Arizona's 'New' Route 66.

Just about the last long stretch of Old U.S. 66 has been eliminated, with the opening of an 80-mile portion of Interstate-40 in northern Arizona. The new alignment is 20 miles shorter than the old.... We all are aware, if we're experienced enough or youthfully perceptive, that Old Route 66 is gone forever. As Novelist Thomas Wolfe told us, “You can't go home again,” and Thomas might have added truly, “Not only home, but the way back home no longer exists.” The road by which so many of us Americans literally and figuratively “left home,” now wanders forlorn and nameless through prairie railheads that have just about dried up and blown away now forms a quaint 90-degree turn approaching a country bridge in Missouri... now mocks a gaping storefront in Arizona's “beautiful downtown Winona” now delineates a side street of half a hundred seedy neighborhoods now develops asphaltic acne as it languishes along the geometric off ramps of the still unpeopled Mojave Desert of California now tumbles down the gulches and hikes up the ridges of our ever-evolving dreams now echoes with scraps of nostalgic verse and frames with fading view, our yesterday poems and prayers.

Change of unexampled magnitude has overtaken us all as individual women and men, within a nation, of a world. No cultures since the Creation or in the 800 generations of so-called civilization have been obliged to accept so quickly so much raw, revolutionarychange. Our forbears over millenia adapted to fire, to tools, to the wheel, to pottery, to agriculture. Each, of itself, in a thousand years, a wrenching social change.

Consider our own abbreviated moment to cope with convulsions of brain and body-bending change:

And by no means completing the list, we have become humankind's first generation of operators of motor vehicles speeding along a freeway. For example, the New Route 66.

Imagine. You and I. We are ballyhooed as the star attractions for the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. Let's say the fair promoters have provided us with a three-mile segment of the brand-new I-40 which now connects Seligman and Kingman, Arizona. Let's throw in a couple of standard overpasses and maybe a modern cloverleaf, plus one sprawling Gas-Food-Lodging-Telephone-Rest Stop. With grandstands.

We sell tickets. Simply to let the St. Louis fairgoers watch us accelerate our Mustangs and K cars and Camaros along the straightaways and maneuver the whoop-de-dos and nonchalantly switch lanes among the roaring 18wheelers. You and I would become millionaires and heroes and daredevils and household names. Because what else of the modern world could so engage the 1904 imagination? Even today, we can't all rocket to the moon's Tranquility Base or cure polio with a sugar cube or come to terms with thermonuclear threat. But each of us, if of reasonably sound mental, physical, and economic circumstance, can go winging in our own set of wheels, down the wonderfilled byways of life. The ultimate phantasmagoria: personal unfettered transportation.

And always, change within change. During the coming and going of OldRoute 66 Eastern cities such as Washington, Baltimore, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago were transformed into megalopolises. But during the completion of New Route 66, every one of the nation's fastest-growing metropolitan areas were in the West and South. St. Louis's symbolic arch looks west, to the stunning skylines of Oklahoma City and Springfield and Tulsa and Amarillo. In Albuquerque, Ernie Pyle's country cottage is a branch library downtown. Over the span of a decade, reports the Census Bureau, Phoenix, San Diego, and Greater Santa Ana each have added 500,000 people to their populations. In that same time, Arizona has enjoyed (if that's the word!) the second largest growth rate in the nation 52.9 percent. The 1980 census reports a net increase for the state of almost a million residents.

From sea to shining sea, America the Most mobile. Thank God that so much survives: spacious skies, waves of grain, mountain majesties, fruited plain, liberty in law, good with brotherhood, thine alabaster cities gleam.A thoroughfare for freedom beat Across the wilderness.

It was a journey west by Katherine Lee Bates which inspired our uplifting lyric nearly 90 years ago, but no Federal Road Act came into being until 1916, and some emerging Western states waited another decade to establish their state highway departments (Arizona, 1927). The Federal Motor Vehicle Highway System was not formalized until the 1930s. The “thoroughfare for freedom” proposed by an Ohio industrialist in 1937 was a superhighway 8 lanes wide 4 lanes for cars, 4 for trucks and buses. A year later another futurist foresaw 9 mighty roads, each 200 feet wide, 3 of them running east and west, and 6 slicing north and south, with a gigantic airdrome at every terminus and intersection. Designer Norman Bel Geddes saw the freeways coming, but equipped with magnetized slots to fetch the cars along at a hundred miles per.

Alas, tomorrow was cancelled. By World War II's drain of personpower and money. Not until 1956 was there a means devised: the Highway Trust Fund, matching federal and state funds, generally on a 90 to 10 basis. Now, a quarter of a century later, 94 percent of the planned 42,500 miles of the interstate highway system is open to traffic. Cost: $76 billion. Result: freeways amount to 1 percent of the nation's road miles, and carry 20 percent of the traffic.

Your favorite flower...

On Earth are 300 million cars. One-third perk along in America. Cars are born twice as fast as babies. Every American alive today could sit in the front seats of America's cars (and some Sundays it seems they do). Our landless second homes. Our mobile living rooms. Our stereophonic spaceships. Our marvelous mounts that put us on a par with the incarnated cowboys who saddle up Macks and Reos and Peterbilts. Nor are the skies not cloudy all day. From the Discouraging Word Department comes news that 1 mile in 10 of our proud interstates now requires resurfacing or rebuilding. Nobody told us paradise was perfect, did they?

Change within change.

Numbers alone chart the transformation of Old Route 66 to Interstate-10 (Los Angeles to San Bernardino); Inter-state-15 (San Bernardino to Barstow); Interstate-40 (Barstow to Oklahoma City); Interstate-44 (Oklahoma City to St. Louis); and Interstate-55 (St. Louis to Chicago). Sweet justice . . it took 5 interstates to supplant our 66!

Time was, Route 66 wended 376 miles across Arizona from Lupton, bordering the sister state of New Mexico, to California's river portal at Topock. Three-hundred-and-seventy-five-million dollars later, the distance has been reduced to 359 miles. The "New Route 66" carries 6000 vehicles a day, 3 cars in 5 from outside Arizona. More than 1 million cars a year. More than 3 million people annually discover that "New Route 66" in its length across Arizona is near to or higher than 5000 feet in altitude. Still married to the railroad, the freeway swaps sides with the Santa Fe seven times across the state.

Yet change. The observatory that discovered the planet Pluto still prospers at Flagstaff, but the Super Chief has come and gone. The "petrified forest" that once was crushed for grinding powder is now a National Park. The price of gasoline has gone from nothing to something, while the Colorado River acquired a stopper in 1935 (thereby assisting in the transmutation of an orange grove into Disneyland). The gourmet meals and gritty gals of the Harvey House at Winslow have crossed the Great Divide, but one wonders how the Okies would have fared, armed with Master Charge, through a gauntlet of Denny's Restaurants and Holiday Inns and Tony the Tigers.

That new piece of road . . . not really Old Route 66 but properly I-40 . . . between Seligman and Kingman reveals how the ray of human progress abruptly has bent, as through a prism. We who have loved and lived Arizona for most of our days freshly remember how it was to wheel out of Seligman on the two-lane across Aubrey Valley, to reach a hilltop for a fleeting peek at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, to stop for a throat-freezing beer at a cluttered stone gas station at Peach Springs, to negotiate the purchase of one of the last baskets woven by the last basket maker of the Hualapai Indian Nation, to look for the lithic clef which inspired the naming of the Music Mountains. Only a finger snap in time ago, we needed more than a Jeep to traverse that back-of-the-moonscape across Cottonwood Wash beneath the Peacock Range. To explore that lay of land as large as some Eastern states, we needed a guide, preferably piloting a helicopter.

The planet has turned 10 thousand times, and a symbolic measure of our generation's awful change is the drive from Seligman to Kingman.

An air-conditioned whoosh, in a bit more than an hour.

Bookshelf

By Mary Mary Lu Moore Inquiries about any of these titles should be directed to the book publisher not ARIZONA HIGHWAYS.

BEALE'S ROAD THROUGH ARIZONA. By Eldon G. Bowman and Jack Smith. Flagstaff Corral of Westerners, Rt. 4, Box 739, Flagstaff, AZ 86001. 1979. 27 р. $11.00, softcover. For their first publishing venture into a series of limited editions on Arizona and Western history, the Flagstaff Corral has selected a short, general overview of the first federally funded highway in the Southwest. Beale's Road was closely paralleled by the tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad and Route 66. Lt. Edward F. Beale's perseverence in re-connoitering and supervising construction of this road and his experiment with North African camels are sketched, as are the geography of the roadway through Arizona and histories of some of the emigrants who traveled it. This expensive but nice keepsake contains a brief bibliography and several sepia photographs, but is in need of a good map.

TO THE FOOT OF THE RAINBOW. By Clyde M. Kluckhohn. Rio Grande Press, Inc., Glorieta, NM 87535. 1980. 280 p. $25.00, hardcover; $15.00, soft-cover. Young Clyde Kluckhohn, later a dis-tinguished anthropologist, came from Princeton University to New Mexico to regain his health. His adventures on foot and horseback through the Four Corners region, his visit to Rainbow Bridge, and his observations on people and surroundings are as interesting and almost as pertinent now as they were when he first published them in 1927.

Rio Grande Press first republished Kluckhohn's essay in 1967. To it were added an index, a short but good intro-duction, and a lively endpaper map. Seeking to improve upon that edition, in 1980 Rio Grande Press added color and black and white photographs, a new publisher's preface, an essay on the history and geology of the Rainbow Bridge country by Stephen Jett, a bib-liography, and information on tours of the Lake Powell region. They have also changed the format from 6 x 9 to 81/2 x 11 inches. Jett's introduction is an im-portant addition, and the bibliography and most of the pictures are helpful. However, readers of Kluckhohn's en-during narrative will find a jarring note in pictures of motels, dining rooms and marinas, and in advertisements for Glen Canyon tours. Once again, the old adage pertains. Newer is not always better.

HO FOR CALIFORNIA! WOMEN'S OVERLAND DIARIES FROM THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY. Edited & Annotated by Sandra L. Myres. Hunt-ington Library, San Marino, CA 91108. 1980. 314 р. $20.00, hardcover. Whether by the Panama Route, the California and Oregon trails or the southwestern trails through Arizona, immigrants by the thousands journeyed to California and Oregon in the mid-1800s. A number of the more observant and literate kept articulate diaries of their travels, among them four hardy women, none of whom fits the stereo-type of the long-suffering trail drudge. Their accounts differ with the variation in geography and the participants, yet they are similar in perceptions of the hardships and monotony.

Dr. Myres gives a short history of each route traversed. In her introduction she dispels the notion that westering women's roles were narrow, rigid and unpleasant. There are numerous foot-notes, an excellent and extensive bibliography, a good index, and a few black and white illustrations and photographs. Here is a substantive new addition to the writings on the Westward Movement.

ALL THE SOUTHWEST. By Thomas B. Lesure. 2nd Rev. Ed. Harian Publications, Floral Park, NY 11001. 1979. 364 p. $4.95, softcover.

For the states of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and For southern California, the author has compiled a formidable amount of information arranged topically. Introductory material includes the usual tips on touring and accommodations, plus data about Indian reservations, Mexican border towns, other points of interest, and sources of additional information for each state. Within each state's listing are pertinent facts about geography, flora and fauna, climate, laws, taxes and more. In "Vacation Practicalities" are useful categories regarding what to wear, all types of attractions to visit, and our favorite - "Strange Sights." A final category is a community directory which lists facts about various towns and cities in the areas mentioned above. There are black and white photos and general maps showing major highways and towns in each state. This is a quick and handy guide to take along on travels throughout the Greater Southwest.

HISTORICAL ATLAS OF ARIZONA. By Henry P. Walker and Don Bufkin. University of Oklahoma Press, 1005 Asp Ave., Norman, OK 73019. 1979. 65 maps. $14.95, hardcover; $6.96,softcover. In 65 accurate and readable maps the authors have illustrated the history of Arizona in its broadest sense social, economic, political, and natural. Each map, the creation of Arizona cartog-rapher Don Bufkin, is supported by explanatory text written primarily by retired historian Henry P. Walker. Whether one's interests are in mining, military history, railroading, Indian tribes, agriculture, travel, or Spanish land grants, you will find data here. A bibliography of references for each map and a good index enrich this gold mine of information.

Arizona in its broadest sense social, economic, political, and natural. Each map, the creation of Arizona cartog-rapher Don Bufkin, is supported by explanatory text written primarily by retired historian Henry P. Walker. Whether one's interests are in mining, military history, railroading, Indian tribes, agriculture, travel, or Spanish land grants, you will find data here. A bibliography of references for each map and a good index enrich this gold mine of information.

35mm COLOR SLIDES

This issue: 35mm slides in 2" mounts, 1 to 15 slides, 50 each, 16 to 49 slides, 45¢ each, 50 or more, 3 for $1.25. Allow six weeks for delivery. Address: Slide Department, Arizona Highways, 2039 West Lewis Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona 85009.

Highways, 2039 West Lewis Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona 85009.

(Inside back cover) Scribed by the path of the sun, Old Route 66 began at this point (above) in Chicago and ended at Santa Monica's Palisades Park (below).

James K. Mortimer/Josef Muench (Back cover) Sunflower blossoms on the slopes of the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff, a major refueling spot for road weary travelers and their automobiles on Old Route 66. David Muench