March 24--Road trip?
This is the time of year here when that phrase can be a call of the wild for those of us who yearn to escape the drudgery of our daily lives, break the routine, just take off. Those two words suggest the unexpected, the excitement, the freedom of it all, even if the nation's interstate highways can seem like franchise-dotted dullways from one place to another.
It was not always so. "When it was born, traveling Route 66 was an adventure," writes Susan Croce Kelly in her book "Route 66: The Highway and Its People." "For fifty nine years that highway was a factor in millions of trips, vacations, and relocations. ... Over the years it became a highway the country could not forget."
She says, "You know that feeling you have when you're 20 that you can do anything? That's what Route 66 represents."
There is good reason this 2,400-some-mile ribbon of concrete came to be known as the Main Street of America or the Mother Road and worked its way into the collective hearts and wanderlusting fantasies of generations. It started or ended, depending on your perspective, at Michigan Avenue and Monroe Street in front of the Art Institute, and at the Santa Monica Pier, poking out into the Pacific Ocean in California. The road cut through towns big (St. Louis, Tulsa, Albuquerque) and small (Tucumcari, Gallup, Winona). To stop at its gas stations, motels, diners and souvenir shops was to get an intimate look at America.
Route 66 was officially born Nov. 26, 1926, and vividly appeared in John Steinbeck's brilliant 1939 novel "The Grapes of Wrath," in which he called it "the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert's slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all of these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight."
It took far less poetic form in "Route 66," the 1960-64 CBS television series starring Martin Milner, George Maharis and their Corvette, though most of the locations were far from the title road. Before that it was a jukebox delight, with the Bobby Troup song "Route 66" first made a hit by Nat King Cole in 1946 and covered over the years by dozens of such disparate artists as Bing Crosby, Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, Manhattan Transfer and Tom Petty.
I know you know the song, so sing along here with Mick Jagger:
"If you ever plan to motor west,
"Travel my way, take the highway that is best.
"Get your kicks on Route Sixty-Six."
Kelly first heard of the road from her mother, who told her stories about the farm on which she was raised. It fronted Route 66 in southwest Missouri. "As a little girl she would run out to the road and watch what passed by. She saw a circus caravan drive by. She saw a man walking the road on stilts," says Kelly. "She saw movie stars Douglas Fairbanks and his wife Mary Pickford in a convertible driving east. She called Route 66 the best show in town."
Kelly worked as a newspaper reporter in St. Louis and elsewhere before moving to Chicago, where she raised a family and worked in the corporate world. The idea for her book was born from her mother's stories and meeting photographer Quinta Scott.
This was in the early 1980s, long after the road had begun to be bypassed by the nation's interstates. The pair spent seven years researching and driving and interviewing, capturing people and places and stories; what was left. The road "died" June 27, 1985, when it was officially removed from the U.S. highway system. The book came out three years later.
But its pages remain full of life, a bygone life to be sure, but one captured firmly by solid historical background and dozens of interviews with people whose lives revolved around the road. It is not an oral history per se but one so filled with fine stories and clear-eyed observations that it might remind some of the books of Studs Terkel (who, by the way, never learned to drive a car). The historical photos are interesting, but Scott's are arresting, stunning and stark.
In the book, Kelly writes: "The miracle was not the automobile. The miracle of the early twentieth century was the construction of a vast network of highways that gave automobiles someplace to go." Her latest book focuses on the fascinating man who helped make that happen: 2014's "Father of Route 66: The Story of Cy Avery."
Kelly lives in Lake of the Ozarks, Mo., now, has a lively and informative website, makes frequent public appearances (she'll do so Sept. 22 at the Harold Washington Library Center) and is in close touch with the ever-growing network of Route 66 fans.
There are plenty, clinging fast to history and promoting portions of the road that still exist. There are organizations in each of the eight states through which Route 66 snaked. In Pontiac, about 100 miles southwest of Chicago (via I-55) you'll find the Illinois Route 66 Association Hall of Fame Museum, and there are international outposts in such countries as Canada, Hungary, Norway, Japan and Germany, which is hosting the first European Route 66 Festival July 15-17.
Kelly recently met the head of the Route 66 Association of Italy, who told Kelly that she first got hooked on the romance of the road reading Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel "On the Road."
Though its adventures don't take place on Route 66, its road-riding appeal is universal and it has come to be regarded almost as a sacred text. Little wonder, with passages such as:
"I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility."
"Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road."
"There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars."
So, let me ask you one more time: Road trip?
"After Hours With Rick Kogan" airs 9 to 11 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.
