Why does Route 66 matter?
“Hi. My name is Jean and I’m from France.
And last year I went on a trip in the West Coast, and
we passed by Route 66.”
“Our trip was from LA to Chicago all the
way, taking the mother road, haha.” “We would stop at all the museums on the
way, we stopped at the one in Elk City, Oklahoma and we stood on top of the train.”
“I’m Fabian from Germany. Last year, I was visiting my family in California.
While driving on Route 66, I had to stop to take photos of the beautiful sunset.”
“The plan of the trip is to have no plan at all.”
“My husband and I went back and even visited Route 66 and Williams for our honeymoon.”
“Hey.”
Why is Route 66 not only famous, but internationally
famous? “Starting off Route 66.”
The road starts in Chicago, slides down the country,
and ends up all the way in Santa Monica.
Convert that distance to time and you get
a different story. In 1926, the road was commissioned.
By 1957, the Interstate Highway System began, and it bypassed the route by 1970. In 1985,
Route 66 was fully decommissioned. Route 66 has been in the shadows twice as
long as it was in the spotlight. But there’s still this energy around it.
I talked to Ron Warnick, he’s the editor of Route 66 News, which is an obsessive Route
66 site, and his articles just came alive with people reminiscing about Route 66.
“It was about Oklahoma Joes. It was this dive bar in Albuquerque near the University
of New Mexico campus. I put it out there, and pretty soon, all sorts of people were
exchanging their memories about the bar.”
This road has three distinct eras.
It’s got secrets, and surprises, and even a future.
The Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo has
a challenge: eat 72 ounces of steak and sides, in under an hour, and you get it for free.
I am going to switch to phone mode here. Alright. Before you get to a cardiac arrest-threatening challenge
like this, you actually have to go back more than a hundred years.
Before Federal highways, networks of largely privately owned auto trails, like the ones
on this 1920 Rand McNally map, were standard. Look at the chaotic number of options in the
legend. As Federal highway funding laws were passed
in the 1910s and 1920s, new maps planned a linked highway system, like this one drafted
by World War I General John Pershing. This telegram from April 30, 1926, from Springfield,
Missouri established Route 66 (they initially wanted the nice round number of Route 60,
but settled for 66). Cyrus Avery is called the “father of Route
66” for helping create the highway to promote his home of Tulsa and creating the U.S. Highway
66 Association the next year. That connection from Chicago to Santa Monica
was always a weird shape, and less intuitive than a transcontinental road. But it had lobbying
interest behind it and a good starting point with existing roads.
Texaco rated road conditions in maps like this 1934 one. As the legend shows, Route
66 was just a graded road in parts, basically flattened dirt. Look at the journey from Amarillo
to Glenrio. There’s still parts of Route 66 that look like this today. But they finished
paving the whole thing in 1937. To get all that work started in the 1920s,
the Route 66 association pushed stunts and did publicity that wouldn’t have seemed
out of place in the 1950s and 60s. When a transcontinental footrace called the
“Bunion Derby” was run, the association made sure a big part of it took place on Route 66.
But it was struggle that initially made Route
66’s reputation.
“We’re going to California, ain’t we? Alright then, let’s go to California.”
The Great Depression and Dust Bowl — a rut
of drought and erosion — sent families looking West for a better life.
Route 66 was perfectly designed to scoop them up, leading John Steinbeck to write that these
migrants “come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the
rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.”
Though records show that highways 60 and 70 actually admitted more traffic to California,
Route 66 had become the iconic “mother road.” And then things really got going.
Okay, I have a slight wait before I dine alone, so there’s time for activities.
That thing’s terrifying. “Oh, it is.”
This boot’s a metaphor for steak — and boots.
It’s time.
I feel like the only way to go mega-vi is to get that 72 ounce steak.
OK, see that big 66 on there? Amarillo, Texas, is a good example of a big
Route 66 town. They were already a transportation center.
This 1926 map — the year Route 66 started — shows Amarillo was a railroad hub.
After World War II ended, that existing commerce and Route 66 made it easy to add roadside
attractions. And it’s still that way today.
Over time, Route 66 did this for towns a lot smaller than Amarillo, too.
This is the middle of the video, by the way. Right now. Yeah.
It also did it for Vega, Texas.
Carolyn was nice enough to be my tour guide.
She showed me her house.
“This is Ben’s dad. And grandpa and me.”
“Oh wow.”
She’s very into dinosaurs.
“Armorage and spikes. And teeth.”
“And so where did you find these?”
“Out North of Town.” And she also showed me the Magnolia Gas Station,
which got started just before Route 66 became official. She actually helped restore the
space, including the second floor, where people used to live.
“OK.” “It’s a filling station, but somebody
said at one time they also sold ice. I’m not too sure about that part.”
“The kitchen was green. The bedroom was blue. See, I hung pans up there so you’d
know it was the kitchen.”
“Those pictures are neat because they show
the horses pulling the cars out of the water.”
To support all that travel and all those attractions,
Route 66 had a unique motel culture. Of course, even as it succeeded, Route 66
was limited by the prevailing prejudices of the time.
The Green Book was a traveling guide for black motorists to find safe lodging.
In Tucumcari, New Mexico, in 1960, listed options were scarce.
Route 66 made a culture, but it didn’t change the existing one.
And in the 1960s, just as the Route 66 road trip hit its peak, the road was already being eclipsed.
Today, Glenrio, New Mexico is a ghost town.
It’s not alone.
After the Interstate Highway Act of 1956,
new, better funded interstates were built for defense and infrastructure.
In Texas and New Mexico, you can see how I-40 followed Route 66 in some spots, but also
split away. This is what that can look like.
But it doesn’t have to.
“We had the privilege of designing and creating
two murals, one here in Joplin, Missouri, and another in Galena, Kansas.”
“We wanted to help revitalize and show off our local area on historic Route 66.”
“Route 66.”
“I’m the president of the Oklahoma Statewide
Route 66 association and I’m the chair of the Tulsa Route 66 commission. About ten years
ago, I sold everything I owned and left the country and I backpacked for ten months throughout
Southeast Asia and Europe. When I got home to Tulsa, which is where I was raised, I thought
Okay, I’ve seen all these amazing places, what does Tulsa have? Of course, Route 66
goes right through Tulsa. I thought, well, it’s been here the whole time, I haven’t
really paid attention, and started exploring it.”
“I’m Larry Smith and I’m owner/operator of the Motel Safari in Tucumcari, New Mexico,
on historic Route 66.” “Yeah, this is the motel I’m staying at.”
“I’d hit a wall with my job at the time and I noticed while I was driving 66 that
the road was using a lot of that older generation. It really needed the right people to own the
businesses along the Route.”
But saving Route 66 doesn’t answer the big
question: why it matters.
So I did not eat a 72-ounce steak. But I found
somebody who did. “This is the most excited I’ve been for
an interview since I talked to an astronaut.” “The story behind it is that I compete in
track and field professionally, I throw the shot. I was kind of injured at the time and
I performed really terribly and we were gonna drive through Amarillo. I heard about the
steak, so I’m like, ‘I have to have one win.’ And honestly, it’s not the fullness,
it’s the chewing. By the end I was like, I can’t chew anything else and I was drinking
as much water as possible to get it down. I’m glad I did it but I don’t know if
I’d ever do that again. I mean, I do a lot of ridiculous things. Hey, didn’t do well
at this track meet? I’m gonna eat a 72-ounce steak to prove to myself I can overcome something.”
The Big Texan Ranch isn’t on Route 66 anymore. The owner moved it closer to I-40 in 1970.
And yet it still is Route 66. We think of places on a map as dots. But maybe
a place can be a line.
“There was desert as far as the eye can
see.” “I was getting to the point where I needed
a break from seeing patients in and out. So I called up my friend from med school and
said, ‘hey we have this window, would you be interested in a road trip?’”
“Route 66 kinda became a character in our journey. It was kinda like the Oregon Trail
with all the challenges popping up, and the prize at the end was our new home at the end
of the highway.” “I had a flat tire. So I took my camera
out and took some long exposure shots of my car and the night sky.”
“So the graduation gift to my three boys as they exit high school is a 14-day
driving trip out West — St. George, Utah — to meet my biological family.”
“My great great grandfather, Ramon Negrette, emigrated from Mexico to a tiny town in Arizona
called Williams in the early 1900s, before Route 66 was there. He painted the house yellow
and it is still there today, the yellow house in Williams. We think my great grandma still haunts
the house? What I love about Route 66 is that it’s not just a road that’s going through
tiny towns and big towns in America. It’s a road that goes through people’s histories
and carries legacies of perseverance and hope, and I think that’s what makes it so fascinating
and so beautiful.”
Alright, that’s it for this road trip along Route 66. I’m about to read a couple of
comments from the last episode all about why every suburb looks the same, but first I just
want to give a little plug for the Vox Video Lab. In there right now I’ve got a special
video that shows exactly how I did one shot in the Route 66 video that you just saw. It’s
an obsessive, nerdy, technical breakdown and that’s the kind of behind-the-scenes stuff
that you always get in the Video Lab, in addition to supporting big videos like this one. Now
let’s look at a couple of comments. “As a European, it’s so weird to see streets
without a pavement/sidewalk. Where tf are you supposed to walk?”
Yeah. City Beautiful and Vox both made a video on
this in the same day. Yes. This is the craziest coincidence I’ve
experienced in almost 100 videos. We turned out to be video soulmates and we made this
video very very close apart even though both of us had been working on it for months. But
the take home point here, besides a crazy coincidence or glitch in the Matrix? City
Beautiful’s an awesome channel if you’re interested in urban planning. Go ahead and
add them to your subscription feed if you want more videos like that. That’s it for
this one, the next episode of this Road Trip edition of Almanac is the last one, and it
tackles how roads can shape public policy in really unexpected ways.