Route 66 Turns 80

This year marks the eightieth anniversary of the dedication of U.S. Route 66, born in 1926 and completed in 1938. What started as a link between Chicago and Los Angeles—a 2,400-mile hodgepodge of diagonal connections between farm towns across the Midwest and West—became a legend. Even half a century after the interstate system made it obsolete, Route 66 grips the public’s imagination like no other American highway. It has inspired a great novel, a chart-topping pop tune, a 1960s television series, and numberless road trips in search of America’s main street. Why?

For one thing, its roots ran very deep. Parts of it were mapped out over old Indian paths that later became wagon trails spanning the West from New Mexico to California. With the rising popularity of the automobile in the 1920s (and its affordability, thanks to Henry Ford), legislation was passed to improve old roads, making regional highways like Route 66 possible. This particular highway was the brainchild of Cyrus Avery, an entrepreneur who headed the American Association of Highway Development. Once it was mapped out and named, 800 miles of it were quickly paved (it was completely paved by 1938). Since the idea of automobile travel was still gaining acceptance, Avery and his associates took on the task of promoting the road, and Route 66 associations were formed in each of the eight states it traversed. Annual footraces along the route built public interest; billboards promoted it.

Three years after Route 66 opened, the country plunged into the Great Depression, but the highway grew in popularity as more than 200,000 Okies (the term embraced refugees from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas) took to it to flee the Dust Bowl and look for work in the promised land of California. Refugee camps sprang up along the road, and so did new businesses to serve the masses. John Steinbeck dubbed Route 66 the “Mother Road” in The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1939 novel of the Great Dust Bowl and Depression.

From its inception, Route 66 enabled farmers to distribute their products using trucks, which were beginning to rival the railroads as a means of moving commerce. The road deliberately connected small towns, which gave it its main-street feeling. During World War II it played a crucial role in mobilizing manpower to training camps and military factory complexes in California. The songwriter Bobby Troup, a Marine captain, was stationed in California and moved his family west after the war. His “Get Your Kicks on Route 66” was made famous by Nat King Cole and has been recorded by nearly a hundred artists, including the Rolling Stones.

In the postwar years, Route 66 came to symbolize California and the wide-open West, as well as small-town America and mom-and-pop authenticity—images promoted by countless postcards of palm trees and motor-court motels. American roadside architecture rose to high art along the route, as motels and diners competed for travelers’ business with ever more outlandish façades and neon signs. You could buy Indian jewelry, tour caverns, and visit a snake pit along the way. A few kitschy relics still survive, among them the 1939 Blue Swallow Motel, in Tucumcari, New Mexico, and the Big Texan Steak Ranch, in Amarillo, home of the free 72-ounce steak (free if you can eat it all in one hour).

Eisenhower’s Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 marked the doom of Route 66, bypassing most of it with Interstate 40 (the final stretch was bypassed in 1983 near Williams, Arizona). Though the road no longer appears on most maps, you can still trace the entire route thanks to preservation by aficionados and historians, starting at the intersection of Lake Shore Drive and Jackson Street in Chicago and ending at the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, California. Several museums along the way display vintage photographs and sell memorabilia (do a Google search for “route 66 museum” and you’ll find a slew of them), and there is no shortage of information, books, and maps for the curious (see www.route66guidebooks.com/maps). A Route 66magazine publishes four times a year, and Lonely Planet offers a guidebook to the highway. Even if you have no intention of ever retracing the whole route, happening on the occasional stretch of road with a highway sign that says “Old Route 66” is a thrill that touches a nation’s deep memory.