Musings on The Mother Road
Route 66 is so much more than a road. It’s a dream. It’s a nightmare. It’s a myth. It’s a siren song and a cautionary tale. It is not just a setting – it is a character in the story of America. And just like America, as years pass, it reinvents itself.
The 1920s were a remarkable time in America. Relatively untouched by World War I, the booming US economy was the largest in the world. Optimism was the attitude and expansion was the philosophy. Henry Ford’s Model T had revolutionized transportation and Americans wanted to get off muddy tracks and onto highways. Streets and cow paths and country lanes were consolidated by an act of Congress into the US highway system.
Route 66 was established in 1926 and immediately captured a unique spot in America’s psyche It ran 2451 miles diagonally across the US, from Chicago to Santa Monica, California. For many Americans, crowded into eastern cities or stuck in rural backwaters, California was like OZ… a fantasy land of milk and honey with year-round summer and boundless opportunities. Like the Oregon Trail a century before, “The Great Diagonal Way” was a road of dreams.
It didn’t take long for the roadmap of promise to mutate into something much darker. The double-whammy of the Great Depression and the Dustbowl brought the national economy to its knees. Those that had jobs stayed put, but millions of unemployed workers and farmers driven off their land migrated seeking opportunity. Route 66 became the highway of desperate measures.
John Steinbeck captured this exodus in the American classic The Grapes of Wrath. Unlike the Biblical Exodus, this one didn’t end with most folks making it to the Promised Land. The travel was difficult and dangerous. People starved. Vehicles broke down. Travelers who had nothing found little support from the equally-poor people living along the route.
Steinbeck gave 66 its most enduring nickname – The Mother Road.
And just when the migrants thought things were about to get better as they approached the California state line, they were greeted with signs telling them they were not wanted. California put up gates and only allowed a fraction of the migrants through. Giant camps of destitute travelers formed at the Arizona-California border and conditions were brutal - hot… dry… no food… no hope. Many died. Route 66 became a road of ghosts, lined with graves.
Most historical descriptions end here, but there is another piece to the story.
Hundreds of thousands made the journey – and almost all of them turned around and went back.
In the 1940s, Route 66 became a workhorse… one of the major highways transporting the personnel, supplies, and goods that supported the booming World War II economy.
In the 1950’s, another rebranding occurred. Hip was in the air. Kerouac was on the road. In 1956, Bobby Troup wrote THE song – Get Your Kicks on Route 66 - and Nat King Cole made it famous. The hope of the twenties, the desperation of the thirties, the pragmatism of the forties… were all swept away. Route 66 was now about being cool.
Capitalizing on this new popularity, the producers of the television series The Naked City decided to do a character-driven television drama filmed on location along Route 66. The show had four main characters - Todd, Buzz, a red corvette, and the road itself. Route 66 premiered in 1960 and was an immediate success among young people. It captured the sense of restlessness and search for identity experienced by so many young adults growing up as the children of “The Greatest Generation.”
Their parents were defined by great challenges, great villains, and great successes - the Great Depression and World War II. In the early 60s young adults were faced with much paler opposition. The economy was booming and the Cold War was mostly being fought behind the scenes. Nuclear annihilation seemed to be just around the corner. The show struck a chord… two young men in search of meaning.
An interesting side-note… the producers of Route 66 didn’t want to pay the expensive royalties to Bobby Troup for his hit song, so they paid Nelson Riddle to produce a new theme song. Riddle’s song has piano solos that are reminiscent of Troup’s jazzy original. It was one of the first television theme songs to make it onto the Billboard Top 30 list.
Fans of the show were disappointed when Buzz (George Maharis) left the show in1963 in the middle of the third season. He was replaced with Lincoln “Linc” Case, played by Glenn Corbett. Linc was a Army Ranger veteran, recently returned from a war most Americans knew nothing about in a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map – Vietnam. Linc was trying to come to terms with his war experiences. He never really caught on, and the series was cancelled after the fourth season.
One can’t help but wonder what pressures were brought to bear as the hawks in the Johnson Administration contested with the hawks in the GOP over who could be the most pro-war. As American military involvement in Vietnam snowballed, there was little room for questions.
Cool kids grow up, all too often becoming middle-aged accountants. Route 66 faded from the American psyche after the tv series was cancelled. The song became nostalgia. Route 66 became just another road. And then it died.
President Eisenhower championed a new kind of highway, based on the Nazi autobahns. He envisioned a network of concrete superhighways that would allow rapid transport of military troops and equipment around the US. The Interstate Highway system was born. Much of Route 66 was replaced by I-55, I-44, I-40, I-15, and I-10. Route 66 was officially decommissioned in 1985.
Today the Mother Road is reduced to a series of scattered fragments dubbed “Historic Route 66. Travelers rushing along the Interstate will occasionally see sort segments off t the side paralleling the main road. Sometimes one can spot landmarks… old filling stations, motels, restaurants, and tourist traps like concrete wigwams and reptile farms.
Kingman, Arizona has preserved some of the Route 66 heritage. The old town power plant houses a Route 66 museum.
Art works evoke the magic of the road trip.
Joyful murals illustrate the upbeat mental image of the road made popular by “Get Your Kicks on Route 66.”
A display tells the story of the Dust Bowl migrants… including a full-size migrant truck, complete with chicken.
Not quite as old as the Idiots, a vanilla ice cream-colored 1950 Studebaker shows visitors what travel-in-style looked like. It sports an avant-garde accessory – a wind-powered window air conditioner that used evaporation to cool the air.
Idiot She reminisces about a long family road trip to the West in her childhood. They had borrowed one of these machines. Not far from home, She and her sister began to complain about the heat. When instructed to turn it on by pulling a rope, She yanked it so hard it dumped the reservoir of water all over the back seat. After cleaning up from the deluge, the contraption was relegated to the trunk for the duration of the trip.
Museums are fine… but the best way to experience the essence of Route 66 is to get out on the highway… any highway… and drive. It’s best if you have no specific destination or time table. You have to shift from “getting there” to being “on the road.” It’s not so much a physical as a mental journey. In fact – you don’t even need a road or a vehicle. ON THE ROAD is a frame of mind.
The longest remaining stretch of Route 66 today is a great drive over the mountains from Kingman to Topock, Arizona. It crosses Sitgreaves Pass and runs through the ghost town of Oatman. Today, one can still look out in wonder on the vistas that greeted early travelers struggling over the Arizona mountains and imagine the agonies and the ecstasies of their epic journeys.
What do you suppose Tom Joad would say about travel in the Belly of the Beast? You can almost hear him – in a young Henry Fonda’s voice - saying “If that don’t beat all!”
Even around Berlin, you can still feel them.