, he says, and sold them from a drive-in in Springfield, Ill., that in 1991 was inducted into the Route 66 Hall of Fame. “I guess I inherited my mom and dad’s intermittent intertwining with the route,” he said.

Opened in 1926, Route 66 was the road Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl migrants traveled during the Depression and it was the main artery for troop movement during World War II. It was America’s first paved interstate highway, beginning near Lake Michigan in Illinois and ending at the Santa Monica Pier.

It is now just a stretch of road, completely bypassed by larger highways in 1984, but immortalized by songs and in the popular 1960s “Route 66” television series about two young men on a continual road trip.

For the 300 or so roadside worshipers sitting behind tables of Route 66 T-shirts and information pamphlets Saturday, the old interstate is more than miles of concrete, cracked or buried in places after years of official neglect.

It’s a journey they took many times years ago, a jaunt they still take, and it represents the history of American highway glory, car culture and family-owned motor hotels painted in pastels. And memories.

“Petrolania,” Bob Lundy calls it. A derivative of petrol and mania, he says it is a “generic name for memorabilia associated with vehicles.”

In the Route 66 museum he founded in Rancho Cucamonga, there is a late 1950s Phillips 66 gas pump, set at 19.9 cents a gallon. There are old auto parts and scenes along its San Bernardino County stretch.

Representatives from the Fontana Preservation Society proudly tell about the original orange juice stand they restored in a corner of a Wal-Mart parking lot along Route 66. It is a bright orange ball with holes for windows and a door.

Assn. President Geoffrey Willis wants the decaying buildings along the road restored and more road markers designating the route.

“The romance of the road is what it makes us do,” Willis said. “The whole point is to get off the highway, slow down and pay attention to what’s around you.”