The memorial for the man was little more than an oxidized bronze plaque about the size of a piece of letterhead: a humble memorial for the man who might have helped save Western civilization.
The thought of this bothered me. In my career I had honored myself and been honored, far more than this man had ever been. I had received more standing ovations, gifts, and accolades than this man could have dreamed of. And for what? Taking people’s money?
That thought rattled around my mind for the next sixteen miles, where Route 66 jogged sharply north, up and over the freeway overpass. I followed the original road, with I-55 to my left and railroad tracks to the right, along a lengthy strip of barren landscape. Ten miles later I stopped for the day at the Classic Inn.
I ate spaghetti and meatballs at Pete’s Restaurant and Pancake House, then went back to my room and collapsed into bed.
Chapter Twelve
The authorities have finally conclusively determined the cause of the plane crash. I’m sure the 211 dead can now breathe a collective sigh of relief.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
I headed off the next morning to the town of Dwight. The town wasn’t hard to find as it was announced by a massive baby-blue water tower with its name emblazoned in twenty-foot-high letters.
I walked into Dwight on Highway 47, passing the Ambler-Becker gas station, an iconic Route 66 station and landmark, then stopped at the Dwight laundry, threw most of my clothes into the washer, and walked farther down the street to eat breakfast at the Old 66 Family Restaurant. I had coffee, biscuits, and the Denver omelet.
After breakfast I walked back to the laundromat, moved my clothes to the dryer, then walked to Berkot’s grocery store, where I purchased jerky, Advil, hard caramels, water, and a copy of Time magazine. I walked back to the laundromat and read the magazine while I waited for my clothes to dry.
There was an article in Time on the Flight 227 plane crash with more definitive information about the investigation. The FAA had concluded that the crash was due to mechanical malfunction. As the jet was beginning to take off, one of the engines separated from its mounts, damaging the wing and severing the hydraulic lines that kept the wing locked in place. As the jet started to climb, the left wing stalled while the right wing continued to lift, rolling the jet sideways and causing the crash. I could only imagine the terror the passengers must have felt as the plane rolled.
The jet had just been refueled, and the resulting explosion and fire had incinerated everything. No human remains were found.
When the dryer buzzed, I gathered up my clothes and went back on the road, leaving the magazine on top of the dryer.
The rural landscape was flat, littered with old barns, cornfields, and railroad tracks. The road signs for 66 were now painted shields on the highway, the change likely made because Route tourists kept stealing the regular road signs for souvenirs.
I walked along a narrow, two-lane highway for another three miles until I reached the town of Odell. The town greeted me with four Burma-Shave-style signs placed in twenty-yard intervals:
A SMALL TOWN
WITH A BIG HEART
WHERE EVERYBODY
IS SOMEBODY
Near the entrance of the town was Odell’s Standard Oil Gasoline Station—another vintage Route 66 filling station that had been restored by the people of Odell and the National Park Service. The station’s design was based on the 1916 Standard Oil model known as the “domestic style” gas station, which looked more like a domicile than a place to fuel up. The idea was to leave the customers with a comfortable feeling they could associate with home. I had nothing on the marketing men of those days.
The Route then crossed through a small suburban area without a car in sight. My most surprising find was the Odell Subway Tunnel, a pedestrian tunnel that went under the road, for schoolchildren and pedestrians who needed to cross the busy 66.
It was hard to imagine that the traffic through this sleepy suburb had once been so brisk that an underground crossing was needed. The tunnel has since been filled, so only the entry way and a few steps leading down still exist.
As I left the town, I encountered more Burma-Shave-style signs:
GOOD-BYE
GLAD YOU CAME
HEADED TO PONTIAC?
BE SURE TO VISIT
ROUTE 66 HALL OF FAME MUSEUM
They’re working that rhyme like a rented mule, I thought.
Sixteen miles into my day’s journey I encountered the first advertisement for the famous Meramec Caverns, painted on the side of a barn. Barn-side advertising had once been a thing—before myriad billboards began cluttering our thoroughfares. Then the laws changed, and now only existing advertising barns are allowed to remain.
At about twenty miles, entering the town of Pontiac, I walked past the Old Log Cabin Inn. My guidebook said that the restaurant actually predated Route 66 and its proprietors had turned the whole building around to face Route 66 after it was built.
I came upon still more Burma-Shave-style signage.
IF HUGGING
IS YOUR SPORT
TRADE IN YOUR CAR
FOR A DAVENPORT
Burma-Shave
WHEN YOU
TRY TO PASS
THE GUY IN FRONT
GOES TWICE AS FAST
Burma-Shave
From 1926 to 1963, the Burma-Shave company created hundreds of these advertising ditties (more than six hundred by one count), many of them becoming part of the American lexicon. Sometimes on our morning Dumpster dives, my father would recite one of his favorites, with as much gusto as if he were reciting Shelley or Whitman.
DRINKING DRIVERS
NOTHING WORSE
THEY PUT THE QUART
BEFORE THE HEARSE
One of the Burma-Shave signs even became a popular song of today.
HEY I JUST MET YOU
AND THIS IS CRAZY
BUT HERE’S MY NUMBER
SO CALL ME MAYBE
Pontiac, Illinois, like Joliet, was another one of those towns that owned its Route 66 heritage. Even the town’s welcome sign was a large ROUTE 66 shield with the town’s name stretched across the bottom. My guidebook said that there was a large Route 66 museum in the center of town.
It also recommended the “world famous” Three Roses Bed-and-Breakfast on Howard Street. I called to see if they had availability, which they did, so I walked the six blocks to the bed-and-breakfast.
The Three Roses was a beautiful, Victorian-style mansion with soft-gray, fish-scale shingles and white trimming. I knocked on the door, then walked inside, where I was greeted by Sharon Hansen, half the proprietorship of the Three Roses, which was named for the couple’s three daughters.
Sharon led me to a room on the second floor. The view from the window was of the Vermilion River, spanned by one of Pontiac’s three swinging bridges—an ironwork suspension bridge with a wooden walkway. She left me in my room, and I put away my things and laid back on the bed to rest a bit before dinner. I slept until the next morning.
Chapter Thirteen
I’ve come to understand that Route 66 is not a location—it’s an idea. It’s the physical manifestation of the American Dream.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
I woke the next morning to the aroma of breakfast pleasantly wafting up to my room. I’m sure this was by design, as one of the B&B’s slogans is “Where breakfast is an event!” (Exclamation added by proprietor.)
I went downstairs. The menu included egg and cheese strata, cinnamon rolls, seven kinds of pancakes—including oatmeal, flaxseed, butter pecan, and orange—French toast, Belgian waffles, fresh fruit, spiced oatmeal, homemade granola, and grits.
I ate a hearty breakfast, thanked Sharon for her hospitality and designer pancakes, grabbed my pack, and continued on my walk, stopping just a few blocks from the B&B at Pontiac’s Route 66 Museum.
The museum, also called the Route 66 Hall of Fame, was well laid out. Its main floor displayed life in the 1930s a
nd ’40s with rooms representing the décor of the time—like a traditional dining room with rose-colored upholstered couches, a black lacquered bookshelf, and a console radio with rabbit-ear antennae.
There was also a kitchen, complete with a vintage refrigerator and stove, other appliances, and boxes and tin cans of the foodstuffs of that time.
As I looked over the displays, it occurred to me that Route 66 was a destination less of locale than of time—a 2,500-mile display case of an era.
In front of the museum was the Bob Waldmire Road Yacht, a school bus turned motor home with a wood siding exterior. Bob Waldmire was a Route 66 enthusiast who gained notoriety for touring up and down the Route in a mustard-colored VW microbus called the Old Route 66 Mobile Information Center.
I spent about an hour at the museum, though I could have stayed longer had I not been concerned with reaching my next destination. I left the museum and continued down Howard, turning left onto Route 23/Route 66.
It was along this stretch that I finally settled on the fact that there is not just one Route 66. Route 66, like the country it was built on, has never stopped evolving. When it first opened in 1927, parts of the original road, like all highways of the time, were gravel or graded dirt. The US Highway 66 Association (this may be the only road in history with a fan club) pushed to make it the first fully paved interstate in America. In 1930 much of the Route underwent major realignments, especially between Illinois and Missouri and particularly in St. Louis. Then, in 1932, it changed again.
Not surprisingly, the original road was smaller than the later versions, narrower and more precarious. One section was called Bloody 66 (owing to the frequency and lethality of accidents there), and a few places on the Route were so steep that the automotive technology of the day, with gravity-fed carburetors, required that cars drive backward to make it up the hills.
Since the older road was abandoned long before the rest of the highway, miles of road are still visible but unusable—the pavement broken up, with weeds and trees growing through the cracks.
My afternoon walking was easy, as the terrain was flat and the temperature pleasant. About nineteen miles into the day, the original two-lane road suddenly appeared again. Oddly, only one half of the road had been repaved.
I spent the night at the humbly named America’s Best Value Inn, which boasted that it was the number one ranked hotel in Chenoa. It was also the only hotel in Chenoa.
Chapter Fourteen
Art is an expression of life. Perhaps it should be the opposite.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
It was hard to believe that it had only been a week since I had left Chicago. It felt longer, much longer. As they say, it’s not the years, it’s the mileage.
I looked different. I had already lost weight, my beard was filling in, and my skin was toned a deep bronze. More importantly, I felt different. Curiously, being transient made me feel more stable. The next morning I passed more Burma-Shave signs.
WHEN YOU CAN’T SEE
PASSING CARS
MAY GIVE YOU A GLIMPSE
OF ETERNITY
Burma-Shave
DON’T STICK YOUR ELBOW
OUT TOO FAR
IT MIGHT GO HOME
IN ANOTHER CAR
Burma-Shave
Even though it was nearly summer, a decorated Christmas tree stood next to a billboard that read
GET YOUR KICKS ON TOWANDA’S ROUTE 66
Two hours from Chenoa I reached Towanda. I couldn’t see the name without envisioning Kathy Bates in the Fried Green Tomatoes movie shouting “Towanda!” before ramming her car into the car of the teenager who had just stolen her parking space.
THE WOLF IS SHAVED
SO NEAT AND TRIM
RED RIDING HOOD
IS CHASING HIM
Burma-Shave
I didn’t stop in Towanda, but continued on for four more hours until I reached the Bloomington-Normal water tower.
Bloomington and Normal are different towns, but up to that point, all the road signs I’d encountered had hyphenated them together like conjoined twins. Maybe they were. I wasn’t sure where one town started and the other ended, but I learned that no one else did either.
The natives call the region Blo-No, which is a considerable savings of syllables but sounds like it needs a Kleenex.
Bloomington has a colorful past. It is the birthplace of both the Republican party and Beer Nuts—read into that what you will. The fictional character Colonel Henry Blake from the TV show M*A*S*H was from Blo-No, as was the American writer and philosopher Elbert Hubbard. While Hubbard may not be a common name among most Americans, he was a wise and unlikely hero of mine.
Hubbard was a fascinating character who described himself as both an anarchist and a socialist but was later disavowed by the Socialist Party when he became a vocal proponent of free enterprise and the American dream. When his anticapitalist friends accused him of selling out, Hubbard replied that he had not given up his ideals, he had “just lost faith in Socialism as a means of realizing them.”
In addition to his more incendiary thoughts, he said many things that I found memorable and profound, some of which have stuck in the American lexicon. You have likely heard some of them and not known who they came from.
God will not look you over for medals, diplomas, or degrees—but for scars.
Don’t take life too seriously. You’ll never get out of it alive.
And a quote oftentimes misattributed to Aristotle:
Do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing, and you’ll never be criticized.
What intrigued me most about Hubbard’s life was how, in the end, his reality imitated his art.
After the sinking of the Titanic, Hubbard recorded the story of one Ida Straus, a married woman who, when offered a place on a lifeboat before the men, refused to leave her husband, choosing instead to die with him. Of the incident Hubbard wrote, “There are just two respectable ways to die. One is of old age, the other is by accident. Disease is indecent, suicide is atrocious. But to die as Mrs. Straus did is glorious. Few have such a privilege, happy lovers both.” The article ended with his now-immortal words, “In life they were not separated and in death they are not divided.”
As he wrote those words, he couldn’t have known that he was foreshadowing the circumstances of his own death. Three years after the Titanic’s sinking, the Hubbards boarded the ill-fated Lusitania in New York City. Eleven miles off the coast of Ireland the ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat.
Ernest Cowper, one of the survivors of the tragedy, offered this firsthand account:
After the ship had been torpedoed, Mr. and Mrs. Hubbard came up to the portside boat-deck. Neither appeared disturbed in the least. The Hubbards linked arms and stood looking calmly out over the side. Mr. Hubbard said to me, “Well, they have got us. They are a damn sight worse than I ever thought they were.” When I asked what they were going to do, Mrs. Hubbard smiled and replied, “There does not seem to be anything to do.” Then the two of them, still arm and arm, went into one of the rooms on the top deck and shut the door behind them. It was the last they were ever seen.
They walked their talk and died gloriously together. As sad as their story was, to me it was also remarkably beautiful. The idea of loving someone, and being loved by someone, until death and beyond seemed almost unfathomable to me. It was something I wanted but told myself didn’t really exist. I suspect that I was trying to protect my heart from the truth that, in my current state, I would be dying alone.
Bloomington is, among other things, a college town, the home of Illinois State University. With a population of about seventy-eight thousand, it’s Illinois’s twelfth-largest city, but combined with Normal, it’s the fifth-most populous.
I began to feel a little claustrophobic as my solitary walking gave way again to crowded streets, honking horns, and jostling traffic. I found the hubbub wearisome.
I stopped at a Kroger’s for supplies—mostly protein bars and wate
r—then made my way to the Burr House, a stately redbrick bed-and-breakfast with gables and green-shuttered windows with flower boxes, and retired for the evening.
Chapter Fifteen
Something has changed. It’s as if the road has begun traveling me.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
It was day eight of my walk, and I felt trapped in the city. Even one that was only a fraction the size of Chicago. Coming from a small life, I prided myself in having become cosmopolitan. I boasted that I was at ease in London, Paris, Rome, Chicago, but I now wondered if that was really true. Part of me yearned for solitude.
An hour into my walk there appeared a frontage road with a narrow bikeway that was perfect for walking. A little after noon I passed a sign that read,
MAPLE SIRUP
1/4 MILE AHEAD
FUNKS GROVE COUNTRY STORE
It was one of many signs I’d passed advertising Funks Grove maple syrup, which made me want some even though I didn’t know what I’d do with it. Maybe it was the technically correct but unusual way they spelled sirup.
A few minutes later I reached the Funks Grove store’s driveway. There was a Route 66 roadside attraction sign as well as a large wooden one announcing the store.
I followed the driveway up only to find the parking lot deserted and the store closed. A sign near the store read,
Sorry, We Are Sold Out
I felt cheated. I walked another ninety minutes until I came to the town of McLean, which pretty much consisted of a Hunts Brothers Pizza and a Super 8 Motel, and called it a day.
Chapter Sixteen
It’s my birthday. It’s a grim reality to know that there are fewer celebrating my birthday than there are celebrating my death.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
The first town I reached the next day was Atlanta. Not the Atlanta; this one had a population of fewer than two thousand. The most notable resident of the town was a twenty-five-foot-tall fiberglass Paul Bunyon holding a massive hot dog. This is the exact same giant “muffler man” figurine that can be found in other towns and with different accoutrements throughout America—like the rocket-holding Gemini Giant I’d walked past at the defunct Launching Pad burger stop in Wilmington.