Route 66 in 1986

I was the first caller again today on NPR's Talk of the Nation, and I think it was one of my better efforts.  I have no doubt that if I dare to listen to the audio clip, I'll be appalled by my ums and uhs, but for once I got in what I wanted to say with reasonable clarity.

The subject was America "off the beaten track." It's something I know a little bit about, although my experience is neither recent (for the most part) nor in-depth. Back in 1986, when John and I put our stuff in storage and drove around the country, one of the major goals was to gather material for a book about Route 66, both the 1960-1964 tv show (which was airing on Nick at Nite in those days), and the decommissioned Mother Road.  In 1986 there was officially no U.S. Highway 66 or Historic 66, just a collection of state routes and local road names, small town main drags and access roads that frequently dead-ended in the middle of nowhere, most memorably in a cemetery full of cows (dead people, live cows).

Here are some highlights of my Route 66 odyssey:

* Oklahoma!  We talked an antique shop owner into selling us a genuine U.S. 66 sign as part of a half-hour conversation. We talked about the bypassing of small town America vs. the continuing interest in Route 66 and local color by writers and certain types of travelers. It turned out there were at least two other writers working on Route 66 books that year. I hope they did better with their books than I did with mine, which is still sitting on C-64 floppies in a word processing program called Paper Clip.  Does anybody out there have the capability of converting those files for me?

* Somewhere Off the Map.  At one truck stop, possibly in New Mexico, we were told that the nearest town had been on the 1985 Rand McNally atlas, but didn't qualify to be on the 1986 one due to population decline.  The reason: the town wasn't on I-40.

* Tucumcari Tonight!  We loved Albuquerque, but Gallup and Tucumcari were even prettier and more Route 66-ish. We seriously considered moving to Gallup, until we saw Tucson a week or two later.  The romance with New Mexico was somewhat tarnished, however, by the replacement of the van's starter in Tucumcari under slightly hinky circumstances.

* Dublin, Texas. Or was it Shamrock, Texas?  We were a little annoyed at first by this town, where we had to wait in the middle of a main street while the car ahead of us let a neighbor out of a parking lot, and where we got the hairy eyeball from locals eating at a place that sold BBQ and steak fingers.  But the Pony Soldier Motel (or somesuch name) was pleasant, and the Middle Eastern family who ran it was efficient and friendly.  The next morning as we drove away, a bulldozer was knocking down the other Best Western across the street from the one we'd stayed in.  We decided to get the heck out of town before our motel was knockled down, too.

* Denny's, Las Vegas.  We arranged our interview with Route 66 star George Maharis over the phone at a Denny's in Burbank.  He was doing dinner theatre in Las Vegas at the time.  When the local restaurant Maharis named for the interview venue turned out not to be open for breakfast, we ended up at a Denny's instead.  Among other topics, he spoke at some length (as did Martin Milner in a separate interview) about how much the country had changed since the actors filmed their tv show entirely on location, in a different town every week. Back in 1960, a small town in New Mexico was very different culturally from a shrimping town on the Gulf, a dam project on the Colorado, or a logging camp in the Pacific Northwest. Even getting to such places could be an adventure. "Now you can go anywhere you want," Maharis concluded, "and it's a Denny's."

Dang.  I wish I could have finished and published that book.

Karen