Route 66 in the News
Savoring Route 66 in Oklahoma
2008-01-04 09:31:23
ON ROUTE 66 IN OKLAHOMA - Six years ago Laurel Kane and her husband moved from Connecticut to Afton, Okla., because of Route 66.
They bought an old D-X gas station in the small town and began turning it into a welcoming center and old car museum.
“I’m the Route 66 person, and he’s the car person,” said Kane.
“Immediately after moving here we got a divorce, after 35 years of marriage,” she said.
But the partnership, each with a separate travel-related focus, continues.
“I’ve been a Route 66 fanatic for years and years and years, collecting things,” said Kane. “My husband was a car collector for years and years and years. So we knew we were going to retire and we wanted a place on Route 66. We found this place and it fit the bill.”
Her interest, she said, came quite naturally.
“When I was a kid, my father was the best roadie in the world. He just loved to get in the car – he was like another kid. I was an only child. My mom and dad and I would get in the car and my dad and I would have to stop at every tourist trap. It drove my mother nuts. But I loved every minute of it, and my dad and I started collecting stuff. So I’ve been this way ever since I was about 4.”
“If push comes to shove, I’d almost rather be on the road. I had to decide: Did I want to travel all the time or have this place? Before I got sick (last January), I was putting about 50,000 miles on the car a year, plus having this place open five days a week. When I wasn’t here, I was in the car, driving. Just anywhere. Didn’t matter.”
That schedule has been curtailed by dialysis three times a week.
“But I hope to recover some day and get off the machines,” she said.
Kane is mostly a post card collector – she’s been collecting them for 30 years.
“I have 15,000 roadie post cards, all of motels all over the country. Closest to my heart are my postcards.”
But of Route 66 memorabilia, she prizes most a program from the 1928 foot race, nicknamed the Bunion Derby, that celebrated the opening of Route 66. It ran from Los Angeles to Chicago along Route 66, then to New York City. The winner was a 20-year-old Cherokee Indian from Foyil, Okla.
Kane said that many of those who stop at the station are interested in seeing the old Packards on display there. But the true Route 66 devotees always stick with the Route 66 memorabilia. And, she said, that includes an increasing number of foreigners.
“It’s such a popular destination. Summer is full of foreign tourists.”
And, she added, the movie “Cars” is causing an influx of younger people getting an interest in the highway, “so a lot of kids are dragging their parents out on Route 66.”
One of the attractions often found at the station is Ron Jones, a.k.a. The Tattoo Man. He needs no sandwich board to blazon his love of Route 66 – he just takes his shirt off to display a variety of colorful tattoos.
“He’s always the show-stopper,” said Kane.
And now, with the holidays past and thoughts turning to warm-weather vacations, road trips are once again on people’s minds. AAA says that some 90 percent of Americans vacation by personal vehicle. And despite high gas prices, some of those vacationers will choose to take the scenic route rather than the interstate. A perpetually popular option is Route 66.
There’s no denying the tie to the 1960s television series which saw characters Tod Stiles and Buz Murdock travel the highway in a Corvette convertible. But its fame had come even earlier with John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” characters traveling “the mother road, the road of flight” and World War II military training in the western states using the highway as its primary mobilization route.
Route 66, covering more than 2,400 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles, was officially commissioned as a U.S. highway in 1926, its construction completed in the late 1930s. It was different from many other U.S. highways, following a diagonal rather than a linear course. Part of its purpose was to connect small rural towns of the Midwest, enabling farmers to transport grain and produce for redistribution. It was especially important to the growing trucking industry because it went through mostly flat prairie lands in temperatures milder than those of northern routes.
By the 1970s, Route 66 was rendered obsolete by the interstate system; the federal government decommissioned it in the mid-1980s. But its fame had by then been firmly cemented in the American psyche. There’s plenty of serious stuff along the route, but for many, it’s the ribbon of kitsch found along the roadway that commands attention today. There are, for instance, the Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas; the Leaning water tower in Groom, Texas; the Jack Rabbit Trading Post in Joseph City, Ariz.
Oklahoma has more Route 66 miles than any other state – and a variety of outlandish reasons to stop. Not far from Kane’s gas station is the Blue Whale in Catoosa. Hugh Davis built the monstrosity – 80 feet in length, made from 126 bags of concrete mix – as an anniversary present for his wife, who collected whale figurines, in 1974. The smiling sea creature invites visitors to walk in, right through its open mouth. At one time swimming was allowed in the small pond, thus the slide to get you into the water and the ladder to get you out. A diving board allowed swimmers to do flips off the whale’s tail. And an open area of the body provided a place for sunbathing.
The whale was planned for family use only, but when locals continued to sneak in to swim, Davis hired lifeguards and built a picnic area, restrooms and concession stand. The small roadside attraction also had a reptile zoo.
When Davis died in 1990, the site fell into disrepair. Locals cleaned up the site and repainted the whale, and once again it is attracting visitors.
Foyil has a statue honoring the Bunion Race winner. It also has Totem Pole Park with its own cement sculpture, a nine-story-tall totem, the largest in the world when it was completed.
It took folk artist Ed Galloway 11 years to complete his tribute to the American Indian; he finished it in 1948.
Galloway, a Missouri native, was on his way to California to display some of his woodworking when he came through Tulsa in the late 1930s. He never made it to California. Instead he got a job in the Sooner state, teaching woodworking in a nearby orphanage school.
“He was known primarily for his woodwork, even though he did a lot of work with cement,” said tour guide Carolyn Comfort. “He was a mentor for the boys and brought them out here in the summers, in the late ’20s and early ’30s, and they would camp out. They’d go fishing in the evenings, but they had to work during the day. They would gather rocks – that was their big assignment when they came out here to have fun.”
Galloway also played the fiddle in the evenings.
Later, many of the boys served in the military during World War II.
“What can we do for you?” they’d ask Galloway. His response: To send him pieces of wood.
“So he got wood from all over the world, from where the boys were stationed,” said Comfort. “That’s why the fiddles are here. He did them to show off the wood, 300 in all, in different woods from throughout the world.”
The fiddles are not playable. A key to each one identifies its wood – pecan, white ash, teak, peroba, cow oak, tulip, paw paw, green haw, red mulberry, bubanga, ….
“We’re an icon on Route 66, so he had lots and lots of people come by while he worked,” said Comfort. “He was a workaholic. He’d talk to them while he worked.”
She continued: “One of my favorite stories is about a man who came out in a plane and landed here. Mr. Galloway was whittling over by the house. The man got out of the plane and said, ‘What darn fool would come out here and build a totem pole in a place like this?’
“And Galloway said, ‘For the same reason that darn fool came out here to see it.’”
~Elizabeth Granger, Noblesville Daily Times
See also:
Comments about this article? Tell us.
Need to Know More?
SEARCH Route 66 University.
Home : Our Campus : Maps : Businesses : Events
Study 66 : COMMUNITY : Photo Tour : Campus Rag : Catalog
