ROUTE 66 RAMBLE, PART 6
Crossing the state line westbound from Oklahoma brings us into familiar territory—not just because it’s the state where Kay and I live and make our living, but because it’s the start of a very familiar 178 miles of roadway.
From 2012 to 2019 I was privileged to work for the Texas Plains Trail Region, the heritage tourism program of the Texas Historical Commission for the 52 counties of the Plains and Panhandle. It was a mighty cool gig. Promoting economic development and historic preservation in places as far-flung as Benjamin, Canadian, Floydada, Guthrie, Lubbock, Plainview, Post, Slaton, and, yes, Spur—was a huge honor and great fun.
There came a season when preservation of Route 66 as a national historic treasure rose to the forefront of our program’s activism. Legislation to fund the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program had hit a snag, and preservationists from Illinois to California joined forces to document the economic and cultural justification for keeping the money flowing.
The looming Route 66 centennial, in 2026, was not that far off. A tourism bonanza awaited those communities that could restore and preserve historic gas stations, diners, bridges, patches of roadway, and bits of roadside kitsch, and persuade their highway departments to allow brown-and-white “historic route” waymarking signage bearing the “66” shield.
And in Texas, every mile of the state’s Route 66 legacy lay in our region.
From the Devil’s Rope/Route 66 Museum in McLean (housed in a former brassiere-making factory) to the Cadillac Ranch west of Amarillo, to the midpoint of the Route in tiny Adrian, supporters banded together. An inventory of assets was made. They included the desolate Jericho Gap stretch of old road from Alanreed to Groom through Donley County, never paved; the well-preserved treasure of commercial buildings in Amarillo’s Georgia-to-Western historic district; and the motor courts of Vega, long left to disuse and desolation on the windy high plains.
They also included a unique icon of Route 66 architecture that’s inspired imaginations for decades: the U-Drop Inn /Tower Conoco Station in Shamrock.
Today, the U-Drop brings countless drivers and dollars through this community of fewer than 2,000 souls in Wheeler County. It’s not a prosperous county; oil and gas, and agriculture, are the primary employers, after the local hospital.
It wasn’t a particularly prosperous place in 1936, either, when travelers from points east and west on Route 66 arrived in Shamrock with empty gas tanks and empty stomachs. But a gas-station owner, Tindall, recognized the prospect of increasing automobile traffic at the crossroads of two U.S. highways. A friend used a nail to sketch out an art-deco design in the dirt. When built—including a café and plans for a retail store—it was called by newspapers “the most up-to-date edifice of its kind on U.S. Highway 66 between Oklahoma City and Amarillo.”
Like so many Route 66 inspirations, in due time the structure, with its lime-green neon tubing and distinctive tulip-shaped tower, fell into decline and receivership, prompted primarily by the diversion of traffic to the nearly parallel Interstate 40.
I had first dropped in at the U-Drop twenty-one years ago, in early July 2003.
The New York Times regional newspaper for which I was writing my way across the country was the Wilmington (N.C.) Star-News, eastern terminus of I-40.
I’d happened into the station as finishing touches were being put in place ahead of its grand reopening.
“Route 66 was still a dirt road here when the U-Drop Inn was built,” said then Chamber of Commerce president David Rushing. The inn would soon reopen as an official Texas rest area and an information office for Shamrock.
The route through Shamrock wasn’t exactly bustling on that scorching July afternoon, though. Dolores Hibdon, secretary for an auto-towing outfit down the street, described to me the old highway back when her family traveled frequently between California and Oklahoma. “I remember spending the night in Shamrock,” she said, pointing westward up the road toward one of the vacant mom-and-pop motels.
“All of that ended when I-40 came through,” she pronounced with a sweeping gesture. “They murdered the Mother Road.”
Happily for Shamrock, the U-Drop Inn and other restoration projects—plus an enormous boost from the “Cars” movie, which echoed its design in the fictional Ramone’s House of Body Art—have brought fame and fortune back to the town, to some degree.
If you’re reading this in one of our West Texas newspapers, make a drive up to Shamrock and look around for yourself one Saturday. Tell Amazing Hazel, greeter at the U-Drop, hi for me.
Past the icons of Texas’ Panhandle ranching country, including the straight-and-narrow giant cross and the leaning water tower at Groom, the rising framework of the next Buc-cee’s across from Amarillo’s Texas Travel Information Center, and the enticements of the Big Texan Steak Ranch’s 72-Ounce Steak Challenge, we’re eager to abandon necessary portions of I-40 once more for the Mother Road.
Its own mother, at least within the aforementioned mile-long U.S. Route 66-Sixth Street Historic District in Amarillo, is a petite bundle of energy who drives a bright-yellow MG roadster dubbed “The Yellow Imposter.”
Dora Meroney began championing Route 66 in the late 1990s, when she and her mother opened an antiques store in the family home, a brick bungalow situated directly on the Route.
“You have to make your street look nice, and make sure it has something visitors want to see when they get here,” Meroney had told me for a magazine piece in 2018.
Meroney practices what she preaches: whenever visitors stop by, as they do daily from around the globe, they’re invited to have their likeness posted to the shop’s Facebook, with Texas Ivy’s Route 66 shield as a backdrop.
Meroney wasn’t in her shop the day we made our own return to her block of Route 66. But the historic district was bustling—jam-packed on a Saturday with diners, bookshop patrons, sidewalk strollers, antiques hunters, bikers, buskers, curiosity-seekers.
At the western end of the mile stands the completed project Meroney and her buddies brought to fruition just last year. The enormous blue water tower at 6th and Western boasts a brand-new coat of paint—and an Amarillo Route 66 shield. The landmark beckons, drawing traffic off the thoroughfares and onto this stretch of the Route unparalleled for its shoulder-to-shoulder historic structures and its cadre of shopkeeps and supporters.
It's too dang hot to even think about trudging, spray paint can in hand, out to the pasture-planted array of rusted autos known as the Cadillac Ranch, just west of Amarillo. We’ve done it dozens of times before, anyway. Yet here it is a hundred degrees at noon, and the I-40 access road is lined for a hundred yards in either direction with visitors’ vehicles.
So instead we speed ahead via the Interstate to a place where dessert awaits the faithful. If it feels like cheating, well, we’re no strangers to every driveable mile that parallels this stretch (I have documented actual mileposts, in all seasons). We rejoin the old pavement at Vega, where I’m pleased to see how the Milburn-Price Culture Museum has come along since its start in 2015, and that Rooster’s is still serving up calf fries (hey, someone’s got to).
But the delicacy for which people travel half the distance of the Route is the pie at the Midpoint Café. Tiny Adrian doubles its population daily with diners desirous of this delicacy, and its other deli delights.
Kay and I select from among the rustic-crust desserts. Even at midafternoon, the converted gas station is packed, with owner Brenda Hammit hustling about like a mother hen tending to a flock. Though she didn’t invent the Ugly Crust Pie (credit former owner Fran Houser with that innovation), she carries on the tradition with gusto.
Among the satisfied patrons today are Route Magazine publisher Brennen Matthews and his family, on their own sightseeing tour. They drive from their Toronto hometown across the U.S. each summer, he said, and they’ve found a niche in publishing the slick color book that we’ve spotted on the welcome-counter stand here and all across our journey.
We see he’s got his own interviews to conduct, and we bid them a fond farewell. Everyone is out making new memories and following the myriad old stories along this relict route.
“Maybe we’ll catch up with you along the way!”
Outside in the searing heat, it’s almost—almost—possible to imagine the cool things and cooler weather that might await just over the rise. New Mexico’s Blue Hole, Tucumcari neon, mountains and mesas. We can almost smell California from here.
Sugar-sated, we snap a quick pic at the midpoint line across the highway, jump back into the black pickup.
Halfway. Half the story told, half to go.
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