ROUTE 66 RAMBLE, PART 1 It’s rare that local newspaper editors—especially ones like us, who have an active stake in hometown publications that go to press once a week year round—get to take an extended vacation. No Caribbean cruises or gala getaways for us.
Yet, our comparative freedom to report from the road does provide some unique opportunities for perspective, when we can sync travel with deadlines.
Given the fractious state of our national consciousness these days, along with simple curiosity as a couple of important American anniversaries approach in 2026, your editor and publisher itched to get out and see a few things for ourselves.
Kay and I saw an opening in the calendar with sufficient time and resources to drive across the country’s heartland in midsummer. Starting out on the eve of America’s birthday, we got ourselves to Chicago, our Mile Zero.
If you’ve ever listened to the famous song, from that first Nat King Cole version to the Texas take by Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel, you already know where I’m going with this.
“If you ever plan to motor west . . . Get your kicks—on Route Sixty-Six.”
Visions of tailfin convertibles, neon signs, sleeping in an ersatz teepee might spring to mind. We’d do our best to find those. Streams and rivers spanned by two-lane arched bridges, old-style milk shakes, mom-and-pop motor courts, giant roadside statues. Tales told by old-timers. And that legendary highway shield with its magical double digits.
But like John Steinbeck in his 1962 opus, Travels with Charley: In Search of America, we also wanted to get a handle on what makes our nation tick, or not. Steinbeck, who had himself provided Route 66’s most famous nickname, “The Mother Road,” in his Pulitzer Prize–winning 1939 The Grapes of Wrath, set out to learn what people in all corners of the country felt and thought in the midst of a global nuclear stalemate, a race to space, and a time-bomb of racial tension. He took a poodle for company. Not considering cats companionable for travel, Kay and I left them home at the newspaper office and took each other.
We reset the trip meter upon finding the Begin Historic Route 66 marker at Michigan and Adams, as so many travelers before us have done. Our Rocinante would be a 2015 half-ton Ford pickup nicknamed “Black Beauty.” She’d seen us through any number of adventures already. She was outfitted, like Steinbeck’s rig, with a high-capacity fuel tank, tools we hoped not to need, and too many books.
It was a beautiful evening on the Lake Michigan shore, with summer revelers taking in a music festival in Grant Park, riding the Navy Pier Ferris wheel, enjoying a hot dog, or simply cruising the Route. Navigating the mighty multi-lane traffic, we followed the trail of brown signs.
Today, most of the 1926 (and later) blacktop of Route 66 has long since been paved over, moved, or obliterated altogether. The legendary highway that once funneled freight traffic and fun-seekers westward, or delivered desperate families from the Dust Bowl to a more hopeful home in California, was subsumed bit by bit by wider and straighter throughways. Its original alignments through the heart of small downtowns lined by brick storefronts, cafes, and newfangled service stations gave way to bypasses and eventually to the inexorable juggernaut of the Interstates. In 1985 the route made famous in song and story was decommissioned altogether.
“Excessive truck use during World War II and the comeback of the automobile industry immediately following the war brought great pressure to bear on America's highways,” reads the U.S. National Park Service’s informational website (“Demise and Resurgence of Interest in Route 66”). “Automobile production jumped from just over 65,000 cars in 1945 to 3.9 million in 1948. Meanwhile, the deterioration of the national highway system was appalling. Virtually all roads, including Route 66, were functionally obsolete because of narrow pavements and antiquated structural features that reduced carrying capacity.”
But in 1990 the Route 66 Study Act of 1990, recognizing that Route 66 had “become a symbol of the American people’s heritage of travel and their legacy of seeking a better life,” paved the way for restoration of some segments. A resurgence of interest by preservation and heritage tourism groups (such as the one in which I was employed at the time) led to historical waymarking, interpretation, and economic development incentives.
Those efforts, boosted by the Disney/Pixar Cars film phenomenon in 2006, got the traffic flowing again. Today, an estimated 85 percent of the old route is driveable. It’s hard to even get a grasp on the numbers of leisure travelers from around the U.S. and world who choose Route 66 as a “destination.” The economic benefit to local businesses is staggering.
Yet does the bubble of Route 66 reflect the temper of the country in tempestuous times?
I don’t know.
On the day we left Chicago, the Sun-Times newspaper reported twenty-one people killed and at least 84 others wounded by gunfire in the city during the extended Fourth of July weekend. By the time we’d reached Tucumcari, New Mexico, at the end of the week, the nation was rocked by news of an assassination attempt on a former president. Animosities personal and political continue to threaten our nation, it’s regrettably clear.
Fiery words, firearms and firebrands. Are the divisions they signal greater, or lesser, than in the roiled-up nation President Abraham Lincoln faced when elected to its highest office in November 1860? Only six weeks after, Southern states began seceding from the Union. To understand the temper of America in those dark days, spend some time among the exhibits at the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in the Illinois capital of Springfield.
We’ll take you there, in next week’s installment. The perspective is illuminating.
FLICKR PHOTO ALBUMS FOR THIS POST
Route 66 Ramble, Illinois part 1
