Route 66
- Alternate meanings: New Jersey State Highway 66, Interstate 66
The route was not straight, but intentionally linked many small towns in the Midwest, Plains and Southwest. With its essentially flat course and favorable weather, the highway became popular as a truck route, thus contributing to the growth of that industry.
After the end of the Second World War, US 66 became the road of choice for returning GIs, and later, their families during vacation season. This sharp rise in tourism in turn gave rise to a burgeoning trade in all manner of roadside attractions from motels to frozen custard stands; Indian curio shops to reptile farms. It was changes like these to the landscape that further cemented 66's reputation as a near-perfect microcosm of the culture of America, now linked by automobile.
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2 The Fall of the "Mother Road" 3 Present-Day "Route 66" 4 Related U.S. routes 5 See also 6 External links |
In 1940, California writer John Steinbeck called the highway the "Mother Road" in The Grapes of Wrath, his seminal novel about the westward migration of Oklahoma's Dust Bowl farmers to California's San Joaquin Valley.
In 1946, jazz composer and pianist Bobby Troup wrote his best-known song, "(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66" after driving the highway himself to get to California. He presented it to Nat King Cole who in turn made it one of the biggest hit singles of his career.
The lyrics read as a sort of mini-travelogue about the major stops along the route:
The highway also gave its name to a popular television show, Route 66, seen from 1960 through 1964 on CBS. The show featured two young men in a Corvette looking for adventure along America's highways. Much of the show was filmed on location but rarely along Route 66. The show's theme song, by Nelson Riddle, was also a hit.
The death knell for Route 66 came in 1956 with the signing of the Interstate Highway Act by President Dwight Eisenhower. As a five-star general fighting in the European theater during the war, Eisenhower was impressed by Germany's high-speed roadways, or "autobahns." Eisenhower envisioned a similar system of roads for the US in which one could conceivably drive at high speed from one end of the country to the other without stopping as well as making it easier to mobilize troops in the event of a national emergency.
During its nearly sixty-year existence, Route 66 was under constant change. As highway engineering became more sophisticated, engineers were constantly looking for more direct routes between cities and towns. In fact, Kansas, with its roughly thirteen-mile-long stretch of US 66 slicing off the southeast corner of the state near the Missouri and Oklahoma state lines, was totally bypassed by the late 1940s as part of a quicker, shorter route to Tulsa, Oklahoma. The stretch remains intact as Kansas State Highway 66. One of the most notable reroutes came in 1953 when a new stretch of 66 more directly connected Kingman, Arizona to Needles, California on the Colorado River. The bypassed stretch through the Black Mountains of Arizona was fraught with sharp hairpin turns and was the steepest along the entire route; so much so that early travelers, too frightened at the prospect of driving such a potentially dangerous road either hired locals to negotiate the winding grade...or in some cases, to be forced to back up the route since reverse on most cars was more powerful than first gear. Bypassed too was the small mining town of Oatman, Arizona, famous as the honeymoon stop of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard after their whirlwind 1933 wedding in Kingman. Oatman still clings to its Route 66 heritage more than half a century after being bypassed. Later, in 1984, Arizona would also see the final stretch of highway decommissioned with the completion of Interstate 40 through Williams. Official decertification of the highway by the federal government came the following year.
Today, more than eighty percent of the original route and alternate alignments are still driveable with careful planning. Although a great deal of the original roadway was covered up by the interstates that replaced it or abandoned to nature, some long, well-preserved stretches remain including one between Baxter Springs, Kansas and Tulsa. The road through Oklahoma is relatively flat and straight, and it was on this part of 66 that two chemical engineers were testing a new gasoline from a Tulsa oil company in the late 1920s. The company car they were driving ran exceptionally well on the new blend, prompting the engineer in the passenger seat to proclaim that the car was "going like sixty." His companion looked at the speedometer and said that they were going more like sixty-six miles per hour. The combination of the highway number, speed of the car and even the fuel's specific gravity in the range of 66 led to the creation of Phillips 66 gasoline, a brand still marketed today. A roughly 160-mile-long segment in Arizona links Seligman to Kingman and is considered to be 66's best-preserved stretch. In California, where it is known by its pre-66 designation of National Trails Highway, travelers can drive a continuous stretch of approximately 150 miles through the blazing Mojave Desert between Mountain Springs Summit west of Needles (where the Joad family camped out in The Grapes of Wrath after facing an armed posse at the state line) all the way to Victorville. Another surface street stretch between San Bernardino and Pasadena retains its number as California State Highway 66. In Pasadena, 66 was known as Colorado Boulevard, the street on which the Tournament of Roses Parade takes place every New Year's Day. And should one wish to approximate the route via the interstates, it would be as follows:
Early 20th Century American Pop Culture
Winona, Arizona is the only town out of sequence in the list. It was a very small settlement east of Flagstaff, and might be largely forgotten if not for the song.The Fall of the "Mother Road"
Present-Day "Route 66"
Related U.S. routes
See also
External links