Route 66 - The Lyric Lingers On.

And Jackson Boulevard in Chicago to the ocean at Santa Monica was officially designated 66. My Jack was a barber, and a born promoter. When we established our home here, at that time the 'Main Street' of Clinton was not paved. Not many 'Main Streets' east were paved, and fewer west, so maybe as the concrete and blacktop came first to the towns and inched out into the open spaces, that's how Route 66 earned the nickname we always liked best, the Main Street of America."

Toll roads were a great fad in those times, and a powerful political movement pushed for national toll roads. Jack and the association fought that idea. He always said that free Americans ought not to have to stop frequently and pay for the right to use a public road and I firmly believe that it was the efforts of the U.S. 66 Association that insured free access to the roads of the West. We kept Route 66 free and clear, and that set the pattern for the other roads.

Each state organized a 66 Association, and as I recall, one of the first conventions we attended was in Williams, then just a wide spot in the highway, about midway across Arizona. Paving the road was the highest priority from the first meeting. Those were lean times! when haircuts were 15 cents, and mothers saved the 15 cents by cutting their family's hair at home!

But Jack and his bunch of go-getters always had the time and money to go down to the highway department or the state capital to fight for paving America's Main Street. By 1932 they could brag that the hard surface reached all the way from Lake Michigan to the Pacific Ocean no small accomplishment in the depths of the Great Depression. Convicts, men on relief, county road crews, and plain private citizens did the work. That's the way the country operated, back then. I guess you'd get arrested these days, if you took a shovel and went out and worked on a national highway!

She pauses to pour another cup of coffee. Gray of hair, in good health, Gladys remains active in Clinton organizations and devotes much time to straightening Route 66 archives. Now she says: Once the road was paved, the Association really had something to promote the quickest all-weather 2200-mile route from mid-America west. text continued on page 12By the way, Bob Troup is alive and well, and still getting his kicks from Route 66. He and Julie London, his wife of 17 years, reside in Encino, outside Los Angeles. Much too young for retire-nment, he continues to dabble in show business and songwriting. Although an optimist by nature, he doubts he will ever bring off a lyric so timely and indelible as “66.”

Very far...Burma Shave

Troup, as a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote the song “Daddy” which remained at the top of Sammy Kaye’s “Hit Parade” for an un-precedented spell. Fate scarcely allowed Troup to enjoy his royalties. In World War II, he served five years in the Marine Corps, including an extended tour of the South Pacific and bustling islands like Saipan. At war’s end he re-turned home as heir apparent to his family’s music stores in Harrisburg and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. But he disappointed his folks by opting for a show career. As he tells it: “I wanted to know if “Daddy” was a one-time fluke. So I insisted on giving song writing a couple of years. At the time there were two centers for songwriters — New York and Los Angeles, and L.A. seemed more exciting to me.

“So I headed west. During a lunch stop at a Howard Johnson’s on the Pennsylvania Turnpike my first wife said, ‘Bobby, you ought to write a song about U.S. 40.’ Well I said, ‘But pretty soon we’re going to pick up U.S. 66 at Chicago,’ which we did, and not far down the road she blurted out the line, ‘Get your kicks on Route 66!’ I said, ‘That is one great theme,’ and by the time we reached California I had half the song written.” Nat King Cole was especially fond of Troup’s “Baby, Baby, All the Time.” Cole encouraged Troup to finish “Route 66,” recorded it, and moved the song’s release ahead of 20 other finished recordings. An instantaneous hit, “Route 66,” according to Cole, was the song most people identified him with throughout his career. The Andrews Sisters, Bing Crosby, and others cut popular “66” versions, but “it was the song that people never stopped asking Nat Cole to sing.” Why? “Maybe it was just right for its time, for people on the move, down their road. But remember, it was basic blues. The Rolling Stones recorded it, and just a couple of years ago it was chosen one of the best current country songs. We were also lucky with the lyrics. I had to use ‘hip’ to rhyme with ‘trip.’ The slang word ‘hep,’ fell out of favor, and ‘hip’ took its place. People still get their kicks, so the words are in current usage. The place-names may now be symbolic, but motorists used to tell me they’d use my song as a road map. They’d drop a nickel into the jukebox and plan the next day’s drive through ‘Saint Loo-ey and Joplin, Missouri.’” Nor was “Route 66” a fluke for Troup. Thereafter, he wrote a passel of well-accepted songs, including “Girl Talk,” but nothing else he wrote grabbed the nation by its soul and never let go. “No,” says he, “I never get tired of talking about the song, and no, I can’t say the highway itself became a dominant influence in my life.

“As a matter of fact, after that one, one-way trip down Old U.S. 66, I never went back.”

Get Your Kicks from page 9

Dues and assessments bought advertising in the biggest Eastern newspapers and magazines, and published a brochure that was distributed at no cost to oil companies and travel agents and roadside businesses.

"Was it successful? I'll say! At the height of the campaign it was estimated that 65 percent of the nation's westbound traffic used Route 66 and 50 percent of the eastbound traffic."

Not realized at the time, the Association's success helped seal its own fate. One paved lane with turnouts, begat two wide lanes, which multiplied to four. Spoiled by faster cars and peeks at the future (as early as the early 1950s you could go 70 miles per hour - minus obstacles on the Oklahoma Turnpike, from Tulsa to Oklahoma City), and nationally the policy prevailed for limited-access, publicly financed federal interstates. In ultimate irony, the superhighways, grand as they were in scale and efficiency, bypassed the small-town business boosters who nurtured Route 66 from wagon ruts to blacktop boulevard.

"We fought the bypasses," says Gladys. "Especially where they didn't make much sense, we fought them. But mostly we lost the fights, and a lot of prospering little towns dried up. They were towns that helped a lot of people down the road and sometimes I wonder, if times ever get real bad again and people have to pull up and head west, whether they'll get very far without those little towns that had their own Main Street that was a tiny bit of the Main Street of America?"

Impelled by those memories of unthinking hospitality, Gladys pours yet another cup.

The wistful shadow crossing the eyes of Gladys Cutberth recalls the testimony of another eyewitness, Ma Joad, in The Grapes of Wrath: "I'm learnin' one thing good. Learnin' it all a time, ever' day. If you're in trouble or hurt or need go to poor people. They're the only ones that'll help the only ones."

If Steinbeck's saga stood alone, only the Okies and Arkies and Texies flooded the human channel called 66, and of those types, only the poorest. In truth, they numbered anywhere from 350,000 to 500,000. They were people driven off their land by dust storms and dispossessed by falling markets and defeated by chronic joblessness that idled 25 percent of the nation's work force. Many a so-called Okie was from Missouri or the Dakotas or Iowa or the big factory burgs up the Ohio. And some were right well-off, not even bothering to honk a horn for Steinbeck's notebook.

The Grapes of Wrath also might mislead us into believing that a mass of people got down Route 66 with nary a detour. From Chapter Eighteen: The Joad family moved slowly westward, up into the mountains of New Mexico, past the pinnacles and pyramids of the upland. They climbed into the high country of Arizona, and through a gap they looked down on the Painted Desert. A border guard stopped them.

"Where you going?"

"To California," said Tom.

"How long you plan to be in Arizona?"

"No longer'n we can get across her."

"Got any plants?"

"No plants."

"I ought to look your stuff over."

"I tell you we ain't got no plants."

The guard put a little sticker on the windshield.

"O.K. Go ahead, but you better keep movin'."

"Sure. We aim to."

About 150 words later the Joad family arrives in Topock, on the Colorado River, and then, "This here's California, an' we're right in it!"

As nomads will, tens of thousands of the Depression's offspring wandered away from 66 and other migration routes, and they coped with privation and prejudice wherever they found it. In Arizona, many toughed out the hard times and paid down on a piece of ground and achieved full and prosperous citizenship. Others never settled in one place for long laboring along the ripening edge of seasonal harvests as a lifelong lifeway. The majority that did press on to California were attracted to the Central Valley by cruelly misleading handbills. There they converted "Okie" into a term of affection, but unforgotten is the true pain and hostility and strife when stoop labor was 15 cents an hour, cotton-picking was 40 cents a hundred pounds, and four breadwinners competed for every job.

"I'm not an Okie!" exclaims an elderly woman of Bakersfield. Fifty years ago, at age 19, she had been a college freshman when the bank foreclosed on her family's West Texas home. "We lost everything in the drought landed in California without any money. But we found jobs right off. We lived in a one-room cabin, the five ofus children and our parents."

Free-lance Writer Thomas W. Pew Jr. not too long ago acquired a marvelous quote from "Okie Paul" West-moreland, a radio personality of Sacramento: "We were starved out in 1929, ahead of The Grapes of Wrath bunch. We went to Shamrock, Texas, to pick cottontext continued on page 16(Photos at left) For many years the tiny community of Hack-berry, Arizona, northeast of Kingman, felt the pulse of the great east to west migrations on Old Route 66. Today, bypassed by Interstate-40, life goes on, perhaps at a slower pace, for Postman Roy Buckley, top, residents Bill and Clara Brazell, left, and the faculty and student body of the one-room schoolhouse. Photos by Alan Benoit