Throughline - Route 66 and the quest to connect America

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

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 PeopleSupport shows like Throughline with NPR+. Sign up today at plus.npr.org.See 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

Hey, it's run. A quick note before we start the show. This weekend, we'll mark one year since Congress voted to eliminate federal funding for public media. That funding, more than a billion dollars of it, is gone. But we're still here, making through line every week and taking you back to the moments in history that have shaped our current world. Because you, the public, continue to make this work possible. If you're already an NPR Plus supporter, thank you. If not, you can join the community of people who power public media at plus.npr.org. In part by the Girardi funeral home, 2520, Chicago Road in Chicago Heights. Summer, it's road trip season. Come on, get in the car. Here on wonderful W-I-L radio. We're taking a drive down the most famous highway in America, Route 66. I'm for the 7-Eleven weather watch.

You may be our next winner. 66 is the path of a people in flight. 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 were on their way. Refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, John Steinbeck called it The Mother Road.

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. Millions of Americans, they weren't just using the highway to get someplace. It was personal. As you drive down Route 66, you're rolling through tire tracks left by generation after generation. You're the navigator. In the 60s, there was a TV show called Route 66. Caught a lake, tape, a rock.

Grands Pass. It was about the adventures of two young guys in a Corvette. Now, that sounds like a town where it'd be hard to get into trouble. Meeting girls and solving murders and whoever knows what on Route 66. And my generation grew up with that show. It's the only highway I know of that has its own theme song. If you ever plan to mowed away, Get your kicks under 66.

Travel my way. Take the highway, that's the best. Nat King Cole recorded it, and it became famous. It became the anthem for the highway, for the vacationers. 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. The Rolling Stones gave it some tempo. The Pesh mode introduced cement.

And John Mayer brought it off 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. I'm Randat-Fat-Thap, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. This November, Route 66 turns 100. Today, the highway is largely defined. 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-kiss 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 rag-tag gang of cross-country runners, and a very stubborn highway commissioner who turned it into the main street of America. Hi, this is Jules from Toledo, Ohio. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Thank you guys so much for all you do. I love listening to ThruLine on my drive and on my runs and really any time.

Thank you guys for all you do. Part 1, The Mighty Monarch Mud. 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, 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. 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 walked 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. 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. And even at 8.5, I remember looking at that road and thinking, nah, You were like underwhelmed by it? It was just a little road, you know? As mothers are, my mother was right. You know, but it took a long time for me to know that.

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. And even back 50 years ago, when I was a reporter, you'd go down that highway, and it was, it was. 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. 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. And what people said was Cy Avery invented Route 66.

So then we had to find out about Sy. 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. His dad was a livestock farmer, and Cy, among other things, delivered milk in the town with an ox. By the time he was 12, Sy was growing up to be a curious and independent kid

who knew his way not just around an ox cart, but the rutted dirt roads in Pennsylvania. And in 1884, after Size 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. 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,

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. So I had a firsthand knowledge of how bad the roads were. This was not a theoretical deal. 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 1940s, the government had run out of money for the project. 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.

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 drearily affected by extremes of weather and roads that were impassable for weeks at a stretch. So when Cy Avery and his dad were heading west, they would have run out of road 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? I can give you two stories. Okay.

One of them was obviously apocryphal, and probably from the era when Sai 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 okay? The guy kind of shook his head and he said, yeah, I'm fine, but he said, I don't know about my horse. Does that help? 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.

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. 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. You have produce to sell, purchases to make, bills to collect, and obligations to me,

but all these must wait because your only avenue of travel is taking its annual soak. And you can tell people where, mad, because they got a little snarky about it. 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. 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 roads would strengthen the shipping industry. No, the Good Roads movement came from a much more unified and powerful group. 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. 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. 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. In 1983, at the Chicago World's Fair, there was a big good one. 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. 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. 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. That's an excerpt from a speech by President Teddy Roosevelt, piping up roads in 1903. And here's another president, Calvin Coolidge, a couple decades later. No expenditure of public money contributes so much to the national wealth as for building good roads. Zai 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 adults 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. Sigh 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. 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. Cy was rapidly becoming a local leader in Tulsa. Farmers went to him for loan. 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? 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. 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 Sai hated being four-wheeled 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. In that part of the world, I guess in most of the world, even still today, it's all about money.

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. Right, right. And after 1900, the push became even greater. 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. At first, mistrust, spoofed that. 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.

That mechanical genius was Ford's Model T rolled out in 1908 and designed to be affordable and easy to operate. 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. In 1910, Oklahoma had a grand total of 23 miles of what were called hard-surfaced roads. Sai 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.

And so people said, well, we'll do it ourselves if Congress won't do it. County commissioners like Sai and other good roadsmen organized a vision. vigilante roadbuilding effort. They talk local groups into running road building seminars. They form 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. 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.

Coming up, the war is over. And Cy Avery is hellbent on getting his highway. Hi, this is Kyle from Boistown, Nebraska. You are listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part two. In April 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. And when it entered the war, roadbuilding efforts came to a screeching halt. Instead, states like Cy Avery's Oklahoma focused their resources on the war effort.

They sent their oil, mules, oxen, and draft horses to the battlefront. When the U.S. 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. 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 not just a weekend deal. This was serious business. 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. 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 ante up money.

And they would promise to keep the road in as good of shape as they could. And then the money would go to advertising. 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. I think it may be that you could say that the country's identity changed because of the roads. 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. 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. Yeah.

If you wanted to build that future, you needed to build the roads. Right. So let's go back to Route 66. 1924. Zai 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. The American Association of State Highway officials.

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. 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. They got the go-ahead. Over the course of several months, Zion his fellow highway obsessives that 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. 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. And our man Avery was really interested in making sure that a lot of roads went through Tulsa. 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, Sai 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 Tolstah. So it ran west to east from Los Angeles to Tulsa and then northeast to Chicago. Here's how we justified it to a reporter at the time. This road of ours is the shortest to Southern California. 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 75,000, 8,000. 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. 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. 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 Sai 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 size highway had when the map was sent around to the states for approval.

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

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. And Avery and would have none of that. If roots are to be changed this way without any notice to state, 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. But you know who was on that committee? Cy Avery. And he was not sympathetic to the governor of Kentucky's cause. 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 begin 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, We're getting more and more upset. 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. 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 sigh.

The problem was all the good numbers were already taken. 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. 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... He thought he could sell it. Ah. I think that's what it amounts to. Yeah, yeah. He was like, this number has marketing power. On November 11, 1926, the state's president.

voted to accept the map for a new national highway system. Sai 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 a thriving Main Street, Cy Avery envisioned, would take a miracle. That's after the break. This is Rachel from San Diego, California.

I love ThruLine. I'm a history major. In college, I feel like I get a refreshment every week. And I really appreciate it. You're listening to ThruLine. And VR. Part 3, the Main Street of America. My great uncle, my grandfather's brother, who was a very laconic Ozarker,

he said, you know, when your grandparents got married, he said, I took him over to Joplin. to take a train for their honeymoon. And he drove him over there on old 66, which is 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 him 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'd never driven on anything that smooth or that fine. I just to think about this guy, you know, in an old bottle T, saying, I got to go back and do that again. That was so cool. In 1926, when Route 66 was officially signed into existence, along with the rest of the U.S.'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 that ran through

weren't seeing much more traffic than usual. Sai Avery wanted fanfare, and he knew it was going to take some good old-fashioned showmanship. 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 days celebration, Avery and Woodruff went out to see where the paving was going on for what would become Route 66.

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. 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 U.S. 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. It's because of this guy.

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. 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. 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.

The Bunyan Derby. I think this is the reason that Route 66 is known around the world, right there. It all started with the publicist Woodruff and Avery had hired to hype up Route 66, a guy named Lon Scott. 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.

Oh. And everybody guffawed. A foot race on the highway? 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. Now, I don't claim to be any kind of sports officiornado, but even I have heard of some of the big sports stunts that were going on around this time.

Charles Lindbergh flew not. on-stop over the Atlantic, the first time anyone had ever done that, with the help of nine sponsors. When the American swimmer Gertrude Ederle swam the English Channel, newspapers in both England and the U.S. 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. And Pyle was the sports professional.

promoter. So they got in touch with Charlie Pyle, and the end result was the great international transcontinental foot race from Los Angeles to Chicago and then on to Madison Square Garden. 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. 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 prize fighter 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, you know, and $1,000 to the top 10 finishers. And so this got worldwide attention. You can imagine. 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. 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. They kick up a cloud of dust as they take off.

And the sports riders ate it up. Bunyan Derby underway. Farmer leaves field in long Bunyan Derby. Cross-country Bunyan Marathon still numbers 96 hired runners. And once it was well on its way down Route 66, that's when the Bunyan Derby really good. 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. Pyle also had a carnival that went with him. There was a two-headed chicken, a tattoo lady. and they also had the mummified body of a junior wine, Oklahoma outlaw. 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 like Mad Men era marketing. Like, this is the OG.

Yes. And remember, the roads were muddy. Because the road wasn't actually done yet, right? 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, did he get to? shot. 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. 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. The runners plotted the their way across the country, from L.A. 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. It took almost three full months, but 55 men made it all the way from Los Angeles to New York City. Fifty-five made it the whole way. What happened to the rest of them? They just dropped off along the way somewhere. They dropped off. Some of them got hit by cars. 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. I mean, it 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.

Absolutely. I mean, this was the biggest thing, and I swear, that's why Route 66 is known to people. Because of the Bunyan Derby, I think the world knew about Route 66. 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. My great-grandfather had a farm on Southwest Missouri that fronted on Route 66. And mom talked about seeing one time she saw a still 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 for every car that goes past on this road. Route 66 was always, always, Sai Avery or not, it was always about money. Getting people to drive in, get their car service, spend the night, eat in the cafes, and leave money behind. Because there was not much chance without the highways. In the early 1930s,

Cy Avery stepped away from the highway-making business, but his dream stayed alive. Route 66 kept growing, and by the end of the decade, the whole thing got paved. The first U.S. highway paved all the way west. In the 40s and 50s, families, now with paid time off, set off on road trips. One of the best things about a trip to Southern California on U.S. 66 is that it starts in Chicago.

And promotional films like this one sold them on every stop along the way. I leave St. Louis and continue west. I'm having a very nice trip. You can hear how over the course of these decades, Roots, 606 starts to take on a new identity. Route 66 called the Main Street of America. With ad copy that really channels John Steinbeck. Highway 66 leads across the arid grass-covered plains and plateaus that sweep toward the distant hills.

Through a landscape of constantly changing colors, dotting the limitless panorama of earth and sky. 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. So, 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. Susan says if Cy Avery, the PR campaign and the Bunyan Derby were what put Roos 66 on the map, the people who drove down the road in the decades that followed

were the ones who made it mean something. In my mind, Roe 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. It imprints on you when you go through something like that, yeah. It imprints on you. And then in the 50s, that was the first time that people in this country, the working people who 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. California, the golden land of orange groves and sunshine, trees and flowers, deserts and ocean show, offers rich promise and exciting fulfillment to the holiday seekers. So you had, you know, three decades of millions of Americans. They weren't just using the highway to get someplace. It was personal. At a time when the country was growing and U.S. 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

and built newer, bigger roads. which bypassed and replaced the old Route 66. After the interstate system came in, rear 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. 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. Criss-crossed 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, Sai Avery, would have been proud to see. 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. Which was always Cy Avery's dream, wasn't it?

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 was a lot of goes to show that anyone interested in roads should never quit. You know, we're marking a hundred 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? 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 a way.

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. It's the world's highway. And What does it reflect about the U.S.? 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. Susan Croce-Kelly is the author of the father of Route 66.

The story of Cy Avery. And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randad de Fattah. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Adablui. This episode was produced by me and Sarah Wyman. Julia Redpath. Casey Minor.

Devin Katayama. Hiana Mohadam. Amy Padula. Jasmine Romero. Skyler Swenson. Leanna Simstrom. Irene Noguchi. Voice overwork from Dan O'Neill,

Rylan Barton, Steve Drummond, Mark Smith, and Emily Sajia. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keely. Thank you to Johannes Durgy, Cheyenne Butler, Matthew Pollock, Nadine Zilstra, and Tommy Evans. Music for this episode was composed by Rantin and his band,

Drop Electric, which includes... Navid Marvi, Show Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or liked something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at npr.org. And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number two. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode.

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