Route 66 a cornerstone of modern US travel

Susan Croce Kelly: Route 66 was among first highways to be paved for motorists, guaranteed.

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The First Rule? Attract Attention.

An excerpt from “Route 66: The Highway and its People” by Susan Croce Kelly

Especially after World War II, Route 66 was lined with establishments that seemed to wave their arms, whistle, blow bubbles, sing, dance, flash lights, and make outrageous promises just to get drivers to slow down and pull off the highway. Clearly, Red Chaney who was frying hamburgers in an old gas station on Route 66 outside Springfield, Missouri, subscribed to the belief that the first rule is to attract attention. Not long after he opened for business, Chaney parked an old Willys Jeep in front of the former service station, put a washing machine motor inside the jeep, and rigged it to rotate two large foil-covered spheres hanging on the ends of rods that came out of the top of the jeep through a hand-painted sign that said Red’s. Over the years the car changed – once because a kid had a similar vehicle and needed the bearings out of the wheels – but the rotating balls and old car were a permanent invitation to passers-by to stop and see what was inside the building. Next to the car Chaney erected a large yellow Latin cross with black letters that said GIANT on the crossbar and HAMBURG on the upright, with the two words sharing the same “A.” (“I would have put ‘hamburger,’ but I ran out of space,” Red said.) Together, the cross and the old car with the rotating balls tended to stick in people’s minds.

Later Red’s Giant Hamburg added a drive-in window, “probably the first in the world with speakers,” he explained modestly. “There were trees and drive-in parking in back and trash cans. I wanted to put a conveyor belt out there, but, instead, this guy had an intercom, so I built a cubby hole out from behind the counter and put the speaker on a post out in front. People would drive up and the speaker would talk. It sometimes scared them to death and they’d drive off, but they got used to it.”

Inside, he painted the ceiling blue, the walls white with a touch of peach, the seats green, and the floor like dirt; “as much like a picnic,” Chaney said, “as you possibly can. It stimulates the appetite and people enjoy it.”

By the time Chaney retired in 1984, the management-school graduate, hamburg king, believer in the power of pyramids and business promotion had become a local celebrity and his cafe, an institution. When the doors opened in the late forties, however, Red’s was still outside town, and Chaney had to depend on the highway for his living.

In the mid-fifties, when U.S. 66 was rerouted to bypass Springfield, Chaney turned his attention to the local community and worked hard to maintain a presence in the Ozark farming center of 150,000 people. “I advertised, I sent postcards,” he noted. “I still do. People like it here. Last year we had four graduation parties. The parents would ask their kids where they wanted to go for graduation, and they said, ‘Red’s.’ Kids like us because we don’t act like old people.”

It did not necessarily take a degree in management to turn highway entrepreneurs into promoters.

Author Susan Croce Kelly founded Ozarks Magazine, served as managing editor of OzarksWatch and as a reporter for the Springfield News-Leader and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, as well as a public relations executive. Croce Kelly knows a thing or two about Route 66, which she dubs “the road that runs through everyone’s life.” Her books on the Mother Road include “Route 66: The Highway and its People” and “Father of Route 66: The Story of Cy Avery,” and she frequently delivers talks on the history and culture of Route 66.

“Route 66 started out as a road,” Croce told Springfield Business Journal recently. “It is now a tourist attraction. It morphed. That was in keeping with the goals.”

One of the goals was simply to have paved highways, a novelty for U.S. travelers a century ago when the famous telegram sent by a group of highway planners from the Colonial Hotel in downtown Springfield to Washington, D.C. helped set 66 as the numeral designation for the newly planned Chicago-to-Los Angeles highway.

“Remember, [in 1926] the United States was not … like it is now,” Croce Kelly said. “Towns were inaccessible. Distances were huge. … In 1909, a bunch of engineers up near Detroit paved the first mile of concrete pavement. Up until then, all the highways – I’m not talking about in the cities – but all of the highways or cross-country roads were either gravel, or dirt-and-gravel – or out west, sand.”

Mud was a factor. Croce said farmers could make a good business hitching their mules to automobiles that went offroad into ditches.

“After they picked the number 66, the road was still 90% mud,” Croce Kelly said. “And there was not very much going on along the road. So, they said, we want this to be the major road west … and everybody said yes, we need a booster association for Route 66. … it had two purposes. One to get the road paved, one to bring people to the road.”

Paving the road took time, court rulings and acts of Congress, Croce Kelly said: Missouri’s segment of Route 66 wasn’t fully paved until 1931. The entire road from Chicago to Los Angeles wasn’t fully paved until 1938.

“That was one of the reasons for the national highway system,” Croce Kelly said. “These would be the first roads that would be paved. Guaranteed.”

Getting travelers onto the road was tremendously important, especially for small-town economies, Croce Kelly said. Quickly after Route 66 was established in 1926, a booster association formed.

In 1928, sports promoter Charles C. Pyle put on C. C. Pyle’s International Transcontinental Footrace, an 84-day, 3,400-mile endurance contest won by Andy Payne, who defeated roughly 275 other competitors in “the Bunion Derby,” as the press nicknamed it, according to the Claremore Museum of History in Oklahoma. The race route went from Los Angeles to Chicago via Route 66, then along an improvised course to New York. Roughly 55 competitors ran the entire race. “It made the news all over the world,” Croce Kelly said. “In my mind, that race was the reason that 66 really lodged into people’s brains.”

In 1956, Congress passed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. Implementing the law, the federal government began bypassing Route 66, Croce Kelly said. As the route was bypassed, the government took down Route 66 signage, causing Route 66 awareness to fade.

But in 1987, a barber named Angel Delgadillo in Seligman, Arizona started the first historic Route 66 association. His brother, Juan, had owned Delgadillo’s Snow Cap Drive-In, a popular Route 66 attraction, according to the website of the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona.

“And that was the beginning of the revival,” Croce Kelly said. That’s when people began to celebrate what 66 had been. And now people come from all over the world to look at what there was.”