Route 66 and the quest to connect America

Route 66 turns 100 this year. It's considered America’s most nostalgic road trip. With wide open road, sunsets that fill the whole sky, dirt-kissed Chevy trucks, and revving motorcycles. But Route 66 started out as a muddy road to nowhere. Today on the show, we’ll meet a league of gilded-age bicyclists, a ragtag gang of cross-country runners, and the very stubborn highway commissioner who turned it into the “Main Street of America.” Guests: Susan Croce Kelly, author of Father of Route 66 and Route 66: the Highway and its People CORRECTION: In a previous version of this episode, we incorrectly said the government ran out of funding for a road improvement project in the 1940s. That happened in the 1840s. Support shows like Throughline with NPR+. Sign up today atplus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:23Rund Abdelfatah?

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• 1:06Speaker 02

  Brought to you in part by the Girardi Funeral Home. 2520 Chicago Road in Chicago Heights.

• 1:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  Summer. It's road trip season. Come on, get in the car.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  You're on wonderful W I L radio.

• 1:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  We're taking a drive down the most famous highway in America. Route 66.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Time for the 7-Eleven weather watch. You may be our next winner.

• 1:35Speaker 03

  66 is the path of a people in flight.

• 1:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  It's not all of America, but in its heyday, it traversed a lot of it. Almost 2,500 miles of its middle. The well-trod path for millions of Americans who are on their way.

• 1:51Speaker 03

  Refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership.

• 1:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  John Steinbeck called it "the mother road."

• 2:01Speaker 03

  From the desert-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.

• 2:15Speaker 04

  Millions of Americans, they weren't just using the highway to get someplace. It was personal.

• 2:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  As you drive down Route 66, you're rolling through tire tracks left by generation after generation. You're on the now.

• 2:29Speaker 04

  In the '60s, there was a TV show called Route 66.

• 2:33Speaker 05

  Carter Lake, Table Rock, Grants Pass.

• 2:36Speaker 04

  It was about the adventures of two young guys in a Corvette.

• 2:40Speaker 05

  Now, that sounds like a town where it'd be hard to get into trouble.

• 2:43Speaker 04

  Meeting girls and solving murders and whoever knows what on Route 66. And my generation grew up with that show.

• 2:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  It's the only highway I know of that has its own theme song.

• 2:56Speaker 06

  If you ever plan to motor west.

• 3:01Speaker 04

  Get your kicks on Route 66.

• 3:03Speaker 06

  Travel my way, take the highway that's the best.

• 3:08Speaker 04

  Nat King Cole recorded it, and it became famous. It became the anthem for the highway, for the vacationers.

• 3:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  You can hear how Route 66 changed and how road trips changed in covers of this song, recorded between the 1940s and the early 2000s.

• 3:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Rolling Stones gave it some tempo.

• 3:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Peshmod introduced cement.

• 3:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  And John Mayer brought it all full circle in 2006 with a version that makes you feel like you're pulling out of a diner parking lot in your Chevrolet Bel Air.

• 4:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm Randa Abdel Fattah, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR. This November, Route 66 turns 100. Today, the highway is largely defunct, broken up and bypassed. But in other places, it's been restored to its old glory. America's most nostalgic road trip, with wide open road, sunsets that fill the whole sky, dirt-kissed 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 ragtag gang of cross-country runners, and a very stubborn highway commissioner who turned it into the Main Street of America.

• 4:57Speaker 07

  Hi, this is Jules from Toledo, Ohio. You're listening to Throughline from NPR. Thank you, guys, so much for all you do. I love listening to Throughline on my drive and on my run and really anytime. So, thank you, guys, for all you do.

• 5:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high-fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake, ready-to-cook pizza, no antibiotics ever chicken wings, and sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market. This message comes from DataIKU Agent Management. Most enterprises can count every device, every login, and every contractor. Almost none can count their AI agents. Take control of your agentic workforce with one view across every platform and tool,

• 6:06Rund Abdelfatah?

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• 6:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  Part One: The Mighty Monarch Mud.

• 6:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  I've never driven Route 66, but I can imagine it. Starting out in Chicago, driving past steaming sewer grates and concrete sidewalks, a 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.

• 7:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  Driving past gas stations and diners with neon signs. Until we hit the beach in 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.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  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'd walk down to an old blacktop road where there was a little creek with fishes in it. And my mother would say, "This is the most famous road in the world."

• 8:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Susan Croce Kelly. She's written two books about Route 66. And as a kid in the 1950s, she lived just down the street from a bypass patch of the highway.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  And even at age five, I remember looking at that road and thinking, nah.

• 8:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  You were like underwhelmed by it?

• 8:42Speaker 04

  It was just a little road, you know? As mothers are, my mother was right. But it took a long time for me to know that.

• 8:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  When 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 Old Route 66.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  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. And I thought, boy, somebody needs to write a book about this.

• 9:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 at diners along the road.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  And what people said was Cy Avery invented Route 66. So then we had to find out about Cy.

• 9:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  Cyrus Avery was born in 1871 in a small town in Pennsylvania. He was named after his grandfathers, both of whom were also called Cyrus, and both of whom were farmers.

• 9:56Speaker 04

  His dad was a livestock farmer. And Cy, among other things, delivered milk in the town with an ox.

• 10:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  By the time he was 12, Cy was growing up to be a curious and independent kid who knew his way not just around an ox cart, but the rudded dirt roads in Pennsylvania. And in 1884, after Cy's 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.

• 10:26Speaker 04

  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, that 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, Cy had a firsthand knowledge of how bad the roads were. This was not a theoretical deal.

• 10:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 into the Northwest Territory. But by the 1840s, the government had run out of money for the project.

• 11:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  But there are many among us who can recall when there wasn't an auto 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.

• 11:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  So when Cy 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. What does it entail to actually try to pull a wagon out of mud?

• 12:12Speaker 04

  I can give you two stories.

• 12:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  OK.

• 12:15Speaker 04

  One of them was obviously apocryphal and probably from the era when Cy was that 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. And one of the farmers got a long pole, 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 OK?" The guy kind of shook his head. He said, "Yeah, I'm fine." But he said, "I don't know about my horse." Does that help?

• 12:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Life on the farm was particularly difficult before 1900, almost primitive compared to the present. Convenience was for millions often only a word in the dictionary, if you found time to look for it.

• 13:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  You have produce to sell, purchases to make, bills to collect, and obligations to meet, but all these must wait because your only avenue of travel is taking its annual soak.

• 13:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  And you can tell people were mad because they got a little snarky about it.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  The dirt roads of America are heavy drinkers. They lead a staggering and uncertain course from town to town. For four months of the year, they aren't fit for the company of respectable people.

• 13:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  But the agent of change, the hero Rhodes 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 Rhodes would strengthen the shipping industry. No, the Good Roads Movement came from a much more unified and powerful group.

• 14:10Speaker 04

  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.

• 14:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  Bicyclists in the late 1800s were a pretty elite group. They tended to be wealthy because bicycles were expensive. And like other wealthy Americans at the time, they had power in politics and in business.

• 14:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 steered Congress to spend thousands of dollars on road feasibility studies.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  In 1893, at the Chicago World's Fair, there was a big Good Roads convention. And 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."

• 15:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  The 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. They got the railroad magnates more involved. And they turned roads into a political issue, one politicians ran campaigns on, the way they might embrace climate or immigration as platforms today. And these were politicians whose names you might recognize.

• 15:48Speaker 03

  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.

• 16:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 16:12Speaker 06

  No expenditure of public money contributes so much to the national wealth as for building good roads.

• 16:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  Cy Avery grew up alongside the Good Roads Movement. He went from being a kid who dug wagons out of knee-deep mud to a young adult 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. Cy 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.

• 16:51Speaker 04

  He wasn't 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.

• 17:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  Cy 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?

• 17:15Speaker 04

  Yes, a golden-tongued 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 a real, universal kind of a guy and very smart. And very committed to what he was doing.

• 17:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 Cy hated being four wheels deep in the 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.

• 18:16Speaker 04

  In that part of the world, I guess in most of the world, even still today, it's all about money.

• 18:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 18:49Speaker 04

  Right, right. And after 1900, the push became even greater.

• 18:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  I don't need to be dramatic about what a big deal cars became at the time. That's what newsreels from the 1940s are for.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  At first mistrusted, spoofed on, 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.

• 19:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  That mechanical genius was Ford's Model T rolled out in 1908 and designed to be affordable and easy to operate.

• 19:23Speaker 04

  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.

• 19:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 1910, Oklahoma had a grand total of 23 miles of what were called hard-surfaced roads. Cy was pushing for more, but he realized quickly, local taxes weren't going to cover the cost, and the federal government wasn't volunteering any funds.

• 19:57Speaker 04

  And so people said, well, we'll do it ourselves if Congress won't do it.

• 20:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  County commissioners like Cy 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, the Mid-Continent Highway Association, the Tulsa Good Roads 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.

• 20:31Speaker 04

  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.

• 20:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, the war is over, and Cy Avery is hell-bent on getting his highway.

• 21:07Speaker 06

  Hi, this is Kyle from Boystown, Nebraska. You are listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 21:15Speaker 06

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high-fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake, ready-to-cook pizza, no-way-antibiotics-ever-chicken wings, and sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better, save through November 3 at Whole Foods Market. This message comes from Data IQ Agent Management. Most enterprises can count every device, every login, and every contractor. Almost none can count their AI agents. Take control of your agentic workforce with one view across every platform and tool,

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• 22:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  Part Two. Route 62.

• 22:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 6 million of them. By 1929, that number would balloon to 23 million.

• 23:27Speaker 04

  And 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, this was not just a weekend deal. This was serious business.

• 23:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  And while they waited to hear if and how the federal government might get involved, county commissioners like Sia Avery took matters into their own hands.

• 23:51Speaker 04

  During those years, there became about 250 of these, what I call, do-it-yourself highways. Some 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 would add up money, and they would promise to keep the road in as good a shape as they could. And then the money would go to advertising.

• 24:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  I think it may be that you could say that the country's identity changed because of the roads.

• 24:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hmm.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  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.

• 24:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  Cars and roads were ushering in a modern era, and not just for the big cities on the coast, but for suburban and rural communities, too. So this was the future, in a nutshell. Like, this road project, that was the future of the country.

• 25:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  If you wanted to build that future, you needed to build the roads.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  Right. So, let's go back to Route 66.

• 25:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  1924. Cy Avery had grown from a road evangelist to state highway commissioner for Oklahoma. He 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.

• 25:27Speaker 04

  The American Association of State Highway Officials.

• 25:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  Lots of the guys in this association had roots going back to the Good Roadsman days of the late 1800s. They were people who'd been lobbying for roads and highways for decades. But by 1925, they'd amassed some real authority.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  And they got together and asked the Secretary of Agriculture, who was 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.

• 26:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  They got the go-ahead. Over the course of several months, Cy and his fellow highway obsessives at the AASHO met around the country. They 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.

• 26:26Speaker 04

  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.

• 26:36Speaker 04

  And our man Avery was really interested in making sure that a lot of roads went through Tulsa.

• 26:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  Did Cy 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, Cy 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. Here's how he justified it to a reporter at the time. This road of ours is the shortest to Southern California.

• 27:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  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. It 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.

• 27:54Speaker 04

  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.

• 28:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  The highway Cy Avery had fought so hard for, the one bridging Los Angeles and Chicago via Tulsa, it was a bit of an oddball. But Cy still wanted it to have a nice round number. So anyone opening up a roadmap would know it was a major route, one they should take, Route 60. And that's the number Cy's highway had when the map was sent around to the states for approval.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  When the map got to the states, it was pretty much approved, except that the governor of Kentucky looked at the map.

• 28:43Speaker 04

  And he said, wait a minute, there's no zero ending 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.

• 28:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 veer north to Chicago instead.

• 29:06Speaker 04

  And he got very emotional about it.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  Chicago influence is written all over the map. All 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.

• 29:31Speaker 04

  And Avery would have none of that. If routes 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. Well, then the governor went to the executive committee of the state highway officials.

• 29:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  But you know who was on that committee? Cy Avery. And he was not sympathetic to the governor of Kentucky's cause.

• 29:55Speaker 04

  I can think of nothing more unfair to the original marking 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. 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 at 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.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  And finally, one 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.

• 30:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  Cy 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 Cy. The problem was, all the good numbers were already taken.

• 31:14Speaker 04

  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 telegram to Washington. We are willing to agree to this change.

• 31:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  We prefer 66 to 62. There was something about that number, 66, the way it rolls off the tongue, the visual impression of the matching sixes, a sort of edgy symbolism. In other words, Avery was on board because...

• 31:50Speaker 04

  He thought he could sell it.

• 31:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  Ah.

• 31:52Speaker 04

  I think that's what it amounts to.

• 31:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  Yeah, yeah, he was like, this number, this number has marketing power.

• 32:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  On November 11, 1926, the states voted to accept the map for a new national highway system. Cy Avery had his highway. But 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 the thriving Main Street Cy Avery envisioned, would take a miracle. That's after the break.

• 32:30Speaker 07

  This is Rachel from San Diego, California. I love Throughline as a history major. In college, I feel like I get a refreshment every week. And I really appreciate it. You're listening to Throughline on NPR.

• 32:50Speaker 06

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• 34:17Speaker 06

  Part Three: The Main Street of America.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  My great uncle, my grandfather's brother, who was a very locionic Ozarker, he said, you know, when your grandparents got married, he said, "I took them over to Joplin to take a train for their honeymoon." And he drove them over there on Old 66, which was New 66. And he said, "On the way over there," and I've since pinpointed the place, he said there was a paved section of highway, because 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 them 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've never driven on anything that's smooth or that fine." I just, to think about this guy, you know, in an old Model T, saying, "I gotta go back

• 35:07Speaker 04

  and do that again. That was so cool!"

• 35:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 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 it ran through weren't seeing much more traffic than usual. Cy Avery wanted fanfare, and he knew it was going to take some good old fashioned showmanship.

• 35:40Speaker 04

  Within 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 roadsman named John Woodruff, who was one of the civic leaders in town. And Woodruff had built this huge, wonderful hotel on the edge of what would become Route 66. And he was having a celebration, and he invited the governor and all kinds of state officials, and he invited Avery and his wife. And they drove over from Tulsa. And during the course of the two or three day celebration, Avery and Woodruff went out to see where the paving was going on for what would become Route 66.

• 36:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 36:29Speaker 04

  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 US 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, is because of this guy.

• 37:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  Woodruff and Avery bought ads in magazines and put up billboards. They hired a PR guy and of course, had lots and lots of meetings, which were more well attended than you might think.

• 37:13Speaker 04

  They had over 100 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, "Okay, 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.

• 37:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 37:53Speaker 04

  The Bunyan Derby. I think this is the reason that Route 66 is known around the world, right there.

• 38:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  It all started with the publicist Woodruff and Avery had hired to hype up Route 66, a guy named Lon Scott.

• 38:07Speaker 04

  And while Avery and Woodruff were going around helping the states and the counties get money to pave the road, he was going around to 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."

• 38:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  Oh.

• 38:27Speaker 04

  And everybody guffawed.

• 38:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  A foot race on the highway?

• 38:30Speaker 04

  Yes, yes. And after the luncheon, two or three reporters came up to him and 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."

• 38:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 were 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. When the American swimmer Gertrude Etherly 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.

• 39:22Speaker 04

  And Pyle was the sports promoter. So they got in touch with Charlie Pyle. And the end result was the great international transcontinental footrace from Los Angeles to Chicago and then on to Madison Square Garden.

• 39:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 39:48Speaker 04

  In March of 1928, 199 men lined up. And they included your typical American runners. A number of Olympic athletes. A black runner from Seattle. A guy that was in Bible movies who wore long biblical robes when he ran. A prizefighter from Arkansas who 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.

• 40:31Speaker 04

  You know, and $1,000 to the top 10 finishers. And so this got worldwide attention. You can imagine.

• 40:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 Bunyan Derby."

• 40:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  A throng of spectators bobs around the hood of a black car near the starting line. On your marks. And then? Get set. The runners are off.

• 41:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  They kick up a cloud of dust as they take off.

• 41:09Speaker 04

  And the sportswriters ate it up. Bunyan Derby underway. Farmer leads field in long Bunyan Derby.

• 41:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  Cross-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. Pyle's motley crew ran city to city through barren desert and small towns. They slept on the floors of an elf's lodge, 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.

• 41:50Speaker 04

  Pyle also had a carnival that went with him. There was a two-headed chicken, a tattoo lady. They also had the mummified body of a genuine Oklahoma outlaw.

• 42:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  I should say, we weren't able to totally verify that last part. I just think this is remarkable, by the way, because this is decades before Mad Men era marketing. Like, this is the OG.

• 42:15Speaker 04

  Yes. And remember, the roads were muddy.

• 42:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  Because the road wasn't actually done yet, right?

• 42:20Speaker 04

  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. So 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, that he'd get shot.

• 42:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  Sounds like a lot of people, you 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.

• 43:12Speaker 04

  And when we were interviewing people, I can remember two distinct times when somebody grabbed me by the shoulder 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.

• 43:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  The runners plotted their way across the country, from LA to Tulsa to Chicago and every small town in between. Until, finally, 8th Avenue in Manhattan stretched ahead of them. Madison Square Garden grown closer with each step.

• 43:42Speaker 04

  It took almost three full months. But 55 men made it all the way from Los Angeles to New York City.

• 43:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  55 made it the whole way. What happened to the rest of them? They just dropped off along the way somewhere?

• 43:55Speaker 04

  They dropped off. Some of them got hit by cars.

• 43:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  Geez.

• 43:57Speaker 04

  Some of them.

• 43:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm sorry.

• 43:59Speaker 04

  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.

• 44:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  I mean, this sounds like both hazardous and problematic in so many ways. But then also, like, weirdly, a celebration of the country, of America at that moment.

• 44:21Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I mean, this was the biggest thing. And I swear, that's why Route 66 is known to people.

• 44:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hmm.

• 44:29Speaker 04

  Because of the Bunyan Derby, I think the world knew about Route 66.

• 44:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Bunyan Derby, as zany 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 that, 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.

• 45:06Speaker 04

  My great-grandfather had a farm in southwest Missouri that fronted on Route 66. And Mom talked about seeing, one time she saw a steel walker going across the country. Circuses, because 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 elephants 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,

• 45:46Speaker 04

  for every car that goes past on this road, Route 66 was always, always, Si Avery or not, it was always about money. Getting people to drive in, get their car serviced, spend the night, eat in the cafes, and leave money behind. Because there was not much chance without the highways.

• 46:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  In the early 1930s, Si Avery stepped away from the highway making business. But his dreams stayed alive. Route 66 kept growing. And by the end of the decade, the whole thing got paved. The first US highway paved all the way west. In the 40s and 50s, families, now with paid time off, set off on road trips.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  One of the best things about a trip to Southern California on US 66 is that it starts in Chicago.

• 46:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  And promotional films like this one sold them on every stop along the way.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  I leave St. Louis and continue west. I'm having a very nice trip.

• 46:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  You can hear how, over the course of these decades, Route 66 starts to take on a new identity.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  Route 66, called the Main Street of America.

• 46:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  With ad copy that really channels John Steinbeck.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  Highway 66 leads across the arid, grass-covered plains and plateaues that sweep toward the distant hills, through a landscape of constantly changing colors, dotting the limitless panorama of earth and sky.

• 47:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  Eyes on the street ahead and bent to it again. 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.

• 47:30Speaker 03

  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, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, the 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, and folds the final shore in.

• 48:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  Susan says if Si Avery, the PR campaign, and the Bunyan Derby were what put Route 66 on the map, the people who drove down the road in the decades that followed were the ones who made it mean something.

• 48:12Speaker 04

  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 2.5 million people. And then, during the 40s, if you were sent to a military base or to the Pacific down that road, you didn't know if you were coming back.

• 48:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  It imprints on you when you go through something like that, yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  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.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  California, the golden land of orange groves and sunshine, trees and flowers, deserts and ocean shore, offers rich promise and exciting fulfillment to the holiday seeker.

• 49:22Speaker 04

  So you had, you know, three decades of millions of Americans. They weren't just using the highway to get someplace. It was personal.

• 49:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  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. Over the course of decades, the federal government passed new highway legislation

• 50:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  and built newer, bigger roads, which bypassed and replaced the old Route 66.

• 50:22Speaker 04

  After the interstate system came in, Route 66 was pretty much defunct. As the interstates came, they took the official signs down, and pretty soon, there was not much there. Business just stopped.

• 50:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  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, crisscrossed and paved over by newly poured highways of gray concrete. But something else happened, too. As car traffic dwindled and small towns along the road started to dry up, some local communities rallied around Route 66, with a spirit Cy Avery would have been proud to see.

• 51:13Speaker 04

  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.

• 51:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  Which was always Cy Avery's dream, wasn't it?

• 51:30Speaker 04

  That's right. And, well, the very last thing in my book. In 1958, more than 40 years after he began building roads in Tulsa County, Cy 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."

• 51:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  You know, we're marking 100 years this year. And the country was undergoing this huge, dramatic transition at that moment. What 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?

• 52:11Speaker 04

  I think this has always been a 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 who come in. And there's that much of an interest in this old road. So it's the world's highway.

• 52:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  It's the world's highway. And what does it reflect about the US?

• 52:51Speaker 04

  I think it says, welcome, for one thing. And you can do this. You know, come and see who we are. I 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.

• 53:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  Susan Croce Kelly is the author of The Father of Route 66: The Story of Si Avery.

• 53:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Arablouei. This episode was produced by me and Sarah Wyman. Julia Redpath. Casey Minor. Devin Kadyama. Kiana Moradam. Amy Padula. Jasmine Ro Skylar Swenson. Leanna Simstrom. Irene Moguchi. Voiceover work from Dan O'Neill, Ryland Barton, Steve Drummond, Mark Smith, and Emily Saja. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keely. Thank you to Johannes Derge, Cheyenne Butler, Matthew Pollak, Nadine Zylstra, and Tommy Evans. Music for this episode was composed by Rantin and his band,

• 54:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  Drop Electric, which includes- Navid Marvi.

• 54:18Speaker 06

  Sho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani.

• 54:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  And finally, if you have an idea or liked something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected]. And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number, too. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. Also, make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.

• 54:55Speaker 05

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

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