Route 66, America's Immortal Way West

“The first requisite for immortality,” a wise man tells us, “is death.” Perhaps U.S. Highway 66 was pronounced dead most emphatically when a Midwestern state recently removed all of the familiar black-and-white shields from its roadsides and scrubbed the “66” designation from its official highway map. As an afterthought, the salvaged signs were offered as souvenirs to the public. So much for death. Immortality asserted itself immediately. So many requests poured in for the signs, state officials were obliged to order 3000 brand-new U.S. 66 signs to meet demand. Many orders came from youngsters not yet born when the nation hummed, throbbed, and pulsed from the Great Lakes down the Mississippi, through the Great Plains, across the arid highlands to the Pacific Coast. To Poet Carl Sandburg, Chicago was “Stormy, husky, brawling.” Nuestra Seora la Reina de Los Angeles is Spanish for Our Lady the Queen of the Angels. These places, ranking second and third in size of American urban centers, were terminals of Route 66 in its heyday. The city of the Angels and the “City of the big shoulders” are still number two and number three, although in reverse order. Perhaps an erroneous myth persists that Route 66 was merely the shortest distance between the only two points that mattered. But Route 66 was more. Much more. For a half-century of the automotive age, Route 66 was like an enormous demographic hourglass, pulling restless Americans in from the Southern pines and plantations, from the Midwestern granaries and grade crossings, from the Gulf and Atlantic seaports and sloughs, from the Appalachian hills and hollows. Whole, suddenly mobile generations funnelled in from all over, and pinched into the panhandles and trickled through the narrow neck across New Mexico and Arizona, to fan out into California, some to the warm borderlands, some to the Great Central Valley, and others, to be sure, to Los Angeles. And still others didn't go that far. In the 5 decades of Route 66's place in the sun, more than a million newcomers migrated to Arizona alone. Young and old, poor and rich, unschooled and learned, they defied description as a group, but they carried common denominators. By definition they were refugees from the status quo. They were willing to take a chance with life. They mostly moved by choice. Many came to play and go home, “back East.” But those who stayed embraced their fresh surroundings with the fervor of the reborn. They shared in the latter-day settlement of the great shining cities of the Sun Belt. Not without sacrifice did Americans wend westward. These first participating experimenters with an often exasperating highways system were also sideline spectators during explosive advances in communication. The saga of U.S. 66 was told in novel and magazine, over radio and television. It's true that travelers along Route 66 hit some cavernous chuckholes and drank some terrible coffee and braved considerable perils. But, as no migrants before them, the users of Route 66 knew who they were, and why. They soon would learn that their Medium was the Message. Meantime, their Road was the Reason. Mobility. In rural England, two centuries ago, few citizens in entire lifetimes ever traveled farther than a day's walk from where they were born. Even in early 20th-century America the exceptional person was one who journeyed far from home. Travel for travel's sake was considered a recreation reserved for the rich and royal. Only with the mass production of relatively inexpensive automobiles by the multimillions were great numbers of Americans set free to choose new homes, seek better work, visit national wonders, or hit the open road for the sheer heck of it. An unexampled mechanical wonder, the horseless carriage also transformed a nation from a federation of provincial homebodies to a community of unfettered spirits. The effects of physical and psychological freedom are not all measured or fully understood by scholars of the modern American scene, but we seem to share a sentimental and nostalgic appreciation for those brief decades when America en masse moved on. And so, in memory and motivation, Route 66 lives: “Immortality is the power to influence others, after others can no longer influence you.”

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