Route 66 ran on CBS from 1960 to 1964, and it was one of the stranger things American network television has ever produced. Two young men — Tod Stiles and Buz Murdock, later replaced by Lincoln Case — drove a Corvette across America, stopping in different towns each week and getting involved in the lives […]
In St. Louis, Missouri, there is a frozen custard stand that has been operating on Route 66 since 1931. It is called Ted Drewes. It has no indoor seating. In winter, it closes. In summer, the line wraps around the building. This has been true for almost a century. Ted Drewes Sr. opened the original […]
Easy Rider came out in 1969 and told the story of two motorcyclists riding from Los Angeles to New Orleans. It was not, technically, a Route 66 film. But it couldn’t have existed without Route 66 — the idea of the American road as a space of freedom, rebellion, and danger that Dennis Hopper and […]
Tucumcari, New Mexico, sits in the high desert about three hours east of Albuquerque, and for decades, people who pulled off Route 66 after dark were greeted by the neon glow of the Blue Swallow Motel — a low, turquoise-painted structure with a sign featuring a swooping bird in blue and pink that could be […]
Angel Delgadillo has been cutting hair in Seligman, Arizona, since 1950. He still does. His shop is a small, cluttered, extraordinary place where the walls are covered with photographs and signatures and license plates sent by people from every country on earth who drove to Seligman specifically to meet him. When Interstate 40 bypassed Seligman […]
Between 1930 and 1940, roughly 3.5 million people left the Great Plains for California. The drought that killed their crops went on for almost a decade. Banks foreclosed on farms that had been in families for generations. The only road most of them knew headed west — Route 66. The migration has been romanticized so […]
In 1963, a twenty-six-year-old artist named Ed Ruscha drove Route 66 from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles and photographed every single gas station he passed. Not the dramatic ones. Not the neon-lit cathedrals of commerce that photographers usually went for. He photographed ordinary, slightly beat-up, completely unremarkable roadside gas stations with the same flat, documentary […]
John Steinbeck called Route 66 “the mother road, the road of flight” in The Grapes of Wrath, and the phrase lodged itself so deep in American consciousness that it still shows up on roadside signage today, nearly ninety years after the book was published. But there’s something worth knowing about how Steinbeck came to write […]
In 1946, Bobby Troup and his wife Cynthia were driving west from Pennsylvania in a secondhand Buick with a few hundred dollars between them and a dream of making it in Hollywood. Cynthia kept suggesting song titles as they drove. Somewhere in Missouri, she leaned over and said: “Get your kicks on Route 66.” Troup […]
When Route 66 was commissioned in 1926, most American roads were dirt. The government needed a spine linking Chicago to Los Angeles. Some roads take you places — Route 66 made you believe the journey was the point.
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