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From Primedia Publications

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The Road to Yesterday
Route 66, which recently turned 75, was "America’s Main Street" and its "Mother Road" until interstates replaced the last bit of it in 1984. But the states that it ran through refuse to let Route 66 fade away.

By David H. Neal


	A journey down Route 66 is more than just a trip down a dusty old road—it's a ride into the past.

Like just about everybody who traveled Route 66 as a kid, I have special memories of car trips on it. I'd ride with my parents from our home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, into Texas and Arizona. The thunka-thunk of tires rolling over the concrete highway's joints, the marble reflectors of "66" looming up in the headlights, Burma Shave rhymes and the garish neon lights of the roadside tourist traps—all became the stuff of fond memories for me and countless others.

Such childhood recollections are something Angel Delgadillo hears all the time. "It's like a recording—'when I was a little boy' or 'I was a little girl'—I've heard it thousands of times," he says. Delgadillo, a retired barber, turned his barbershop in Seligman, Arizona, into a Route 66 museum and curio shop. Next door, his brother Juan owns the Snow Cap Drive-In, a famous Route 66 eatery still feeding travelers "Dead Chicken" and other road cuisine. Over the years, the Delgadillos have become almost as legendary as the road itself.

US Route 66 is very popular for a road that no longer officially exists. First given its official double number in 1926, it was decommissioned in 1984 when Interstate 40 bypassed its last Route 66 town, Williams, Arizona. But Angel refused to let the old road die. In 1987 he launched the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona to promote the highway and the businesses that depended on it. Other Route 66 states quickly followed his lead and formed their own associations. Even Mexico, Canada, Japan and several European countries have Route 66 organizations.

Arizona has the honor of having the longest remaining stretch of the old highway, 158 miles from Ashfork, just east of Seligman, to Topock at the Colorado River, designated by the state as Historic Route 66. That's only about seven percent of the entire road, which once stretched over 2,248 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles, dropping south from Chicago to St. Louis, then sweeping westward across the prairies of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Avoiding the Rockies (but climbing up over the Black Mountains), it crossed the high desert of New Mexico and Arizona and cut through the blistering Mojave Desert to the Pacific. More than just another highway, it had a life of its own and became a destination in itself.

In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck called Route 66 the "Mother Road" and sent the Joad family down it to the promised land of California. The Joads represented the thousands of "Okies" who used US 66 to flee the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. The Mother Road collected an estimated half-million refugees from busted factories and dried-up farms in the East, Midwest and South, funneled them through New Mexico and Arizona and delivered them to the beaches of Santa Monica, California. The journey wasn't an easy one in those days. Not completely paved until 1938, US 66 was in some places as rough as any road in the country, and spare tires were a necessity.

"Whole families were migrating with all of their worldly treasures piled high in one or two trucks and cars," says Joy Nevin, who operated a trading post with her husband on Route 66 near Holbrook, Arizona. "Many broke down along the way or asked for a tank of gas to get them to the next town." Locals called the road "bloody 66" because of frequent accidents, she remembers.

World War II brought jobs for all but rationing of tires and gasoline, and instead of refugees the Mother Road carried America's sons to war and then home again. Delgadillo recalls the long military convoys that passed through Seligman when he was a boy. Then the post-war economic boom made Americans prosperous and gave them new, high-powered cars and paid vacations. Travel became recreation instead of a means of survival. In 1946, singer Nat King Cole made Bobby Troup's "Get Your Kicks on Route 66" into an anthem as legions of Americans hit the road, turning 66 into "The Main Street of America." The tourists needed services, and thousands earned their livings filling that need. Motor courts, mom-and-pop cafes and funky roadside attractions like rattlesnake gardens sprang up like weeds.

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David H. Neal grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, pretty near the middle of Route 66.

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