ROUTE 66 RAMBLE, PART 3
South of Edwardsville, Illinois, in search of the turnoff for Chain of Rocks Road, we wound up instead swept along in the current of St. Louis–bound trucks on I-270. We had to settle for an out-the-window view of the famous iron bridge that since 1927 has spanned the Mississippi with a quirky thirty-degree bend in the middle.
The bridge hasn’t been drivable since 1968, but it was rescued in 1999 as a pedestrian and bicycle route. A new public park opened just this year on the St. Louis side, we’d read, and we were eager to get out of the truck and walk the bridge for the views and the exercise.
Alas, as was to prove the case often in the days to come, the contradictions of paper map, digital app and road signs foiled our best attempts to stick to existing old-route pavement. If I had taken good advice weeks ago and mail-ordered the acclaimed Ross/McClanahan “Here It Is!” maps, we’d have saved some grief in wayfinding. The digital maps we’ve come to rely on daily in the iPhone age aren’t up to the task of locating Old Route 66, and in my recent experience, the plethora of available mobile apps aren’t, either.
Jerry McClanahan’s spiral-bound “EZ 66 Guide for Travelers” (which we acquired from a bookstore later on our journey) is a good compromise, but it’s so chock-full of detail that a capable and patient navigator in the copilot’s seat is a must. By this I mean one who isn’t prone to dozing on boring stretches.
Having also been foiled on the Missouri side of the big river by construction closure of the cloverleaf leading to the park, we prepared to embrace everything else the Show-Me State had to offer.
Neither Kay nor I were familiar with Missouri. I barely remembered my cross-country traverse by bus in 1976 when the Gateway Arch flickered by in a home-movie reel. Now, I wanted to see this door to the West up close and to appreciate how modernist architect Eero Saarinen’s design became as much the recognizable icon of St. Louis as the Space Needle, the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower have become for their cities.
The site’s National Park Service website provides useful background. “Neither an obelisk nor a rectangular box nor a dome seemed right on this site or for this purpose,” Saarinen wrote. “But here, at the edge of the Mississippi River, a great arch did seem right.”
And it does.
Gleaming in the vesper sunlight as we approach it from the bluffs of Riverview Drive and the bricked vista of Florissant Avenue, the Arch seems to beckon those on the opposite bank to join us in this grand adventure. I recall tracking Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery last summer, far up on the mighty Missouri. I begin to appreciate the vastness of this continent when it was wilderness. Some say untamed; I say unclaimed, except by tribes who needed no metes and bounds, no Google Maps to define their territories.
I take a deep breath as we pause in one traffic-less moment in the lee of the shining Arch. I’m ready to head for California.
Between us and Joplin, clear on the other side of the state, there are a lot of Missouri hills and woods. Wikipedia tells us that the etymological origin of “Ozarks” might be the French “aux arcs”—“land of the arches”—recalling natural rock bridges formed by erosion and collapsed caves in the region. We’ll go with that, as the green land rolls like a magic carpet beneath our Rocinante.
Among the region’s destination caves, Meramec Caverns beckons from frequent billboards. Part of its Route 66 lore is that the guy who opened it as a tourist attraction back in 1935 began gluing promotional cards to car bumpers (also a recent development) while visitors were inside exploring his caves. A decade or so later, when adhesive plastic was invented, the bumper sticker fast became ubiquitous.
If the bumper sticker and the billboard became the magnets to draw in visitors’ dollars along tourist routes, these days what keeps them staying longer and spending more is the building mural.
Whether an early-era advertising message colorfully painted on crumbling brick (and often barely visible a century later as a “ghost” sign) or a newly crafted artwork embodying local symbolism, the mural has become a proven strategy for town pride and traveler engagement. Not to mention the much-needed income commissions provide to hungry artists.
Joplin, tucked into the southwest corner of Missouri and the largest city in the Four State Area of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri and Kansas, was a mining boomtown in the 19th century. A bustling downtown center and fine neighborhoods blossomed by the 1920s, but that didn’t forestall something of a wild-and-woolly reputation.
“In 1933 during the Great Depression,” saith our handy digital source, Wikipedia, “the notorious criminals Bonnie and Clyde spent some weeks in Joplin, where they robbed several area businesses. Tipped off by a neighbor, the Joplin Police Department attempted to apprehend the pair. Bonnie and Clyde escaped after killing Newton County Constable John Wesley Harryman and Joplin Police Detective Harry McGinnis; however, they were forced to leave most of their possessions behind, including a camera. The Joplin Globe developed and printed the film, which showed now-legendary photos of Bonnie holding Clyde at mock gunpoint, and of Bonnie with her foot on a car fender, posed with a pistol in her hand and cigar in her mouth.”
Yes, we drove by the modest home on 34th Street that was briefly the gangsters’ hideout. But more of interest to us was the city’s twenty-first-century story.
My generation recalls Joplin as the victim of a mile-wide EF5 tornado strike in May 2011. A 10x20 mural, “On the Wings of Butterflies,” stands today on the site of a hospital destroyed in that storm. Artist Eric Haun painted another mural, titled “161,” that features one butterfly for each of those who perished in the massive storm. A “butterfly effect” hatched many other representations incorporated into artworks around the city.
“Going forward from the tornado,” said Joplin Convention & Visitors Bureau director Patrick Tuttle in a Four States Homepage article a decade after the disaster, “Joplin is not defined by the one event, but instead as a town they must focus on recovery and look forward—which the town has done over the past 10 years, and the murals represent that.”
Kay and I spent a delightful afternoon chasing butterflies—and other brilliantly rendered images—all around the city.
Finally, determining that we’d benefit from a printed guide, we stopped in at the Joplin Convention and Visitor Bureau, located in the gorgeous former Newman’s Department Store on Main Street, now its city hall.
Tourism assistant Donna Miller plied us with helpful brochures and maps. We happily bought souvenirs, these days in the form of ubiquitous, colorful die-cut stickers smaller than the bumper stickers of yore. They travel well, go in the mail, and fit easily into journals or on guitar cases or bulletin boards.
Noting the poster reproduction framed in the building’s foyer, I (an art student in earlier days) remarked how much I admired the Thomas Hart Benton work it incorporated. Benton’s ruralist style had long captivated me, and I recalled for Miller how powerfully the energetic composition of his 1928 painting “Boomtown” represented the Borger oil-boom community back in our home state of Texas.
“Oh, come with me!” Miller exclaimed, practically dragging me by the arm out the office doorway and around the corner.
There, before us, was Benton’s original.
“Joplin at the Turn of the Century, 1896–1906,” we learned, is Benton’s only autobiographical work. (Yes, we spotted his younger likeness, sketching, among the milling throngs in his composition.) Dedicated in 1973 to honor Joplin’s 100th birthday, this mural was the final piece that Benton signed before his death in 1975.
City Hall also displays an exhibition on how their showpiece came about, and continuing the tradition, the 2010 mural “Route 66, Joplin, Missouri”—by Benton’s grandson Anthony Benton Gude—also graces its walls. The building is open to the public Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and by appointment on weekends.
You showed us, Missouri: you showed us a great time. Thank you.
PHOTO ALBUMS, ROUTE 66, MISSOURI:
