Michael Wallis, an Oklahoma journalist and writer, published Route 66: The Mother Road in 1990, and it became one of the most important books in the history of Route 66 preservation. Wallis had been traveling and writing about the highway for years before the book appeared, and he knew sections of it intimately that most people had never heard of.
What Wallis did in the book that hadn’t quite been done before was treat the highway as a subject worthy of sustained historical attention. Not just the mythology — the Dust Bowl, the songs, the cars — but the actual history: who built specific sections of the road and when, which businesses had been operating at a given location for how many decades, what the mechanics of Route 66’s decline had been.
The book appeared at exactly the right moment, just as the nostalgia movement that would eventually produce the Route 66 preservation initiatives was gathering momentum. It became a kind of bible for the preservation community. People who’d been working to restore segments of the old road, or maintain the surviving motels and diners, found in Wallis’s book a historical framework that gave their work context.
Wallis was also an advisor to Pixar during the production of Cars, which came out in 2006 and introduced Route 66 to a generation of children who would eventually grow up to drive it. The car that the film’s highway town is modeled on is Radiator Springs, a composite of several real Route 66 towns — Peach Springs, Seligman, Oatman.
The road generates its own literature. Always has. Wallis added to it in a way that made the rest of it more legible.
We are offering licences for ROUTE 66® Beer in specific territories. An invitation to others to become part of this story. To carry a piece of the road with them and to contribute to the story. We will share a percentage of royalties with Route 66 associations to keep the story alive.
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