Throughline_Route 66 and the quest to connect America

0:00Hey, it's run. A quick note before we start the show. This weekend, Walmart one year since Congress voted to eliminate federal funding for public media. That funding, more than a billion dollars of it, is gone. But we're still here, making through line every week and taking you back to the moments in history that have shaped our current world. Because you, the public, continue to make this work possible. If you're already an NPR plus supporter, thank you.

0:30If not, you can join the community of people who power public media at plus.npr.org Summer is road trip season. Come on, get in the car. We're taking a drive down the most famous highway in America. Route 66. It's not all of America, but in a Tay Day, it traversed a lot of it.

1:21Almost 2,500 miles of its middle, the well-trot half from millions of Americans who are on their way. Refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership. John Steinbeck called it, the mother road, from the desert's slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that hollow up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land.

1:48and steal what little richness is there. Millions of Americans. They weren't just using the highway to get someplace. It was personal. As you drive down Route 66, you're rolling through tire tracks left by generation after generation. You're on the navigator. In the 60s, there was a TV show called Route 66 called a Lake Table Rock Grand Pass. It was about the adventures of two young guys.

2:16In a Corvette. That sounds like a town where it'd be hard to get in the trouble. Meeting girls and solving murders and whoever knows what on Route 66. My generation grew up with that show. It's the only highway I know of that has its own theme song. Get your kicks on Route 66. Travel my way. Take the highway that's the best. Now I can't call recorded it.

2:47And it became famous. It became the anthem for the highway, for the vacationers. You can hear how Route 66 changed, and how road trips changed, and covers of this song, recorded between the 1940s and the early 2000s. The Rolling Stones gave it some tempo. The Pesh Mode introduced some head. And John Mayer brought it off full circle in 2006.

3:22with a version that makes you feel like you're pulling out of a diner parking lot in your Chevrolet Bel-Air. I'm Randotte de Fattaf and you're listening to Thru Line from NPR. This November, Route 66 turns 100. Today the highway is largely defunded, broken up and bypassed. But in other places, it's been restored to its old glory.

4:00America's most nostalgic road trip, with wide open road, sunsets that fill the full sky, dirt-kiss Chevy trucks, and revving motorcycles. But Route 66 started out as a muddy road to nowhere. And today on the show, we'll meet a league of gilded-age bicyclists, a rag-tag gang of cross-country runners, and a very stubborn highway commissioner who turned it into the main street of America.

4:37You're listening to three lines from NPR. Thank you guys so much for all you do. I love listening to three lines on my drive and on my run and really anytime. So thank you guys for all you do. Part one, the mighty monarch mud. I've never driven Route 66, but I can imagine it. Starting out in Chicago, driving past steaming sewer grids and concrete sidewalks.

5:20a lot of people honking at red lights, sirens blaring, and then leaving all that behind for winding roads. Down through Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, all the way across Oklahoma, over rolling hills, open plains. And then we're into the Southwest, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, driving past gas stations and diners with neon signs, until we hit the beach.

6:01in Santa Monica, California. And all along the way, those two yellow lines take us through small towns, where occasionally we might look out the window and see a little girl standing alongside the road, waving. I grew up in Kirkwood outside St. Louis. And when I was really a little girl, my mother would walk us down. My sister would be in a stroller and we walked down to an old blacktop road where there was a little creek with fishes in it.

6:32And my mother would say, this is the most famous road in the world. This is Susan Croci Kelly. She's written two books about Ruth 66. And as a kid in the 1950s, she lived just down the street from a bypass patch of the highway. And even at 8.5, I remember looking at that road and thinking, nah. You were underwhelmed by it? It's just a little road, you know? As mothers are, my mother was right. You know, but I didn't take a long time for me to know that.

7:02When Susan grew up, she became a reporter for a local newspaper, and she spent a lot of her time driving around. And every once in a while, her work would take her down an old Route 66. And even back 50 years ago when I was a reporter, you'd go down that highway and it was like a time machine. There were the old motels and the old service stations and the old concrete pavement with the lip on the side, which was characteristic of the highway.

7:30And I thought, boy, somebody needs to write a book about this." So she did, along with her colleague, Quinta Scott. The two of them drove Route 66 together, knocking on doors, peering into shuttered businesses, grabbing a bite to eat, and diners along the road. And what people said was, sigh, Avery invented Route 66. So then we had to find out about sigh. Cyrus Avery was born in 1871 in a small town in Pennsylvania.

8:00He was named after his grandfather's, both of whom were also called Cyrus, and both of whom were farmers. His dad was a livestock farmer, and Siam, among other things, delivered milk in the town with an ox. By the time he was 12, Siam was growing up to be a curious and independent kid, who knew his way not just around an ox cart, but the redded dirt roads in Pennsylvania.

8:26And in 1884, after size 13th birthday, he and his dad loaded up a heavy wagon and headed west in search of land for the family to settle on out on the frontier. His family says he went in a covered wagon. My conjecture is that if you're on a covered wagon from Pennsylvania to southwest Missouri and then into what is now Oklahoma, probably there were wagons that broke down. There was horses that got away and if there was a 13 or 14 year-old around, you would say, hey, come and help us pull this wagon out of the mud. So as did many people in this country, so I had a firsthand knowledge of how bad the roads were. This was not a theoretical deal. Even during the colonial period, Americans were complaining to their government about bad roads. So in 1806, Congress and Thomas Jefferson approved plans for a national road that would funnel settlers from Maryland

9:23into the Northwest Territory. But by the 1940s, the government had run out of money for the project. Then the Civil War broke out, and by the time that was over, roads just weren't a priority anymore. We obviously don't have audio of Americans talking about this in the late 1800s, but the memory of abysmal roads still felt fresh in the 1940s. You can hear it in this promotional film for highways.

9:51But there are many among us who can recall when there wasn't an order to be seen on the streets. Less than 50 years ago, this was still a predominantly rural country, with much of its life, rarely affected by extremes of weather and roads that were impassable for weeks at a stretch. So, when Sy Avery and his dad were heading west, they would have run out of roads somewhere around Illinois, and what they ran into was mud, and lots of it.

10:19What is it entailed to actually try to pull a wagon out of mud? I can give you two stories. One of them was obviously apocryphal and probably from the era when Psy was at age. There were two farmers who lived across the road from each other. And they were friends but the road was so terrible that they rarely actually crossed the road to be personally together. And one morning they were yelling across the road to each other and they noticed there was a hat in the middle of the road.

10:48and one of the farmers got a long call and he flipped up the edge of the hat and lo and behold, there was a head under it. They said, my God, man, are you okay? The guy kind of shook his head and he said, yeah, I'm fine, but he said, I don't know about my horse. Does that help? Yeah, yeah. I have an image in my head for sure now. And you have to understand this was happening to people all the time. Life from the farm was particularly difficult before 1900, almost primitive compared to the present.

11:17Convenience was for millions, often only a word in the dictionary. If you found time to look more. If you look at newspapers from the late 1800s, they make getting stuck in the mud sound like today's equivalent of sitting in traffic, so annoying, and also so normal. You have produce to sell, purchases to make, bills to collect, and obligations to me, but all these must wait, because your only avenue of travel is taking its annual soak. And you can tell people are mad.

11:45because they got a little snarky about it. But the agent of change, the hero roads were waiting for, wasn't who you might expect. It wasn't the doctors who couldn't get to their patients, or the farmers who couldn't get their goods to the market, or even the railroad magnates who thought roads would strengthen the shipping industry.

12:15No. The Good Roads movement came from a much more unified and powerful group. Bicycles became a big deal in the United States. And as soon as people had bicycles, of course, beginning on the East Coast, they said, we need better roads. We can't ride these bicycles in the mud. And that was the beginning of a push for good roads. Bicyclists in the late 1800s were a pretty elite group.

12:45They tended to be wealthy because bicycles were expensive. And like other wealthy Americans at the time, they had power in politics and in business. By 1880, they'd created an advocacy group called the League of American Wheelmen. And before long, that group went national. By 1890, its lobbying had seared Congress to spend thousands of dollars on road feasibility studies. In 1893, at the Chicago World's Fair, there was a big good road's convention.

13:16And a magazine came out. It was Good Roads magazine. And almost immediately they had a million subscribers. I mean, this is how important this was to people. There were Good Roads men all over the country in their individual states getting elected because they said, I will bring better roads. Cyclist movement grew and grew. Soon they pulled in rural postal workers, doctors and farmers in small towns who'd been complaining about mud for decades.

13:44They got the railroad magnates more involved, and they turned roads into a political issue. One politician's ran campaigns on, the way they might embrace climate or immigration as platforms today. And these were politicians whose names you might recognize. When we wish to use descriptive terms, fit to characterize great empires, and the men who made those empires great. Invariably, one of the terms used is to signify that that empire Built Good Roads. That's an excerpt from a speech by President Teddy Roosevelt, hyping up roads in 1903. And here's another president, Calvin Coolidge, a couple decades later. No expenditure of public money contributes so much to the national wealth as for building good roads. Si Avery grew up alongside the Good Roads movement. He went from being a kid who dug wagons out of knee-deep mud

14:42to young adults who relied on those same roads to move out of state and go to college. But by the 19 teens, he was done moving. Tulsa Oklahoma was home. Siah was in his 40s, married with kids. And he was ready to step up and do something about these roads. Susan says he had a powerful presence. He was very big. I don't think he was six feet tall. But I think he might have been the kind of a guy that pretty soon you'd turn around if he walked into a room, you know, to see who that was.

15:12Si was rapidly becoming a local leader in Tulsa. Farmers went to him for loans. And the community voted for him to be on the board of county commissioners, even though he wasn't running in the election. Was he like, as far as we know, was he a good orator? Yes, golden-toned orator. He was a twinkly-eyed guy. He would sit down and talk to anybody. And I don't think that he cared if people were barefooted or had servants with him. He was just...

15:40a real universal kind of a guy, and very smart, and very committed to what he was doing. What he was doing was building roads, and he found a way to do it without money from the federal government or the state of Oklahoma. In 1912, he raised $25,000 from private donors to build roads. And all the while, He was rubbing elbows with state senators to get laws passed that would make it easier for county officials to approve and break ground on roads in their communities without having to deal with red tape at the state level. We know Si hated being four wheels deep in mud as much as the next guy. But Susan says his obsession with roads was also about something bigger. He knew this issue would one day become existential for his community. In that part of the world, I guess in most of the world.

16:32Even still today, it's all about money. In the Midwest and on the frontier, a road could totally change a place, not just in the obvious ways, by building up an economy and making commerce easier for everyone, but by attracting new people, new settlers. And maybe for the first time, visitors, tourists. They saw it as like, this is the way we build the country, this is the way we expand. Right, right.

17:02and after 1900, the push became even greater. I don't need to be dramatic about what a big deal cars became at the time. That's when newsreels from the 1940s are for. At first, mistrust, spoofing, but gradually accepted as the open sesame to the new age, the automobile age, which was to have one of the greatest effects ever to rise from American mechanical genius. That mechanical genius was Ford's Model T rolled out in 1908.

17:31and designed to be affordable and easy to operate. After the Model T was introduced, that meant everybody could have a car. In 1909, up by Detroit, a bunch of engineers laid the first mile of concrete pavement. So that meant we could get hard roads. But concrete pavement was expensive. In 1910, Oklahoma had a grand total of 23 miles of what were called hard surface roads. Si was pushing for more.

18:01But he realized quickly, local taxes weren't going to cover the cost. And the federal government wasn't volunteering any funds. So people said, well, we'll do it ourselves if Congress won't do it. County commissioners like Si and other good roadsmen organized a vigilante road-building effort. They talked local groups into running road-building seminars. They formed new associations dedicated to roads left, right, and center, the Tulsa Automobile Club.

18:27the mid-continent highway association, the Tulsa Good Road's association. You get the idea. And all of this was working. The federal government was expressing a greater interest in roads. It looked like money to build a highway system might be on the way. 1916, money was made available and the states began to pave their roads by that time, every state had its own highway department. And they were at least working to improve the dirt and gravel roads. But then you had World War I and everything stopped.

18:59Coming up, the war is over, and Sai Avery is hell-bent on getting his highway. Part 2. Route 62. In April 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. And when it entered the war, road-building efforts came to a screeching halt. Instead, States like Sia Avery's Oklahoma focused their resources on the war effort. They sent their oil, mules, oxen, and draft horses to the battlefront. When the US military came home, it was newly motivated to invest in its own highway system. And that wasn't the only thing that had changed. Regular Americans had cars now, around six million of them. By 1929, that number would balloon to 23 million.

20:12And very, very little pavement. So if you can imagine driving 2,400 miles, mostly on a dirt road, people were pretty concerned about getting highway pavement. This was not just a weekend deal. This was serious business. And while they waited to hear if and how the federal government might get involved, county commissioners like Sy Avery took matters into their own hands. During those years, there became about 250 of these what I call do-it-yourself highways.

20:42Some of them went across the country. Some of them just went from one side of a state to another. But the idea was that all the towns along the way went anti-up money. And they would promise to keep the road in as good of shape as they could. And then the money would go to advertising. Advertising. Because Americans were starting to travel in greater numbers. Previously, the American frontier had been a place you moved to. A place you never came back from. But now, as the country was expanding, Roads were also making it feel smaller, more accessible. I think it made me that you could say that the country's identity changed because of the roads, as people began to connect with each other. You know, you don't send your daughter off to be married and go out west and never see her again. Physical communication became possible. And that was a huge change for this country. Cars and roads were ushering in a modern era.

21:36And not just for the big cities on the coast, but for suburban and rural communities, too. So this was the future in Anasha. Like this, this road project, that was the future of the country. Yeah. If you wanted to build that future, you needed to build the roads. Right. So let's go back to Route 66. 1924, Sai Avery had grown from a road evangelist to state highway commissioner for Oklahoma.

22:04He was on at least three different boards working with the federal government to make national highways a reality. But there's just one you need to keep track of. The American Association of State Highway Officials. Lots of the guys in this association had roots going back to the Good Roadsman days of the late 1800s. There were people who'd been lobbying for roads and highways for decades. But by 1925, they'd amass some real authority. And they got together and asked this secretary of agriculture.

22:33who is the man ultimately in charge of rural roads, to appoint a committee to work together and figure out which ones of the major highways in each state would connect into a national highway system so that you could get in a car in Seattle and drive to Florida and not get lost and not run into the mud. They got the go ahead over the course of several months. Zionist fellow highway obsessives at the AASHO met around the country.

23:02They spread maps across tables, flagged roads that were already paved, and started debating where the new roads should go. The major highways connecting all these little tributaries. They would be the most important roads, and people would know that if they got on one of those roads, that they would be able to go wherever they wanted to go. And our man, Avery, was really interested in making sure that a lot of roads went through Tulsa. Did Si Avery have a genuine passion for roads? Yes, but his real love was Tulsa, Oklahoma. And he had visions that went beyond car traffic. He wanted to put his city on the map. So even though the highways, the association was plotting, mostly went in a grid north to south or east to west. Si lobbied hard for his road. It was shaped like a hockey stick because it didn't really matter to him where the road went after Tulsa. So it ran west to east from Los Angeles to Tulsa and then northeast to Chicago.

24:02Here's how we justified it to a reporter at the time. This road of ours is the shortest to Southern California. There's already a tremendous traffic volume, and it will increase rapidly when the national highways are designated. There'll be no chance of getting lost. Naturally, it'll be the best road. It will get the business. By October 1925, there was a map with 75,884 miles of highways traversing the United States.

24:30It was all very organized. You could tell whether a highway ran north-south or east-west by its number. All the major roads ended in zero or one. So that a driver who knew that they were on one of those roads would know that it would be a better road, and that that's the best way to drive? Well, as you can imagine, the people in all those little towns all wanted to be on these main roads. The highway side Avery had fought so hard for.

24:59The one bridging Los Angeles and Chicago via Tulsa, it was a bit of an oddball. The size still wanted it to have a nice round number. So anyone opening up a road map would know it was a major route. One, they should take. Route 60. And that's the number size highway had when the map was sent around to the States for approval. When the map got to the States, it was pretty much approved, except that the governor of Kentucky looked at the map.

25:28And he said, wait a minute, there's no zero gending highway that goes through Kentucky. Kentucky is a proud member of the United States and has been for a very long time and Kentucky has been ignored. It also did not escape his notice that this new route 60 would stop its eastward run just in time to skip over his home state and via North to Chicago instead. And he got very emotional about it. Chicago influence is written all over the map.

25:58All East and West traffic is routed north of the Ohio. The East, I am sure, will join in with me in my protest. Likewise, the South, I will use every means in my power to fight this proposition of isolation. And everyone would have none of that. If roots are to be changed this way, without any notice to states or to the executive committee, you're making a joke of the interstate highway.

26:28Well, then the governor went to the executive committee of the state highway officials. But you know who was on that committee? Sai Avery. And he was not sympathetic to the governor of Kentucky's cause. I can think of nothing more unfair to the original marketing committee or to the members of the executive committee. Well, then the governor went to his congressman and complained about the highway. And you can imagine what happened next if we watch Congress all the time. If it's something not very important, they can get very riled up. And the highway number issue got to be not only the Kentucky Congressman, but the Oklahoma Congressman, and then automobile organizations began taking sides, other states began taking sides about whether a highway that stopped in Chicago should have this exalted zero ending number. And as you can imagine, the people in Washington that were dealing with the highway system were getting more and more upset. And finally,

27:27One of them wrote to Avery and said, look, if you don't solve this problem, we're not going to have a national highway system. You've got to do something." Si Avery had a choice to make. He could die on the Route 60 hill and put his entire highway at risk, or hand the governor of Kentucky a win and accept a less flashy number for his own road, like Route 62 or 60 North. But both those numbers felt forgettable, even confusing to Si.

27:56The problem was, all the good numbers were already taken. They had 24 numbers left over. And they said, what number is left over? One of them was 66. And they said, why don't we try that? And by afternoon, the decision was made and they sent a telegraph to Washington. We are willing to agree to this change. We prefer 66 to 62. There was something about that number. 66. The way it rolls off the tongue.

28:26The visual impression of the matching sixes, a sort of edgy symbolism. In other words, Avery was on board because... He thought he could sell it. I think that's what it amounts to. Yeah, yeah. He was like this number, this number has marketing power. On November 11th, 1926, the states voted to accept the map for a new national highway system. Si Avery had his highway.

28:56But at that moment, it was still just an idea, a line on a map. A disconnected jumble of gravel roads, paved paths, and landscapes in need of a bushwhacking. And to make it more than that, to make it a thriving Main Street sci-avery envisioned would take a miracle. That's after the break.

29:32through life. Part three, the main street of America. My great uncle, my grandfather's brother, who was a very laconic ozarker, he said, you know, when your grandparents got married, he said, I took him over to Joplin to take a train for their honeymoon, and he drove him over there on old 66, which is new 66. And he said, on the way over there, and I've since pinpointed the place, he said there was a pay section of highway.

30:06because the states were also putting down test sections around the country. And he said, there was about a mile of concrete. He said, I took him to the train and then I came back and I drove back and forth and back and forth and back and forth on that concrete because I'd never driven on anything that smooth or that fine. I just, to think about this guy, you know, in an old model T saying, I gotta go back and do that again. You know, that was so cool.

30:31In 1926, when Route 66 was officially signed into existence, along with the rest of the US's first interstate highway system, it didn't yet exist in real life, at least not as a connected, fully paved road. The highway engineers were working on it, but the road still felt sleepy. The small Oklahoma towns that ran through weren't seeing much more traffic than usual. Sae Avery wanted fanfare, and he knew it was going to take some good old-fashioned showmanship.

31:00within weeks of coming up with the number and getting the quick approval from the other states to go ahead. Avery was invited back to Springfield by one of his buddies, another good road man named John Woodruff, who was one of the civic leaders in town. Woodruff had built this huge wonderful hotel on the edge of what would become Route 66. He was having a celebration. He invited the governor and all kinds of state officials. He invited Avery and his wife and they drove over from Tulsa.

31:30During the course of the two or three-day celebration, Adrian Woodruff went out to see where the paving was going on for what would become Route 66. You can imagine the two of them standing there, the city behind them, the open land ahead of them, sky and distant hills, weeds and mud. And Woodruff said, you know, we need a booster organization for this highway. And a few weeks later, They had a core group of people that got together and organized the U.S. 66 Highway Association. And in the very first organizational papers, they said, we are going to make this the main road west and the most well-known highway out there. So Avery's bet for promotionalism was front and center. And that's basically why Route 66 is Route 66. It's because of this guy. Woodruff and Avery bought ads in magazines and put up billboards.

32:27they hired a PR guy. And of course had lots and lots of meetings, which were more well attended than you might think. They had over a hundred people at this first meeting. And the minutes of that very first meeting talked about not only advertising the highway, which the Route 66 Association did and working to get the road paved, but they also sent a message to all the little towns and said, OK, you guys need to promote whatever is in your area that will bring people there. So this is going to be an event to go down Route 66 from the very get-go. And this committee came up with a pretty wild stunt, a stunt that you may never have heard of but whose consequences rippled around the world. It all started with the publicist Woodruff and Avery had hired to hype up Route 66.

33:26a guy named Lon Scott. And while Avery and Woodruff were going around helping the states and the counties get money to pave the road, he was going around the chambers of commerce. And he talked about, you know, we're going to put ads in national magazines and we're going to do this and that. And somebody said, yeah, but what are you going to do to make the road famous? And somebody else said, have a foot race. Oh, and everybody go far. A foot race on the highway? Yes, yes. And after The lunch and two or three reporters came up to him. He said, you know, that's not a bad idea. There's a guy named Charlie Pyle, who is a professional sports promoter, and you ought to get in touch with him. Now, I don't claim to be any kind of sports aficionado, but even I have heard of some of the big sports stunts that we're going on around this time. Charles Lindbergh flew nonstop over the Atlantic. The first time anyone had ever done that, with the help of nine sponsors.

34:21When the American swimmer Gertrude Adderly swam the English Channel, newspapers in both England and the US had a field day. And Babe Ruth and his relentless home run streak was proving better than anyone that amazing feats of athleticism, broken records could capture attention. Expert promoters knew how to turn that attention to their advantage. And Pyle was the sports promoter. So they got in touch with Charlie Pyle.

34:49And the end result was the great international transcontinental flight race from Los Angeles to Chicago and then on to Madison Square Garden. The race would be open to any runner who wanted to register from anywhere in the world. But Pyle also made a point of recruiting people he knew would make a good story. In March of 1928, 199 men lined up and they included your typical American runners, a number of Olympic athletes.

35:19A black runner from Seattle, a guy that was in Bible movies who wrote long biblical robes when he ran. A prize fighter from Arkansas ran in Red Long underwear, at least for a while. I mean, it was just a motley crew. There were rich people whose families came along with a trainer and another car. There were poor people who didn't have anything else to do. They opened this up to everybody and then they promised $25,000 to the winner. At that time, I mean, that was more money than anybody had. You know, and $1,000 to the top 10 finishers. And so this got worldwide attention. You can imagine. Newsreels covering the race don't have sound. But on the first screen, a quote flashes onto the screen in cursive. America calls it the bunion derby. A throng of spectators, bobs around the hood of a black car near the starting line. And then the runners are off.

36:26They kick up a cloud of dust as they take off. And the sports riders ate it up. Onion Derby underway. Farmer, we feel in Long Bunyan Derby. Across country, Bunyan marathon still numbers, 96 tired runners. And once it was well on its way down Route 66, that's when the Bunyan Derby really got weird. Hiles Motley crew ran city to city through Baron Desert and small towns.

36:56They slept on the floors of an L-slodge or a high school gym or in motels if they had money. And Pyle followed behind them with a parade of cars, a portable hospital, a radio truck, and a 300-gallon coffee pot on wheels. Pyle also had a carnival that went with him. There was a two-headed chicken tattoo lady. They also had the mummified body of a genuine Oklahoma outlaw. I should say we weren't able to totally verify that last part.

37:27I just think this is remarkable, by the way, because this is decades before like mad men era marketing. Like, this is the OG. Yes. And remember, the roads were muddy. Because the road wasn't actually done yet, right? No. Illinois was paved all the way. And California had a lot of paved roads. But the rest of the country, you know, Missouri was paved in 1931. The whole way was paved in 1938.

37:52So in 1928, these guys had all kinds of issues. They ran into a snowstorm in Texas. And in the Southwest, the black runners, as you might imagine, were not exactly welcome. So they had to find places to stay in the local black community if there was a local black community for them to stay in. And at one point, one of the runners was followed by a farmer with a shotgun who threatened that if he ever passed a white runner, did he get shot? Sounds like a lot of people.

38:21You know, you're running across the country in 1928, you're going to encounter the different dimensions of the country, right, at that moment in time. And when we were interviewing people, I can remember two distinct times when somebody grabbed me by the children and said, come here. And took me over to a window and said, I was sitting right there when the Bunyan Derby came through. This was a huge deal for these little towns. The runners plotted their way across the country.

38:50from LA to Tulsa to Chicago and every small town in between. Until finally, eighth Avenue in Manhattan stretched ahead of them. Madison Square Garden grown closer with each step. It took almost three, four months, but 55 men made it all the way from Los Angeles to New York City. 55 made it the whole way. What happened to the rest of them? They just dropped off along the way. Some of them got hit by cars. Some of them.

39:18I'm sorry. Some of them just couldn't do it. I mean, you know, this is 50 miles a day for some days. The biblical actor got found in the trunk of a car and they of course made him get out and eliminated him from the race. I mean, it sounds like both hazardous and problematic in so many ways, but then also like a weirdly a celebration of the country of America at that moment. Absolutely. I mean, this was the biggest thing.

39:45And I swear, that's why Route 66 is known to people. Because of the Bunyan Derby, I think the world knew about Route 66. The Bunyan Derby, as Zanie and unconventional as it was, had served its purpose. Even when news coverage about the race had fizzled out, the idea of Route 66 persisted as an adventure, a romantic idea.

40:11that in Susan's words, connected humdrum middle America with golden and glowing Southern California. And even after the runners were gone, the cars kept coming, full of tourists who wanted to see Route 66. My great-grandfather had a farm on Southwest Missouri that fronted on Route 66. And mom talked about seeing one time she saw us still walk or going across the country, circuses.

40:37Because that was the era when circuses were traveling all over the place. And can you imagine being a kid and you're running down and seeing the orphans go by? I mean, wow! So this was a big deal. And from the very beginning, Route 66 was the best show in town. But mom also talked about something else. She talked about sitting on the porch with her grandfather and his cronies. And they'd watch the cars go past on the highway down at the end of the field. And she said inevitably, one of those men would say, if I had a nickel, just a nickel.

41:06For every car that goes past on this road, Route 66 was always, always. Siavery or not. It was always about money. Getting people to drive in, get their car service, spend the night, eat in the cafes, and leave money behind. Because there was not much chance without the highways. In the early 1930s, Siavery stepped away from the highway making business. But his dream stayed alive. Route 66 kept growing.

41:37And by the end of the decade, the whole thing got paved. The first U.S. highway paved all the way west. In the 40s and 50s, families now with paid time off set off on road trips. One of the best things about a trip to Southern California on U.S. 66 is that it starts in Chicago. And promotional films like this one sold them on every stop along the way. I leave St. Louis and continue west on having a very nice trip.

42:07You can hear how over the course of these decades, Route 66 starts to take on a new identity. With ad copy, the really channels John Steinbeck. In the late 1950s, another literary giant, Jack Kerouac, left his own stamp on the great American road trip. Giving words to the feeling, so many others have tried to describe. So, in America, when the sun goes down, and I sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the west coast, all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it.

43:05The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth. Darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks, folds the final shore in. Susan says, if Sy Avery, the PR campaign and the Bunyan Derby, were what put Ruth 66 on the map, the people who drove down the road in the decades that followed were the ones who made it mean something. In my mind, Route 66 was first a road to be able to drive your car and get somewhere. And then second, it became really personal in the 30s and 40s. If you had left the Midwest and had to go to California with all your belongings on top of your car, you would remember that road. You might not remember it happily, but boy, you wouldn't forget it. And that was two and a half million people. And then during the 40s,

44:03If you were sent to a military base or to the Pacific down that road, you didn't know if you were coming back. It imprints on you when you go through something like that, yeah. It imprints on you. And then in the 50s, that was the first time that people in this country, the working people got paid vacations. And so the ones who had been down Route 66 and seen the beaches in California came back, loaded their families in the car and drove down Route 66 for an adventure.

44:34The golden land of orange groves and sunshine, trees and flowers, deserts and oceanship offers rich promise and exciting fulfillment to the holiday seekers. So you had, you know, three decades of millions of Americans. They weren't just using the highway to get someplace. It was personal. At a time when the country was growing and US cities were changing, Route 66 allowed Americans to experience the vastness of their own country. And at the same time, It made that country feel smaller, quainter, simpler. Route 66 was the highway that taught Americans how to take a road trip before that experience had been enshrined as a core part of this country's identity. Before the open road and the opportunity and freedom it represented had been articulated as something truly American. But the road itself was not as enduring as the ideas it birthed.

45:32Over the course of decades, the federal government passed new highway legislation and built newer bigger roads, which bypassed and replaced the old Route 66. After the interstate system came in, Route 66 was pretty much defunct. As the interstates came, they took the official sign-stown and pretty soon there was not much there. The business just stopped. In 1985, the highway was officially decommissioned. Today, In parts, Route 66 has been reduced to disconnected fragments of cracked asphalt, tumbleweeds and dusty out-of-date road signs. It's a road past the golden years of retirement, criss-crossed and paved over by newly poured highways of gray concrete. Something else happened too, as car traffic dwindled and small towns along the road started to dry up.

46:27Some local communities rallied around Route 66, with a spirit Sy Avery would have been proud to see. And so they started the first historic Route 66 association. Well, you know what's happened since then. The associations have grown and 66 has become instead of a road. It has become a tourist attraction, which was always Sy Avery's dream, wasn't it? That's right. And well, the very last thing in my book.

46:54In 1958, more than 40 years after he began building roads in Tulsa County, Sy received news that the County Commission had changed the name of River Road to Avery Drive. When he heard the news, he observed to a friend, 40 years is a long time, but it only goes to show that anyone interested in roads should never quit. You know, we're marking 100 years this year. And the country was undergoing this huge dramatic transition at that moment.

47:23What does Route 66 kind of symbolize when it comes to the American story? What does it symbolize when it comes to the American road trip? I think this has always been to do it yourself country if somebody wanted to make something happen they did or they could it was possible and I think it epitomizes the can-do spirit of the United States and I have heard so many stories about hitchhiking down Route 66 I've met a Finnish couple that was actually on their honeymoon down Route 66. And all of the little towns that have any kind of a tourism bureau will have a booklet that talks about people from all over the world to come in. And there's that much of an interest in this old road. So it's the world's highway. It's the world's highway. And what does it reflect about the US? I think it says welcome for one thing. And you can do this. You know, come and see who we are.

48:17I think a lot of people see this as the real America. You get down into the rural areas, you're not in New York City, you're not in Los Angeles, you're not in the dot com part of the world. This is real America. This is a way to get up close and personal to the United States. Susan Croci Kelly is the author of the father of Route 66, the story of Sai Avery. And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa de Fetta, through line was created by me and Romteen Atta Bluey.

48:58This episode was produced by me and Sarah Wyman, Julia Redpath, Casey Meiner, Devon Kadeyama, Kiana Volchaden, Amy Padula, Jasmine Romero, Skyler Swanson, Liana Simström, Irene Magucci, voiceover work from Dan O'Neill, Ryland Barton, Steve Drummond, Mark Smith, and Emily Seja. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keely.

49:25Thank you to Johanna Sturgy, Cheyenne Butler, Matthew Pollock, Nadine Zilstra, and Tommy Evans. Music for this episode was composed by Romtean and his band Drop Electric, which includes... And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at npr.org. And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number two.

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