Route 66: The Highway and Its People
Susan Croce Kelly, Quinta Scott
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0806122919
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
U.S. Highway 66 was always different from other roads. During the decades it served American travelers, Route 66 became the subject of a world-famous novel, an Oscar-winning film, a hit song, and a long running television program. The 2,000 mile concrete slab also became a seven-year obsession for Susan Croce Kelly and Quinta Scott. They traveled Route 66, photographing buildings, knocking on doors, and interviewing the people who had built the buildings and run the businesses along the highway. Drawing on the oral tradition of those rural Americans who populated the edge of old Route 66, Scott and Kelly have pieced together the story of a highway that was conceived in Tulsa, Oklahoma; linked Chicago to Los Angeles; and played a role in the great social changes of the early twentieth century.
Using the words of the people themselves and documents they left behind, Kelly describes the life changes of Route 66 from the dirt-and-gravel days until the time when new technology and different life-styles decreed that it be abandoned to the small towns it had nurtured over the course of thirty years.
Scott's photographic essay shows the faces of those 66 people and gives a feeling of what can be seen along the old highway today, from the seminal highway architecture to the grainfields of the Illinois prairie, the windbent trees of western Oklahoma, the emptiness of New Mexico, and the bustling pier where the highway ends on the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
Route 66 uses oral history and photography as the basis for a human study of this country's most famous road. Historic times, dates, places, and events are described in the words of men and women who were there: driving the highway, cooking hamburgers, creating pottery, and pumping gas. As much as the concrete, gravel, and tar spread in a sweeping arc from Chicago to Santa Monica, those people are Route 66. Their stories and portraits are the biography of the highway.
celebration in Rolla on Saint Patrick's Day, 1931. More than seven thou sand people turned out for the occasion, which included dances, a parade, dinners, speeches, and the highway dedication. Missouri Governor Henry Caulfield took the opportunity to ask for creation of a state highway patrol. Avery, who by this time had weathered a storm of Oklahoma politics and was president of the 66 Association, reviewed the history of the route from the marking of the Ozark Trail. The whole crowd was treated
the construction was done with animals rather than machinery. "A lot of the dirt was moved by trucks, but the finish work was done with mules and horses," he noted. In Arizona, Bill Nelson remembered his father working as a cook for the road crews during the late 1920s. He also remembered, as a child, watching the teams of mules that were used to haul grading equipment across the northern part of the state. "They done a lot of work with mules," said Nelson, a leathery old boy with pale blue eyes.
fifteen dollars. "Sometimes we would do pretty good and sell maybe ten pieces. We'd get up before sunrise and put the pots in the fire. About eight or nine o'clock we'd get them out, and then we would walk across the pasture two miles, carrying the pots on our backs in a box, and sometimes on our heads." Occasionally, a buyer from Tucson would come to her village of Acomita, bringing blankets and shawls to trade for their pottery. "We would usually trade something to him," remembered Mrs. Leno,
tanker to customers who lived in desert communities outside Barstow, and by the early thirties he had graduated to operating the family station. "The Okies all came here, but they didn't stay," he said. "There wasn't anything here to keep them. We would see an old car with three or four mattresses, pots and pans hanging off the sides. You were never really in personal contact with them. Local police, ministers, and people like that would deal with them, but as families living in Barstow, no
tanker to customers who lived in desert communities outside Barstow, and by the early thirties he had graduated to operating the family station. "The Okies all came here, but they didn't stay," he said. "There wasn't anything here to keep them. We would see an old car with three or four mattresses, pots and pans hanging off the sides. You were never really in personal contact with them. Local police, ministers, and people like that would deal with them, but as families living in Barstow, no