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Route 66: Myth and Reality · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  John Summers is the motoring historian.
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  He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into
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  a fairly inept sports bike rider.
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  Hailing from California, he collects cars and bikes built with plenty of
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  cheap and fast and not much reliable.
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  On his show, he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new
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  and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.
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  Good day, good morning, good afternoon.
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  It is John Summers, the motoring historian, and again, I am
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  on the road, this time rural Oklahoma, west of Oklahoma City.
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  The bit where it starts to feel like plains and then like Texas instead of
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  all nice rolling green hills and bucolic
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  ponds, which Missouri is like, and a lot of Oklahoma is like that.
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  I really must explore that area more.
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  But I digress.
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  So I'm on Route 66, aren't I?
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  Theme of this episode is Route 66.
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  Everyone's talking about Route 66 because it's the centenary
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  of Route 66.
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  What is Route 66?
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  I mean, you probably know this, but it was a route designation, right?
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  The highways agency at the time wanted to help people drive from one place to
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  another, so they called roads things like Route 66 or earlier, the cross-country
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  route was the Lincoln Highway, San Francisco to Times Square in New York.
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  Route 66, of course, is Midwest, like Chicago, St. Louis, and then
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  to Santa Monica, Los Angeles.
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  Route 66 was a designation that was given in 1926, hence
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  this being the centenary of it.
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  What is there left?
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  Well, the answer is, for as long as I've been talking to you, I've been running
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  on 40 with the cruise set at a legal 75, and to my right there is Route 66.
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  It's about 50, uh, oh, no, less than that.
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  I would say at most 100 feet, probably only 50 feet from the
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  road that I'm driving on now.
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  It's a two-laner, but the surface is the original surface.
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  Original to 1926.
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  You say, "Well, Matt." Because obviously, right, the route changes shape over time.
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  One of the tropes of Route 66 is the town which is bypassed by the
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  road, bypassed where the main road, the freeway, Highway 40 that I'm on,
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  bypassed by the road, the town dies.
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  And of course, this story, this trope, is best expressed through the Pixar
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  Cars movie that, you know, at one time 10, 15 years ago was really one of
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  those, like Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola, Harry Potter ubiquitously recognized.
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  I think less so now based upon conversations with my students
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  who are early 20s, late teens.
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  But yeah, that might just be my students.
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  It might reflect my students' international background.
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  Either way, certainly with Queen and the Pixar franchise, the Pixar Cars
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  movie franchise depicts this town, Radiator Springs, and so much of the
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  imagery of the Cars movie is drawn from different parts of Route 66 mythology.
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  Well, what is this Route 66
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  mythology.
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  What do I mean by that?
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  I mean that, yes, there's the physical road there, and you can drive on it, but
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  Route 66 is a whole lot more than that.
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  Yes, John, there's museums, and there's all these silly world's largest rocking
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  horse and world's largest clogs m- things to go and look at for the tourists now.
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  Yes, yes, there is.
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  And, and almost every exit where it says Route 66, there's a Route 66 museum.
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  I, I mean to stop and go in one day and actually see what they've got and, you
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  know, go deeper with the ephemera of what Route 66 is because a road that has
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  a museum, not one museum, but lots of museums… Like, what would you put in
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  a museum to the M5 motorway in England?
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  You know, I don't know, like, a man with receding hair and a company
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  car that has too many miles on it?
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  I don't know.
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  How would you, you de- depict that?
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  But of course, that's not what these kind of museums are.
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  They are full of the stuff that was by the side of the road to service
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  people who were driving on Route 66.
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  And then one of the things that I think's noticeable is in the
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  old days, the cars were crap.
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  You needed to stop a lot.
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  It wasn't just that the roads go past the towns now, it's that cars used to
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  really need gassing up pretty often.
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  They used to need serious work, not uncommonly.
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  So in other words, if the weather was damp, I could see my 1980s
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  Ford Cortina not starting.
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  I could easily see you driving out to a place like this, going to bed outside
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  the motel, coming out, and your muscle era Ford, if it was anything like my
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  '80s Cortinas, Sierras, that kind of thing, not starting because it was damp.
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  The point I'm making here is that even comparatively recently, the '70s, the
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  '80s, there was a lot more need for roadside service, roadside repair.
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  Nowadays, you might be able to drive 100 miles between giant Love's truck stops.
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  In the old days, you couldn't do that because vehicles would break down
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  between that distance, so it would make sense for there to be service stations
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  at far more frequent intersections.
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  So the reason why there are so many dead buildings along Route 66 is because
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  the distances cars and trucks can drive and the amount of service they need
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  has progressively gotten to be less.
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  I hope that makes sense So there are the physical manifestations left, the road
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  itself, which you can drive on, which is an incredible, incredible thing that you
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  can do it for thousands of miles literally from here in Oklahoma through New Mexico
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  into California, the road runs parallel.
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  Now, typically, and this is not surprising, the road is
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  like a frontage road now.
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  So when you get into a town, there's shops and businesses that
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  have grown up along Route 66.
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  Let's get out of this Ram fellow's way.
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  There we go
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  It's like bucolic.
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  I just passed… There's a tree with black cows all sheltering from
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  the monster heat underneath it.
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  But it looks like, it looks like the kind of scene that could have been
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  painted by Pizarro or one of those French landscape painters where you
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  can actually see what they painted.
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  They didn't just paint lilies in their back garden.
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  Well, why don't you drive on Route 66, you're probably saying.
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  Well, the answer is I did on the way here, and it took me ages, and I just
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  need to cannonball a bit more right now.
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  But is that losing the essence of Route 66?
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  Well, I was thinking it might be.
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  But here's the thing, if you cannonball like this, you
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  actually see the country change.
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  And here's the other thing, part of what Route 66 represents, I
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  think, is a joined-up America, an America which is accessible.
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  And therefore, driving on this road where you just set the cruise, you
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  know, do whatever you like with your mind as you just drift down the highway
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  here, this is America connected, isn't it, with this kind of, of highway?
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  The whole notion of the modern American highway is wrapped up with Route 66 On
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  the way across, I shot film and sort of talked as well about how the Route
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  66 murals and things that you see, it's sort of from a particular time.
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  So I was struck by one mural that featured a perfect Marina Blue 70 Chevelle SS.
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  And, you know, it was on rally wheels.
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  It was perfectly depicted on a mural in one town.
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  And in another town nearby, when I was rolling, you know, on the way over here,
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  there was this perfect 65, 64 and a half Mustang convertible in white, roof down.
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  You know, you could see the VA emblem on the fender.
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  I did as I rode past.
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  So again, it's this notion that while the concept of what Route 66 might
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  be is vague, we can nail it to this kind of car, this make model even.
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  Well, that's really interesting, isn't it?
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  Well, also those are from the 60s and the 70s, right, aren't they?
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  So is that when the myth of Route 66 was there?
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  Maybe when you read much about Route 66, they often talk about a show.
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  I don't know if I remember if the show was called Route 66, but fundamentally it
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  featured the sort of spirit of Route 66.
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  And it was these two guys in a Corvette traveling around having adventure.
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  A bit absurd if you think about it, because a Corvette's a terrible
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  car to be traveling around in from place to place, a 50s Corvette.
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  But it captured the romance of the road for a certain generation of Americans.
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  And Route 66 is close to that.
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  So to drive that older road
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  is to wonder at what point in time you are stepping back to.
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  What, what do you mean by that?
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  Well, the idea of Route 66, I think, is
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  tied in the era of those cars, the Mustang, the Chevelle,
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  that this is the '60s, '70s.
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  This is the era where all of the entertainment and movies came from
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  Hollywood, and the rest of America culturally looked to Hollywood.
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  You know, if you wanna make it big, you got on the Greyhound bus, and you went to
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  Hollywood to make it big kind of thing.
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  This, this is the myth of how it worked, right?
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  Well, if that was the myth of how it worked, Route 66 was the mythical road
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  that you were gonna get on to get there.
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  So let's clarify that a little bit more.
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  The magic of the road, the reason why there's all the museums, the mythology of
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  the road, is all wrapped up, I believe, with the dreams that people had of
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  going to Hollywood and making it as a movie star or as a actor, entertainer.
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  What the dreams the everyday Americans had could be realized by
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  going on Route 66 to Hollywood and achieving fame and wealth and glamour.
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  Now let's just think about that idea of towns being bypassed.
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  What does that look like?
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  It looks like somebody recognizing that there's a section of road that's not very
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  well-serviced if people have breakdowns, and so they open a, a gas station or
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  a tire place or a free radiator water and clean bathrooms kind of place.
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  They just open something that services motorists And if that
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  business is successful, other businesses spring up nearby and
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  communities grow up around that.
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  So some of these places that you drive through on Route 66, I mean, they have
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  schools, maybe only, you know, open from like the 20s to the 60s or something
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  like that, but they had schools.
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  Now, what I think is interesting about this is there are ghost towns
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  in Nevada that, you know, look like complete Western towns and then 20
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  years later are completely gone.
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  By complete Western towns, I mean, you know, there's wooden buildings
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  on both sides of the streets like you see in cowboy movies and loads of
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  people walking around and, you know, horses tied up and saloons and that
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  kind, you know, a bustling community.
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  Well, even the wood goes in Nevada because it doesn't rot.
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  So you can just take your buildings down and put them up somewhere else.
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  So that's what people do, believe it or not.
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  So this notion of community that comes into existence exists for a decade or
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  two, walking and talking like a community which you as a European or an East Coaster
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  might recognize and then just completely evaporating like some sort of weird tent
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  city burning man meets the Wild West.
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  That seems to be a reality for a lot of these communities.
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  So let's go back to these towns.
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  Let's go back to one of these towns.
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  First the tire place, first just the tire place.
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  Now the gas station.
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  Now the shop.
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  Now the antique shop.
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  Now the used car salesman.
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  Now the diesel truck service.
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  So now there's a lot of people going backwards and forwards across
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  the road and there's an accident.
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  So they put in a stoplight.
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  It's great, right?
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  It makes people stop and look around and need to get traffic, right?
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  Now the stoplight is a pitch point, isn't it?
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  Especially if because of the stoplight, more people are stopping and getting out
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  and buying their Indian souvenirs and their Coca-Colas and decided to stay in
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  the themed motel that they're looking at.
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  Given all of that, it's pretty easy to see why a decision might
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  be taken to bypass that town.
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  So you have the Radiator Springs scenario where the town, once so
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  bustling because of the road, now is bypassed and falls into decline.
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  So it's still out there running parallel now.
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  And there are tumbled down buildings regularly.
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  But what I would say is most of it is completely untraveled.
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  And in all the time that, you know, I've spoken to
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  you since we've been driving here, there has been no traffic on Route 66.
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  So if you yourself choose to drive it, you have a weird experience
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  because was it this quiet years ago?
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  No, because that's why they built the main highway.
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  But how well-traveled was it in 1928 in comparison to 1968?
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  How much of 40 was actually built in 1968?
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  By that I mean that you could look up individual sections, but
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  the route is always evolving.
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  I drove the wrong way coming through Tulsa.
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  This is coming in the other direction, coming east through Tulsa.
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  Just because of the way the freeways were laid out, I'd not done it before,
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  I just found myself in the wrong lane, fast-moving, heavy traffic.
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  It just took me the, the wrong way.
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  This happens, doesn't it, in, in, in Europe, but quite often what they'll
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  do at junctions like that is they'll redesign them to make it better.
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  And coming through the other way today, I realized that that's exactly what
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  they're doing, that they're doing a whole building project which is gonna
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  move away from that kind of '50s looking freeway infrastructure to something
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  that looks like it was, uh, you know, built to cope with the 21st century
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  First blew by Cadillac Ranch.
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  I did stop there the first time I came across the country.
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  Actually recognized the hotel where I stayed and ordered the worst,
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  slowest takeaway pizza I've ever had.
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  I actually recognized that magenta on the way here through Amarillo.
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  Cadillac Ranch, you've seen it, the graffitied Cadillacs in the ground.
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  A Route 66 icon, they'll say.
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  You have to stop.
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  I mean, maybe.
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  They're a long way from the freeway, so rather than looking impressive, they look
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  a bit forlorn, and it's quite easy to miss them, especially if you're going west.
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  Now, when I went, it was early in the morning, 7:30 in the
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  morning, and I had them to myself.
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  It was raining, so you couldn't really see them properly.
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  But, you know, I, I had a experience.
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  What I was trying to say?
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  I, I'm… Am I trying to say I had an authentic experience that,
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  you know, if you go with all… No, I'm not trying to say that.
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  I'm trying to say that now, on the way into Amarillo, coming, if you're coming
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  west, there's Volkswagens graffitied in the ground in the same way, and
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  before you get to Cadillac Ranch, there is a RV park that has nicely painted
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  Cadillacs, but with their fins in the air.
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  I have a feeling they were fiberglass replicas.
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  But why is something not cool if it's, like, done to death?
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  I feel like that was a cool thing when it was just ironic artwork.
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  Well, not ironic.
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  I don't know what it was.
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  When it was like an art installation that you could interact with,
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  that was a deeply cool thing.
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  When other people copied it, I don't know, that really seems to dilute the cool.
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  Thank you, drive through.
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