description: Route 66 is a historic and mythical highway. Uniquely American, it has become a symbol of mom-and-pop diners, apple pie, and the adventure of the open road. For three years, photographers Polly Brown and Jane Bernard traveled the road to document in photographs and first-person accounts the spirit of America so evident in the playful and determined natures of those who have made the road home.Meet Bob Kraft, who's been tending bar for twenty-eight years at the Riviera, in Gardner, Illinois, an original Route 66 roadhouse from the 1930s and in its infancy frequented by starlets and mobsters. Down the road in Braidwood is the Polk-a-Dot Drive Inn, inauspiciously established when a man named Chet drove a white bus painted with polka dots onto the lot and served fast food out the window. Ruby Boswell, of Pontiac, recalls the days when he had to leave his segregationist town to get a haircut, and artist Sam Butcher thinks of his visit to the Sistine Chapel, inspiration for his unique-even-by-66 standards Precious Moments Chapel, in Carthage, Missouri. Wanda Young, of Lebanon, Missouri, opened her roller rink in 1941, the year she began to skate "artistically." Even and especially today, this is a place "where no bad things happen." Ed Galloway displays his three-hundred-odd fiddles in Foyil, Kansas. His goal was to carve one fiddle from every kind of wood in the world. Harley and Annabelle are the "mediocre music makers" of Erick, Oklahoma. Dot Leavitt started her mini-museum in Vega, Texas, with a cream separator, and another prized possession is a butter mold, date unknown. Albuquerque's Aztec Motel caters to semi-permanents and serves free weekend meals to its "family" of residents. Angel Delgadillo, of Seligman, Arizona, has lived on Route 66 all his life and remembers the Okies during the Dust Bowl coming through town with mattresses strapped to their cars. At eleven, Gordon Evans is the self-proclaimed minister of El Rancho Motel, in Barstow, California, and waitress Hilda Fish, of Oak Hills, once nearly served Elvis breakfast.
language: English
title: American Route 66: Home on the Road
titlecomplete: American Route 66: Home on the Road
ratings_count: 1
publisher: Museum of New Mexico Pr