Route 66 officially died on June 27, 1985. On that day the last stretch was decertified, the shields came down, and the most famous highway in America was formally removed from the United States highway system. The interstates had won. The road that had carried the Okies and the dreamers and the song was, on […]
Before there was a Mother Road, there was the same restless American hunger for speed and spectacle that would one day fill it — and in the years just before Route 66 was born, few embodied that hunger more than Lincoln Beachey. Beachey was the most famous stunt pilot in America, a man who threw […]
For a few glorious decades, the American summer night had a particular shape: a big screen glowing against the dark, rows of cars nosed up to it, and a tinny speaker hooked over the window. The drive-in movie theater was born in 1933, when a New Jersey man named Richard Hollingshead opened the first one […]
Here is a fact that surprises most Americans: the most famous highway in the United States is, these days, largely a foreign pilgrimage. By one University of Illinois estimate, more than seventy percent of the people traveling Route 66 come from overseas — from Britain, Germany, Australia, and beyond. Some shops along the road report […]
The food of Route 66 was never fancy. It was born of the Depression, and it was built to do one job: fill a hungry traveler, cheaply, and send them back out the door satisfied. Up and down the road, in a thousand little diners and lunch counters, the menu ran to the same honest, […]
Climb the twisting old road over the Black Mountains of western Arizona — the steep, hairpinned original alignment of Route 66 that terrified a generation of overheating jalopies — and you drop into Oatman, a gold-rush town that refused to fully die. Oatman boomed in the 1910s on the strength of its mines, which pulled […]
By the 1980s, Route 66 was dying quietly. Decommissioned, bypassed, falling off the maps — and then a journalist from Tulsa gave it back its story. In 1990, Michael Wallis published Route 66: The Mother Road, a book he called a love letter to the highway. He had spent years driving it and talking to […]
Four words on a hand-painted board could put a knot in any driver’s stomach: LAST GAS FOR 100 MILES. On the long desert stretches of Route 66 — the Mojave, the empty runs across Arizona and New Mexico — those signs were not marketing. They were a genuine warning, and a genuine mercy. A driver […]
In 1937, the greatest blues singer America had yet produced died on a dark highway in Mississippi — and the story of how she died says almost everything about what the open road meant to a Black traveler. Bessie Smith, the “Empress of the Blues,” was riding through the Delta on Highway 61 — the […]
When the producers of the Route 66 television series insisted on filming every episode on location, they thought they were making a drama. What they were actually making was one of the great accidental documentaries of mid-century America. Between 1960 and 1964, chasing stories across some twenty-five states, the show’s cameras rolled through real towns […]
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