Steinbeck christened it the Mother Road. Others called it Main Street, USA . For
hundreds of thousands of '30s migrants, it was the way to the Golden Land-California.
Its given name was U.S Highway 66, stretching 2,500 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica.
It was lit by the neon of a hundred motor courts with names like Lariat, Plainsman,
Silver Spur, Wagon Wheel. There were plenty of diners to pull into for steak and mashed
potatoes or a cup of coffee and some homemade apple pie. It was the road that put
Americans in touch with America.
Route 66 is dead. It has been diced up, supplanted by a huge sterilized speedway called
Interstate 40 that runs out in the California desert at Barstow.
But the symbolic Route 66, the metaphor of fresh beginnings, of people discovering
their country, endures. Route 66 began as a collage of cattle and wagon train trails.
Not until 1926 was the collection spliced under the black-and-white shield with the
double sixes.
The first and most eloquent testament to the highway was delivered by John Steinbeck in
"The Grapes of Wrath," published in 1939. Steinbeck's fictional family of
Oklahoma share croppers, the Joads, piled themselves, their dog and their mattresses into
a jalopy and set out for California. Steinbeck wrote: "66 is the mother road, the
road of flight."
If a remake of the film version of "The Grapes of Wrath" were made. Lillian
Redman would be a natural to play Ma Joad. Redman is the operator of the Blue Swallow
motel in Tucumcari N.M. She has blue eyes that are both gentle and strong, set in a
smooth, pink face that has worn the years well.
The Blue Swallow sits on old Highway 66, one of a dozen motels in Tucumcari raised in
the '40s and '50s catering to the highway crowd. Redman remembers the stream of migrants
with their dust- caked, overloaded trucks. "They didn't know what they were going to
do," Redman said. "They just knew they were going to make it."
When they reached Albuquerque after a sweltering drive across the New Mexican desert,
travelers on Route 66 saw what could only be a mirage: several teepees, a white building
with 6-foot-tall black jackrabbits perched on top, and a covered wagon attached to two
motionless oxen.
The fantastic sight was actually the Covered Wagon, a trading post operated by Manny
Gooman, who has peddled the novelties of the West.
"We got 'em all. Elvis. Bette Davis. Ginger Rogers. Tony Quinn. You name
'em," he says. "Hey, there isn't anybody who's anybody who hasn't been to the
Covered Wagon. "
Goodman's old shop was bulldozed to make way for Interstate 40. Now he operates a new
Covered Wagon in the fashionable Old Town district in Albuquerque. As were the Joads,
Steve Waterman was in flight. He stood in the passenger window of his yellow 1975
Oldsmobile and whipped a cord around the spare tire loaded on the roof. When he'd pulled
the cord taut, he dropped back down to the pavement, fished a generic cigarette out of his
pocket. and lit it. He was letting the Oldsmobile cool at a freeway rest stop outside
Holbrook, Ariz. His wife of two days curled in the front seat, sleeping. His four
daughters were playing in the shadows outside the restrooms.
He has no job. No real prospect of any.
One of his daughters, 12 years old, approached.
"Daddy, where are my cigarettes?" she asked.
"I don't know. Where'd you leave 'em?" Waterman asked in return. Waterman
scooped up a jumble of crayons on the trunk lid and put them in a coffee can.
"Time to get movin'," he said.
Over the treacherous pass through the Black Mountains, the road drops through the town
of Oatman to the Colorado River. Interstate 40 crosses the water on four wide lanes of
suspended concrete. Next to the freeway span is a small, almost delicate bridge painted
white. The steel suspension bridge once held the double lanes of Route 66. It was used in
a few of the scenes in the film version of "The Grapes of Wrath." Now the bridge
deck is closed to traffic, and supports large pipelines operated by El Paso Natural Gas
Co. and Pacific Gas and Electric Co.
On the other side of the bridge, rocky and scorched and inviting as a battleground, is
California.
Route 66 angled up a rise, then dropped into the town of Needles. Here, Steinbeck told
how the Joad men folk ventured into the sweet, soothing water, and the children, "
Winfield and Ruthie, waded up to their ankles and explored the reeds. The area is now a
sandy beach where men gather around the tailgates of pick-up trucks to drink beer and
motorboats race noisily through the water, pulling waterskiers and churning the water a
frothy white.
The Joads pushed beyond Needles, beyond the relentless heat and the baked, barren land.
Mac McShan never did.
With long, gray-streaked hair and a grizzled thicket of a beard, McShan is a genial man
with a quick, raw intelligence. He came to California from Arkansas in 1934 aboard
Greyhound bus. After working as a cook's helper and a miner, he got a steady job with the
Santa Fe railroad in Needles and never left.
He recalls one old-timer cruised Route 66 like an automotive vulture, preying on the
broken-down cars and trucks of migrants stranded in the desert.
"When that jackass found an Okie's rig broke down, he'd take everything he could.
Tires. Battery. Pots. Mattresses," McShan recalled. "I often had a mind to park
my car out there as bait, plant myself behind some cactus with a high-powered rifle. and
make his life interesting. Never did it. Kinda wish I had though."
From Needles to Barstow was the final test, and the most difficult. It is 130 miles
across the Mojave desert. There are no real towns, only a handful of gas stations. Drivers
kept a steady eye on the temperature and gas gauges, listened for signs of mechanical heat
exhaustion.
At Barstow, most of the migrants left Route 66 and headed north along what is now state
Highway 58 through the town of Mojave. Then over the Tehachapis and into the broad, green
Central Valley.
The demise of Route 66 came slowly. As stretches of the new freeway were finished, the
federal designation was stripped from 66, mile by mile, and shifted to 40.
But there is no killing the spirit of the Mother Road. It is reborn every time someone
reads "The Grapes of Wrath" or sees the movie, or catches a rerun of the
"Route 66" TV show or hears the Bobby Troup song.
And it lives in the minds and memories of Lillian Redman and Manny Goodman and Jack
Keller and Mac McShan, and a million children and grandchildren who have gathered around
to hear the story of how their parents or grandparents ventured west, to the Golden Land,
on a grand and garish route named 66.
