Photo: David Graham
|
Into the Heart of an American Road
By Elinor Nauen
A name can mean as much to a road as to a person. Frances Gumm could sing, but "Judy Garland" was a star.
|
A name can mean as much to a road as to a person. Frances Gumm could sing, but "Judy Garland" was a star. Of Route 66's many celebrated components, the first is the name itself. Route, as in moon and June—the crooning sound that sold a gazillion Tin Pan Alley hits. And then Sixty-six—the sound of wind in barbed wire. More fun to say than the pillowy Lincoln or Roosevelt Highway. Would Bobby Troup, who wrote "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66," have been "lovin' his baby on Highway 80" or "doin' it again on Highway 10"? And oh yeah, the alliteration: Mickey Mouse…Coca-Cola…66.
A name alone can't ensure greatness, of course, but 66 delivers. Its 2,400-mile route from Chicago to Los Angeles (by way of Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona) made sense six ways to Sunday, and the 1920s automobile boom created a need for better highways. But it took more than that to put 66 on the map. It took the American genius for promotion of Oklahoma Highway Department Chairman Cyrus Avery.
The father of Route 66 had two goals in 1926, when the route was authorized: to get his road paved and the word out. He branded 66 "The Main Street of America" on promotional brochures, postcards and maps. Over the next few years, he waged an advertising campaign in magazines and newspapers and on billboards. Perhaps the most extravagant promotional stunt was a footrace in 1928 from Los Angeles to New York. Dubbed the "Bunion Derby," it was won by an Oklahoma boy in 87 days.
Did Avery know that six is a perfect number in many ancient systems? Did he recognize subliminally that doubled numbers (the .44 and .22 guns, "77 Sunset Strip") are catchy and powerful? Did he consult his friendly local imam for an auspicious number and find out that in Islamic mystical tradition 66 corresponds to the numerical value of the word Allah?
Not exactly. As a member of the U.S. Highway System board, Avery's first choice was U.S. 60. ("Trouble? Nix, bro, on Highway Six-oh"?) However, planners from Kentucky and Virginia were determined that their new road from Newport News, Virginia, to Springfield, Missouri, get what they considered to be the more important number. After months of arguing, Avery gave in and grabbed 66.
Sixty-six. Those derringer-shaped sixes shooting toward the West set a tone that the road never lost. Like the Road Runner cartoons, with wheels of movement made of whirls and tails, the sixes laid sideways roll off into the sunset, a loop-de-loop carnival ride that shoots you out onto the long straightaway of the high plains.
Oklahoma is part of the Bible Belt, and Avery no doubt would have been horrified to think that anyone might affix another six to represent Revelations' mark of the beast, but temptation and danger were always part of the road's allure. "It had a dark side, a dangerous side," says David Knudson, executive director of the National Historic Route 66 Federation. "The accidents were horrendous. GIs were known for driving all night, falling asleep and running head-on into someone. The con people along the road, particularly in garages—those stories add to the whole picture of Route 66. All that took place on other roads, but not as extreme as on Route 66."
It was also a continuous carnival, adds Knudson. "Around every curve was something amazing. Not only scenery, but barbecue pits, always with neon signs announcing 'The best barbecue in Oklahoma.' All the neon of motels and diners, cafes, hotels. Most were come-ons to get your dollar. Python pits and freak shows where you'd pay 50 cents to see 'The world's most amazing snakes!' or 'the half woman-half man.' " The road was crammed with motels like the Coral Court and Wigwam Village, gas stations, wacky signs, steak-and chophouses, dance halls in railroad towns, tumbleweed and legendary tourist attractions—Meramec Caverns, the Totem Pole Trading Post and, later, the Blue Whale and Cadillac Ranch.
During the depression, 66 was the "road to opportunity" for an estimated 210,000 people who hopped into jalopies and rattled out to California to escape the dust bowl.
It was completely paved by 1937, just in time for World War II's military maneuvers and the war-effort factories built to take advantage of the good weather of the Southwest. After the war, hundreds of thousands of GIs who had no desire to go back to the industrial states headed for the golden winters of the Southwest.
America is so much about movement, and also about the promise of plenty for immigrants. It's all there in my own family. My Uncle Earl followed my mother, a war bride, from England to South Dakota after World War II. He soon married a local girl, and on their honeymoon Earl and Audrey toured the Southwest. "We were impressed with the lovely motels and their owners, who were always nice people who seemed to do nothing but collect the rent and take it to the bank the next morning," he recalls. They soon bought the Hiway Haven Motel and Gas Station in Hodge, California, 10 miles from Barstow.
"We moved up there in the winter," he says, "and the first night, Cajon Pass was snowed in and all the rooms were filled. A gold mine, I thought." But the next day, "things got back to normal—which was no business." Although Hodge was between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, few people stopped at their "single neon light in the middle of the black desert." Earl and Audrey soon bailed out for Los Angeles, where he spent the rest of his career as a professor of African history at California State in Los Angeles. But the highway stayed in the family: His daughter, my cousin Margit, now owns a flower shop on Huntington Drive, Route 66 in Duarte, California; her earliest memory is of playing in front of her parents' motel with American Indian children dressed in velvet.
The freewheeling days of the post-war boom soon came to an end, hastened by President Eisenhower who in 1954 authorized what was to become the federal interstate system. By 1970, nearly all of the original Route 66 was replaced by a four-lane highway, now comprised of Interstates 55, 44, 40, 15 and 10. By October 1984, the road was officially off the map.
The road widens and changes its numbers—so why the myth? How did 66 go from a practical transcontinental highway to an icon—a symbol of America's mythic past-with museums, associations in eight states and more than half-a-dozen countries, and countless books, magazines, Web sites, videos, CDs, calendars, coffee cups, T-shirts, watches—even a Route 66 Barbie?
The two romantic trails of America are the Mississippi River and Route 66. As the Father of Waters once held the American imagination, so now does the Mother Road. As Huckleberry Finn is the great book about the river, so is The Grapes of Wrath about the highway.
"Highway 66 is the main migrant road," John Steinbeck wrote in the 1939 novel. "66—the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map…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."
Most of the book describes a brutal, hardscrabble life. "The cars of the migrant people crawled out of the side roads onto the great cross-country highway, and then took the migrant way to the West. In the daylight they scuttled like bugs to the westward; and as the dark caught them, they clustered like bugs near to shelter and to water." Hard to see how this seemed glamorous to so many readers.
Jack Kerouac is another Route 66 icon, and On the Road is the book about 66. Early in the 1957 novel, Kerouac writes, "My first ride was a dynamite truck with a red flag, about thirty miles into great green Illinois, the truckdriver pointing out the place where Route 6, which we were on, intersects Route 66 before they both shoot west for incredible distances." That's it—his one and only reference to 66. Nonetheless, Kerouac and 66 somehow do belong together, with their similar spirit of "nowhere to go but everywhere." And he'd read his Steinbeck—he put his character Dean Moriarty in a Hudson, like the Joads.
Steinbeck's other son must be Bobby Troup, whose song was a hit in 1946 for Nat King Cole and has been recorded since by dozens of artists, from Rosemary Clooney and Sammy Davis Jr. to the Rolling Stones and the Replacements. Los Angeles was the promised land for artists as well as sharecroppers and GIs, and since so many bands—from big to country to rock—spent time on Route 66, it's not surprising that many songs refer to it. David Sanger, drummer with the western-swing band Asleep at the Wheel, toured for the road's 66th anniversary in 1992, playing gigs from Chicago to Los Angeles. "I took my van and a copilot and stayed on 66 as much as we could without being late for the next show," he recalls. "Everything that goes with 66—the song, nostalgia, the TV show—kind of drives each other. The music wouldn't have existed without the road, but now it's the other way round. The road wouldn't exist without the art." He has since produced two CDs, The Songs of Route 66 and the recently released More Songs from Route 66.
And don't forget Martin Milner and George Maharis—Tod and Buzz—whose Corvette in the TV series "Route 66" drove into the homes of baby boomers from 1960 to '64 (although, in fact, most of the shows were filmed elsewhere).
Punk godfather Richard Hell, author of the road novel Go Now, drove some stretches of old 66 out West not long ago. "The small-town museums are so good, like third-rate 'Believe It or Not' exhibits in old-time, seedy Times Square. They had a mannequin with very bad hair dressed like a sailor with his thumb out to memorialize hitchhikers. That sort of thing," he notes. "That's what the towns along the original road have been reduced to, because of course they prospered from the traffic in the old days, but now are near dead because of the interstates. The old two-lanes are still the only way to go, but it must have been something when it was all there was."
Residents along the old road—where 66 memorabilia keeps some near ghost towns in business—and nostalgia buffs are determined to retain it in the American consciousness. Preservation efforts have recently been rewarded to the tune of $10 million in federal money.
For those who traveled it in childhood or as young adults, the highway represents a time when "standin' on a corner in Winslow, Arizona," as in the Eagles' hit "Take It Easy," meant anything might happen. For the foreigners who make up 40 percent of today's travelers on the old road, it's what they imagine the "real" America to be, the opposite of franchises, divided highways and corporate theme parks.
Route 66 is 75 years old this year. It has outlasted the ravages of time and neglect to become more popular almost two decades after being decommissioned than in its heyday. It took a couple of great novels, a catchy song and a sporty car to show us what we had in our Main Street of America, and we haven't let it go. Route 66 has a name of greatness and has lived up to it.
|
