Getting Our Kicks on Route 66
I love history and this road across America has miles of it!
Officially, the numerical designation 66 was assigned to the Chicago-to-Los Angeles route in the summer of 1926. With that designation came its acknowledgment as one of the nation’s principal east-west arteries.
From the outset, public road planners intended U.S. 66 to connect the main streets of rural and urban communities along its course for the most practical of reasons: most small towns had no prior access to a major national thoroughfare.
Store owners, motel managers, and gas station attendants recognized early on that even the poorest travelers required food, automobile maintenance, and adequate lodging. Just as New Deal work relief programs provided employment with the construction and the maintenance of Route 66, the appearance of countless tourist courts, garages, and diners promised sustained economic growth after the road’s completion. If military use of the highway during wartime ensured the early success of roadside businesses, the demands of the new tourism industry in the postwar decades gave rise to modern facilities that guaranteed long-term prosperity.
All along Route 66 is proof of its heyday. Bagdad Café, originally the Sidewinder, is one such place. Its name was changed because of the 1987 film titled Bagdad Café starring Jack Palance which was shot here.
All that remains for many places are their signs. This was Henning Motel.
Ironically, the public lobby for rapid mobility and improved highways that gained Route 66 its enormous popularity in earlier decades also signaled its demise beginning in the mid-1950s. Mass federal sponsorship for an interstate system of divided highways markedly increased with Dwight D. Eisenhower’s second term in the ‘White House. General Eisenhower had returned from Germany very impressed by the strategic value of Hitler’s Autobahn. “During World War II,” he recalled later, “I saw the superlative system of German national highways crossing that country and offering the possibility, often lacking in the United States, to drive with speed and safety at the same time.
The congressional response to the president’s commitment was the passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which provided a comprehensive financial umbrella to underwrite the cost of the national interstate and defense highway system.
By 1970, nearly all segments of original Route 66 were bypassed by a modern four-lane highway. So very sad.
But not all is lost. Some things on Route 66 are going nowhere and Amboy Crater is one of them.
Amboy Crater, formed of ash and cinders, is 250 feet high and 1,500 feet in diameter. It is situated in one of the youngest volcanic fields in the United States.
The crater hike was the perfect way to stretch our legs.
Roy Irvin and Velma Crowl who lived in the area, opened a service station with a garage for repairs in 1938 on Route 66 during the Great Depression. They also had a tow truck to haul broken down cars, which was quite common in the desert in those days.
A must stop, for us, was Roy's Motel and Café in Amboy, CA.
Business boomed so he added more units in the rear, by building a 18 roomed two-floor block. The world famous sign was erected, in 1959, during US Route 66's heyday. When I-40 opened in 1973, bypassing Amboy, business took a turn for the worse. Buster sold out in 1995 and passed away in 1999.
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