Get Your Kicks (and Kitsch) on Route 66

The US is a nation built around the automobile, with undulating ribbons of pavement providing the runway for classic road trips. But of all the roadways snaking across this vast country, none has captured the imagination quite like US Route 66. Called the “Mother Road” by John Steinbeck as it was traversed by the Joad family in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath, the route has inspired songs, movies and a TV series.

What is it about a simple thread of concrete and macadam that has become so much a part of the American zeitgeist?

A Road Is Born

Route 66 was officially designated in 1926 at a meeting of highway officials in Springfield, Missouri. Despite that prosaic start, the 2,400-mile expanse—from the skyscraper canyons of Chicago through the deserts of the Southwest to its end at the Pacific Ocean at the Santa Monica Pier—has long symbolized freedom and opportunity.

As the major route from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean, the road’s creation put dozens of towns on the map—way stations during the Great Depression for weary travelers heading west in search of a better life. Bruce Springsteen references this longing in his song “The Ghost of Tom Joad”—a nod to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath—about people down on their luck seeking the promised land.

The post-World War II years led to a major boom for Route 66, spurred on by Nat King Cole’s release in 1946 of the now-legendary Bobby Troup-penned song “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66.” Thousands of returning veterans pursued opportunity in California, while a growing wave of newly mobile tourists explored national parks such as the Grand Canyon and the Petrified Forest in Arizona. The allure of this highway was further heightened by the Route 66 TV series, which aired from 1960 to 1964.

But cracks in the pavement—and the road’s mystique—were inevitable. The advent of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s sounded the death knell for many two-lane roadways, and much of the Mother Road was sidestepped by four-lane superhighways. By the early 1970s, Route 66 had gone from a place to “get your kicks” to remnants of road with a giant “kick me” sign on its back. The towns along its way—and commerce in them—suffered.

But Americans love a comeback story, and Route 66’s began in Seligman, Arizona. When the town was bypassed in 1978 by Interstate 40, local business owners refused to throw in the towel and lobbied the state to declare the 90-mile still-intact stretch of Route 66 from Seligman to Kingman, Arizona, a Historic Highway. Today, Seligman lays claim as the “birthplace of Historic Route 66,” signifying the road’s transition from a national artery to a historic journey.

A Road Comes of Age