Route 66: The Most Famous Highway In The World

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American stories. Today, we’re going to dive into some of the history behind Route 66. Jim Hinckley is a world traveler and Route 66 enthusiast. Here’s Jim on how this legendary highway came to be.

00:00:25
Speaker 2: Route 66 is a fascinating animal. It is not our nation’s oldest highway; it’s not our most scenic highway, but it’s always had the best press in publicity from its very inception in 1926, and it has morphed into an amazing situation where it now has an international fan club, and it has come to serve as a symbol for American freedom, the quintessential Great American Road Trip. There are six associations in about a dozen countries that organize events, festivals, and tours. I work with several tour companies in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand that specialize just in Route 66 trips. But one of the most amazing things about Route 66 in the modern era is: the highway does not exist. In 1984, the last community, Williams, Arizona, was bypassed by Interstate 40. In the following year, 1985, Route 66 was decertified and removed as an official U.S. highway. So, the most famous highway in America technically doesn’t even exist. Route 66 connects Chicago to Santa Monica, California. Originally, the western terminus was in Los Angeles, and then in the 1930s, it was moved further west out to Santa Monica. And it was an evolutionary situation. President John Quincy Adams originally had proposed a nationwide system of highways, and it was kind of a stillborn project. The railroad eclipsed that, and so the idea kind of languished for a while. And it’s actually the bicycle. In the late 1880s, bicycles evolved. They went from the penny-farthing bicycles, the ones with the tall front wheel, the small back wheel, and became the modern safety bicycle. And in just a few short years, there was an absolute national obsession with bicycles. We went from having 24 bicycle manufacturers in the United States in 1890 to several hundred bicycle manufacturers in 1896. And so an organization was established called the League of American Wheelmen. They began petitioning and working with governments and lobbying for the creation of a Good Roads Movement, and with the advent of the American auto industry in the mid-1890s, this morphed into the Good Roads Association, the formation of True and other organizations. And there was a situation of what they called named highways: the Lincoln Highway, the Dixie Highway, the Jefferson Highway, the National Trails Highway. And they were attempts to create a nationwide network of roads, but it was still inadequate, and so over a period of about 15 years of political wrangling, we finally developed in the mid-1920s the U.S. Highway System. Americans have always had wanderlust. You know, Daniel Boone, the Cumberland Gap, people moving west. So, we’ve always been a restless people. A modern road trip again goes back to the bicycle. We had bestselling books. Mister Steff Ella Named Stevens in the late 1870s did an around-the-world trip on a bicycle, and that became a bestselling book. People were fascinated by the idea, and with the advent of the automobile, the automobile first came to being in the United States. Ransom E. Olds of Oldsmobile started tinkering with this in the 1880s. The Durya Brothers actually started producing automobiles for sale about 1895, but it was still a novelty. The Barnum and Bailey Circus in 1896 gave a Durya motor wagon top billing over the Albino, the Fat Lady, and the Bearded Lady. At the circus, Montgomery Ward said it was a fad you should take your children to see before it passes. Where people were interested in bicycle touring, now the automobilists became all the raids. People were taking trips, people were traveling, and with the advent of Ruth 66 in the U.S. Highway System, of course, this took on a new dimension with the automobile. Interestingly enough, it still took time. Even though we had a U.S. Highway System, Ruth 66 was not fully paved until 1936. The 1930s, of course, the Great Depression, and Route 66 and other highways became a road of desperation as people fled to California in the West in hopes of better opportunity. 1939, 1940, you had The Grapes of Wrath, the book and the movie that proclaimed Route 66 as the Mother Road. Then in 1946, you had Bobby Troop’s song about “Get Your Kicks on Route 66,” sung by Nat King Cole. And then in the early ’60s, we had the television program Ruth 66, the most popular television program of the time, The Lucille Ball Show. There was a three-part episode where Desi and Lucy drove from New York to California, and a lot of this they took, and they were on Route 66. So, the road always had the best press in publicity, and if you fast forward to the modern era, I was very privileged to listen to a fellow from the Czech Republic talk about Route 66. And Zenik is the founder of the Czechisvilckey in Rid 66 Association, and he talked about growing up in a communist country, listening to Radio Free American and watching bootleg copies of movies like Easy Rider, which was filmed on UD 66 and Route 66. The motorcycle, Harley-Davidsons, all came to symbolize a freedom; and, as he put it, for his generation, Route 66, the road trip—the American road trip—came to symbolize freedom the way the Statue of Liberty had done for a previous generation. Anywhere from 60 to 75 percent of the travelers on Route 66 are from other countries, and there are international associations all along the road. For example, in the little town of Elkhart, Illinois, there’s a bank that was built in 1909, and the town is pretty much a ghost town. It has one block. This beautiful bank was acquired by Peter Neuhouse Kneehouse, and he’s a Dutch hydraulic engineer who lived in South Africa for many years. He’s a woodworker by hobby, and his wife is a mural artist. They fell in love with Route 66. They bought this bank, they renovated it, and they created the Wild Hair Cafe, a delightful little place. In King in Arizona, there’s an old 1939 motel, the El Trovodor, and like many old motels, it became a flophouse and a literal crack house—just horrible place. And a gentleman from Israel, passionate about Route 66, has bought and renovated the hotel. You have people buying old motels and old cafes and renovating them. You have a younger generation that’s walking away from corporate jobs, wanting more out of life, more quality, so they’re opening businesses on Route 66. There was one family. They had a fairly decent job. He worked for an oil company, twenty six figures a year, and it was just a soul-crushing job. And they took the Route 66 trip. They fell in love with the highway, the culture of the people. He quit. He walked away from it all, bought a 1939 motel in Too Can Carry, New Mexico. And he told me what, during an interview, he said, “I’ve never worked this hard in my life for so little money, and I’ve never been this happy.” He was meeting people from all over the world and doing something he enjoyed. I’ve traveled the road off and on since 1959. And most of my life has been tied to this thing. But it’s just astounding what the road has become. A great example is 2018. I was very privileged to speak at the second European Festival at 66 Festival in Zlynn, the Czech Republic, and it was surreal. It was. It was a quintessential small-town American event, a ZZ Top tribute band, and when the band wasn’t playing, they were playing country music: Hank Williams and Marty Robbins. And he had a cruise night drive: people driving ’70 Ford pickups and ’57 Chevies, and it was an American celebration, a Read 66 celebration—20,000-plus people from ten countries, including Brazil. And here I am, and it feels totally American, but I’m in a place where I can’t understand anybody, read anything, and I have no idea what I’m needing. It’s just really astounding what this road has become.

00:09:28
Speaker 1: And thanks to Jim Hinckley for his work on the piece, and you can find more of Jim’s work at JimHinckley’sAmerica.com. And by the way, it’s just a story of so many things, but in the end: movement and freedom, and human freedom, and we’re moving people. We came to this country, many of our parents, and grandparents, and great-grandparents from other places. The story of Route 66 here on Our American Story.