Old U.S. 66 - The Wind-grieved Ghost.

BY: James Tallon,Lelia Bird Angell

In our day of total transportation and instantaneous communication, maybe this is the lonesomest place in Arizona. The bottom of Black River? A northward arm of Grand Canyon? An outback province of the Papago Nation? None of these. The corner where quiet meets remote is an abandoned stretch of transcontinental highway. Between Winslow and Holbrook, atop the vast Colorado Plateau, pieces of Old U.S. 66 wander and undulate across a mostly dry drainage of the Little Colorado River. Like a snake severed by a hoe, curved segments of the abandoned track lie on both sides of the interstate. The clock behind my belt buckle strikes noon. I turn onto an off ramp, identify a remnant of the faded asphalt, and park where a range fence barricades what once was a major link in the nation's highway network just a dozen or so years ago, the main tie between the Midwest and the West Coast. Under a bright unfiltered sun, the day is warm. I perch on the tailgate, fixing cheese and crackers. My dog sits on the old macadam, alert with thievish eyes, his tail swinging in slow time. I sail him a chunk of monterey jack, and he wolfs it down, all alone in the westbound lane. After our meal, we duck through the barbed wire fence and stroll down the relic road into the high desert. The view to the newer highway is soon cut off. No sounds of commerce reach across the gullies. We can't see the Gas-FoodLodging sign, or the Rest Stop - only the deserted byway, where a gloomy little wind toys with patterns of sand. I walk down a double white line, without care for public law or personal safety. Once a guy and his dog had to sprint to cross, but now there is no need to look left or right, up or back.

Nothing approaching. Nothing coming up behind. No clapping or blatting or fuming of diesel rigs. No rights of way. No shrieking tires of heavy sedans. No no-passing zones. No buzzing of foreign coupes. No Greyhounds, picking up 10 minutes lost at St. Joseph. No plodding hoboes, no optimistic college kids with "LA" crayoned on their cardboard semaphores, no Indian wagons crowding a shoulder, no slewing house trailers, no camps of migrants broke and broke down. No. None of that. Wildflowers thrust through the gray, oxidized surface. I walk right down the highway middle, and my pup meanders the brushy borrow pits along the road, where blownout tires are dissolving into rings of rotted rubber. In a chink of the blacktop, a tree has sprouted. All but invisible in a dry wash, a shell of a stripped vintage Ford rusts where it landed 40 years ago. When I kick a fender, a rabbit darts out, traverses U.S. 66 and disappears into a collapsed drainage culvert. That rabbit? He survives how many ancestors who never made it to the other side? I whistle my dog, and talk to him the way a man does, when he knows he is utterly alone. "Nobody's honked a horn at you for an hour, pal. No leash. No traffic signals. What would you think if the whole world was like this?" I swear, that dog runs over and plunks down on the faint center line of Old U.S. 66, and looks up and smiles and wags his tail. He shakes his head up and down, and utters a small, throaty bark which sounds very much like, "I'll vote for that!" But knowing the dog as I do, he is merely hoping for another handout.

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Not ton for 50 cents a hundred. Got a few dollars. Had an old Model T truck. Then we went to Gallup, New Mexico, to find cotton, but it wasn't there, or else it wasn't ready yet. Then we went to Coolidge, Arizona, living all the time on 'Hoover Hogs' (jackrabbits) and black-eyed peas, maybe some pork for side meat. We made 25 miles an hour, maybe a hundred miles a day going down Route 66, and every other road too, looking for work. We went back to Oklahoma every good Okie left more than once and tried again and failed again. Did that more than once until finally we left for good, right down 66, splitting it wide open for 6 or 7 days to Arizona. The wind was blowing, it was dry, the cotton wouldn't come up, everything went wrong. In the fall of '33 I went into the CCC camp, worked in the Grand Canyon on the Kaibab Trail. My dad was in a vet CCC camp. We made a buck a day and our board. It was some working for a dollar a day....

Not nearly as famous as Grapes is a privately published book titled When the Birds Migrated by Lelia Bird Angell. She tells how she was a professional pea-picker by the time she was 13. Now comfortably well-off, and living in San Bernardino, she wants the new generations to know how it was "back then:"

"My mother hated every minute of it. It was so hard to keep things clean and neat. She used bleached, worn-out cotton sacks to make bedspreads we had mattresses by then. And she would not raise the sides of the tents until the beds were made and every box was tucked neatly out of sight."

Wounds are healed; scars remain. Then and now, no pen portrayed that time and track so vividly as the master: "66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert's slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all of these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight."

A younger friend of mine contends that, to her, at least, Route 66 will always be "the father road."

"My father was a shoe repairman,"

she explains, "and in New England during harsh economic times, that wasn't a bad skill to have. He never had much, but it was always enough, and how he loved to round us all up and set off on a drive, the longer the better.

"My mother was an accomplished pianist, and she had instilled in me and my brothers a musical exuberance. Needless to say, before our faithful Pontiac rolled down that road, we knew the harmonic parts and lyrics for: If you ever plan to motor west Travel my way, take the highway that's the best Get your kicks on Route Sixtysix!"

That extraordinary hit of Bob Troup's, belted out by the Andrews Sisters and crooned by Nat King Cole, celebrated the end of gasoline rationing for an itchy-foot America. Recreational motoring complimented a dawning of general national affluence and leisure. Ancient Hupmobiles and futuristic Studebakers abounded; gasoline was 17 cents a gallon; the spare bedroom down the hall in the tourist home was giving way to the bungalow court and that phenomenon of Western byways the motel.

"We counted power poles we kids called 'em telegraph poles we made up games with points for identifying Chryslers and Packards and Pierce Arrows. Thank God we didn't learn firsthand why the section south from Chicago was cursed as 'Bloody 66' but it didn't take long to understand why 66 sometimes was called 'The World's Longest Traffic Jam.' And yes, we watched for the Burma Shave signs. To this day I know some by heart. If you don't know / Whose signs these are / You can't have traveled / Very far. Pedro / Walked / Back home by golly / His bristly chin / Was hot-to-Molly. I don't know if my father used Burma Shave, but he memorized, Don't stick / Your elbow / Out so far / It might go home / In another car."

It was the way we were. The Chicago Bears football team wore leather helmets, and 18 players split $1800 per game. The nation stopped every Sunday to hear Fred saunter down Allen's Alley.

"We accepted as Gospel the billboard that advertised the Giant Snake Farm, and my father promised that he would try to get a room at the Teepee Lodge -the one with the rooms shaped like wigwams and to stop at Meramec Caverns, Missouri."

It winds from Chicago to L.A. More than two thousand miles all the way.

Get your kicks on Route Sixty-six!

A new bed every night. Malts too thick to drink. Genuine Haviland china dinnerware, 32-piece set, $13.95. Car awnings, $1.69 the pair. The 12,000mile six-ply Allstate clincher tire, $10.95. Will Rogers Memorial. The guidebook confiding, “To a remarkable degree, the main highways follow the earliest routes of travel. For example, Ridge Road, connecting St. Louis and Springfield, followed the crest of the Osage-White River divide, whence it derived its name. Through the years it has retained its position as the foremost route to and from Springfield, first as a wagon road, then as U.S. Highway 66 . . . This route, more than any other, is the great transportation corridor of the Ozarks. . .” And across the oak and hickory copses and by the bluestem prairie, we sang on:

Now you go thru Saint Looey and Joplin, Missouri And Oklahoma City is mighty pretty; Men wearing real cowboy hats. Names out of dime novels: Shawnee, Elk City, Wildorado. Special seats / Reserved in Hades / For whiskered guys / Who scratch the ladies.

Continues the informant, “There were gasoline stations I forget the brand that handed out free color pictures of Western scenes all different and my kid brother had a contest to see who could collect the most pictures of Petrified Forest and the San Felipe Church in Albuquerque, and I drove my dad crazy by pretending I had to go or

(Left) Nearly one mile in width, ancient Meteor Crater was a must-see attraction on Old 66. Josef Muench (Below) Joseph City, to the east of Meteor Crater, also had its attractions. And the old painted katcina on the wall of a shop in Winslow recalls the days when Route 66 was a veritable treasure of roadside art.

Get Your Kicks from page 18 Else whenever I spotted that certain brand of gasoline."

Quoise silver jewelry at an Indian store, and I still have it - it's worth a fortune now." Baldface steers on unbroken ranges, and once, a coyote in the headlights. Navajo women in their purple tunics. The Continental Divide, with even Father getting his geography wrong - "All the water on this side runs down to the Atlantic Coast, and all the water on the other side, runs over to the Pacific Coast."

According to the Rand McNally atlas of 1926, the year 66 got its number, not one mile between towns was paved in Arizona. "But when we went over it I do believe it was all paved. Some of it had a crown as high as a church dome, but it was paved through.

Somewhere I keep the pebble of petrified wood that cost a nickel at Howdy Hank's Trading Post or was it Apache Fort, Buy from Hopi-Navajo Indians and take pictures of live groundhogs? Dad insisted that we take the side road to Meteor Crater 'where the shooting star struck' and maybe my childhood memory fails me, but I think we did spend a night at a Flagstaff motel that had rooms shaped like real Navajo hogans with dirt on top. Another thing - we never seemed to be out of sight of trains, and Dad and Danny would pretend to race them, until we passed the wide spot marked with seven miniature white crosses where a waitress at

Beneath the lonely vigil of the San Francisco Peaks there are tiny places like Parks, Arizona, where there is time for remembering a busier day when Old Route 66 carried most of America's tourists west.

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a diner told us a family of seven died. If daisies are / Your favorite flower / Just keep pushin' / Up those mph. Dad didn't race the trains after that."

Won't you get hip to this timely tip: When you make that California trip Get your kicks on Route Sixty-six! Probably those tourists went out one way from Flagstaff to Grand Canyon and returned another way to rejoin 66 near Williams. "Yes, I retain overpowering impressions of the Canyon. As a girl, I was afraid I'd fall into it. But I much more enjoyed El Tovar Lodge, its gigantic timbers and the coals glowing red in the stone fireplace. Probably the greatest worry we developed on the whole trip was, as we drew closer to California, the warnings grew more and more shrill of the dangers of crossing the Mojave Desert. We bought a water

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The decorations of humankind come and go, while the beauty of nature endures. (Left) Ponderosa pine in the Hualapai Mountains, overlooking Old 66 and the new Interstate-40. David Muench (Below) Nature's beauty contends with man's roadside symbols, near the ghost town of Goldroad in Western Arizona. Willard Clay

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Back in Peach Springs and installed a bug screen in Kingman and had a backflush in Needles. To avoid the heat they told us to drive the desert at night, so, along with all the other Easterners, we got up at 2:30 a.m. and lined up for gasoline. We had dressed in our flimsiest outfits, and I have never been so cold during a Connecticut blizzard. Mother kept asking Father, 'When is it going to get hot?' as we sped across the desert, and ha! we were in Barstow before sunrise.

Pre-Disneyland Los Angeles had to be seen to be believed. Before television and a whole series named for Route 66, the Big Orange, Los Angeles, boasted of downtown Clifton's restaurant where poor diners didn't have to pay and the busboys burst into impromptu ballads. Where stars of another sort struck the sidewalk in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater. Where a real estate office was a replica of the Sphinx, a photography shop was an enlarged camera, and a diner (the Dugout) preserved a dive bomber crashed into its roof. Where the Boone, Iowa, Society met every year. Where every high school heart yearned to dance at the Coconut Grove. Where the unemployed actors and aspiring leading ladies daily gathered in the Alexandria Hotel bar. Where the membership of a club was confined solely to magicians. Where sabre-toothed tigers were embalmed in a tar pit, and where one suburb took not only the name but the canal system of an older village named Venice. And where the Main Street of America vanished into the surf.

"We spent some days taking in the sights of Los Angeles and environs, and when it was time to go back home to New England, Mother asked Father if we were going to do Route 66 backwards.

"Father seemed shocked, and he said, 'Heck, no. We saw everything. I think we'll go back through Las Vegas. . . '"

Maybe it was like being born again, nine feet tall. Or perhaps it was the travel. The gawking crowds. The movie cameras. The newspaper headlines.

The why of it all, not even Pete McDonnold understood. He only knew he was hooked, for better or for worse, and that he never again would be truly happy unless he was wearing a pair of stilts, with a road inviting him to the horizon.

In 1958, for a fee of $1500, he walked on stilts for 3250 miles, from New York City to Los Angeles. For much of the demonstration Pete lurched right down Route 66. He was neither the first nor the last of the wild, weird, and wonderful celebrants of America's Main Street. Hobo Dick Zimmerman routinely (even when 78 years of age) would walk from California to Michigan pushing a wheelbarrow, to visit his mother, 101. Hobo Dick's contemporary was Shopping Cart Dougherty, who used to make 9 to 16 miles a day, flaunting a white beard and turban, all the while propelling ahead of him you guessed it - all his worldly possessions in a shopping cart.

Hobo Dick and Shopping Cart weren't the most unusual challengers and celebrants of the national road. High school baton twirlers marched along 66, breaking dubious records. One young plumber's helper brought his family from Iowa to Arizona in a surplus hearse. In a tour of the West, Mr. and Mrs. Fred Reed of Muncie, Indiana, and later of Phoenix, walked along most of 66, camping out with packs on their backs. Nobody possibly could guess how many Americans, from the Mountain Men to the Flower Children, considered Route 66 to be first and foremost an invitation for an extended stroll. A South African, John Ball, 45, jogged from coast to coast in 54 days in 1972. That bettered Marvin Swiggert's 1971 mark of 63 days, which had toppled the 74-day transcontinental run of Don Shepard's in 1958. According to the current edition of the Guinness Book of World Records the fastest time for a cross-country run is 53 days, 7 minutes, set by Tom McGrath of Northern Ireland. John Lees of England was just a few hours short of that time in 1972 but John walked all the way. Notable relay efforts were turned in by the Redwood Striders of California (3241 miles in 19 days, 12 hours, in 1972) and 14 Los Angeles police (3867 miles in 20 days, 6 hours, 45 minutes, in 1974). Last year bicyclist John Marino tooled from Santa Monica to New York in just 12 days, 3 hours, 41 minutes. Twelve years earlier Jefferson Spivey required 143 days to cover the same distance but John was handicapped by having to ride his Arabian gelding.

Failures as well as foibles compound the human experience. Desperadoes of the 1920s and 1930s considered 66 their getaway. Down through the years, as regularly as the seasonal influx, the Associated Press distributed stories warning of Route 66's dangers, from "the criminally few who mix with the tourist throng." Just as regularly, a national magazine such as Argosy would publish an article on "America's Worst Speed Traps," blowing the whistle on country cops and judges quick to extract fines from out-of-state motorists. About half the speed traps identified were along 66, and at the peak of the problem the American Automobile Association maintained a national reporting bureau for towns with zealous law enforcement. Evidence is strong that many a town along 66 paid its police and sweetened its treasury from the wallets of tourists more willing to forfeit a bond than wait two weeks for a trial.

One way to avoid the fleecing was to take the bus. Still is.

Russell A. Byrd was a bus driver. Still is. Now 77, he transports loads of tourists for the Gray Line around the homes of Hollywood stars and from Los Angeles for daylong outings to the San Diego Zoo. Byrd thinks he holds the record: 5 million miles without an accident. Twenty-five years ago he was given a medal in Washington for his safe driving. Along Route 66 Russ Byrd has been snowbound, mudstuck, and windwhipped, but he was never in a wreck attributable to the driver. He has pursued an entire second career since the publication of his book, Russ's Bus, 45 years ago.

"We built our own buses," says Russ. "We drivers would help put them through the factory, and that's how we knew to fix them if they broke down on the road. One schedule I followed for a long time left Los Angeles at 8 a.m. every Monday, with hotel stops at Needles, Winslow, Albuquerque, and similar towns, all the way to Chicago, and I took pride in never being late more than 5 minutes on either end.

"Just over the line at Oatman, in Arizona, there was a steep curve where the passengers got out and walked, and I went up the hill empty. Sometimes for better traction, I had to back up the hill in reverse. Later we had better buses - parlor coaches we named them that carried a relief driver and a porter, and was so designed that passengers slept in berths. We'd strap everybody down so they wouldn't jar loose on the bumps."

Cross-country busing continues as a more comfortable, inexpensive, occasionally adventurous option. Modern driver Jim Hatton swears that of a recent winter he negotiated a treacherous Arizona mountain stretch altogether hidden by snowdrifts.

"I couldn't even see the edge of the road, much less any pavement markers," he told a reporter later.

"How did you make it, then?"

"I saw an angel," said Jim. "Stood right there in that doorwell, shinin' like snow. Put a hand on my shoulder and said Don't worry, Jim, you'll get through all right, then disappeared."

Jim then asked the reporter, "You ain't religious, I take it?"

Reporter: "After an experience like that, I would be."

Jim: "So was I. Still am."

Sure, things have changed along old 66. To say otherwise is to deny the revolutionary alteration of technology and social mores of humankind's most eventful human generations. The United States has doubled population. Life expectancy in America has jumped 10 years for males, 15 years for females. The nation's total working force has nearly quadrupled. All within the 55 years that U.S. 66 was a recognized road, an institution, an element of national character.

From its initial designation to obsolescence, America's Main Street has seen its people adjust to: The Atomic Age. International Jet Travel. The Pill. Instant Credit. Agribusiness. Television. Synthetic Fiber. Computers. Plastics.

"We are the first generation ever," the sociologist reminds us, "absolutely the first human beings in the mass required to learn how to drive a 4000pound car at 75 to 85 miles per hour on a freeway." No sooner did we learn, we now are compelled to drive slower in smaller Yet mobility remains the catchword of our times.

"We change hometowns like our fathers changed suits," observes Neil Morgan, editor of San Diego's Evening Tribune and author of Westward Tilt, the first altogether book about the American West's extraordinary modern changes. "We trade careers like our fathers traded cars. We move to new houses as easily as our fathers put on a fresh coat of paint. Universal mobility has become part of the national heritage; Westerners are the most mobile people on earth." They have moved the country's population center west of the Mississippi; made California the most populous state; challenged Chicago and now New York City for the urban superlative. A Californian occupies the White House. Following the 1980 census, Congressional apportionment will flow again from New York, Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania and other Eastern and Northern states to Texas, California, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and Washington. When people move, they take their political power with them. Assisting the residency shifts is an interstate freeway system of some 40,000 miles, serving nearly all of the nation's 275 cities of populations of 50,000 or more.

Irony abounds. True, a new car in America today costs more than Columbus spent in equipping his maiden voyage to the New World. Mariners now navigate by satellite, The first powered flight at Kitty Hawk was only half as long as the wingspans of big modern airplanes. Trucks ride on trains; few people do. In 50 years, postage has increased 1000 percent. New waves of disadvantaged people haunt today's benefactors of Okie agony.

"The cowards stayed home; the weak died on the way."

So has bragged the surviving Western migrant since covered wagon days. The outrageous boast, in Neil Morgan's view, bears a legitimate germ of truth: "The coalescence of Western outlook has been induced above all by migration." In his book, Character of Races, Ellsworth Huntington develops the relationship between migration and natural selection. He documents the thesis that migrants exhibit superior courage, resourcefulness, and initiative, and that, after the stresses attendant to their migration have subsided, they contribute more than the average person toward human progress.

"Throughout history, the people who move have been stronger individualists than those who stay. From the established places to the more recently settled regions have flowed originality, independence, and energy. If the move is indiscriminate or tempestuous, it is likely to fall short of its aim. If it is motivated primarily by escape, rather than by search, it is less productive. If external, material goals lead to the move, it is less hopeful to mankind than if the search is for satisfactions of the inner life: freedom, creativity, and love.

"By these standards, the westward tilt receives a better than passing grade...."

Not only pain and exhaustion and greed followed those black-and-white shields stenciled with that familiar Double Six. Down America's Main Street surged originality, independence, and energy. Freedom. Creativity. And Love.

Lyrics from "Route 66" by Bob Troup, copyright Londontown Music, used by permission.

(Left) These abandoned gas pumps near Yucca, Arizona, are slowly disintegrating, but the Needles, above, in the mountains to the west, endure. David Muench/ James Tallon