Converted wagon roads were old routes that started out for horse carts. Later, people tried to use them for cars, so they weren’t always designed for modern driving.
Good Roads Organizations were groups of people who campaigned for better roads. The episode says they showed up when more people started driving cars and needed roads that worked better.
A national highway system refers to a coordinated network of major roads planned and standardized across states. In the segment, they mention officials working to standardize routes and highway planning so travel and infrastructure would be consistent.
Concept
Secretary of Agriculture
The Secretary of Agriculture is a top government official. In this story, they’re mentioned because the government helped coordinate road planning at the national level.
The WPA was a government program that hired people to do big public works projects. Here, it’s being connected to road improvements along the Route 66 era.
The CCC was a government jobs program that worked on nature and public projects. In this story, it’s linked to improving roads so travel became easier.
They say the building was put on the National Register of Historic Places. That’s a government list for places considered important to history, which helps protect them.
Neon trim is the decorative neon lighting you’d see on older diners and roadside stops. They restored the original neon look as part of the building’s renovation.
Cadillac Ranch is a famous Route 66 stop with old Cadillacs set up like an art display. It’s the kind of quirky roadside landmark Route 66 is known for.
They mention the interstate, meaning the modern highway network. It can affect how you drive Route 66 today compared to how people did back then.
Concept
Blue Swallow Hotel
The Blue Swallow Hotel is a Route 66 landmark near Tucumcari. The hosts say it looks really damaged, which shows how some old stops have fallen into disrepair.
Concept
Parkway
They talk about a “parkway,” which is a special kind of road meant to be scenic. They’re comparing it to other stretches they’ve driven.
Concept
gout
Gout is mentioned as a medical issue that flared up due to diet, affecting the person’s ability to travel and participate in events. While not automotive, it’s part of the lived road-trip story around Route 66.
The Volkswagen Beetle is a small car made by Volkswagen that’s famous for its rounded, bug-like shape. It’s known worldwide and has been produced for many years. People mention it because it’s an easy car to recognize.
They mention a place themed around the Volkswagen Beetle. It’s the kind of quirky car attraction you might find along Route 66.
Term
diesel trains
These are trains that run on diesel fuel. The engine provides power to move the train along the tracks.
Concept
MythBusters thing
They’re talking about trying to prove or disprove a rumor by testing it. It’s like “let’s see if that actually works” instead of just guessing.
LIVE
Emily EP43: Hello.
Emily EP43: Here we go. And I feel like we should just jump in to, to, to today's episode.
Emily EP43: Yeah. We don't know what happened.
Rose EP43: Mm-hmm. No, not, not that part. Okay. No. Yeah, it's, it's a little more DTLA, quote unquote.
Coop and I would talk about it 'cause we drove past it a couple times. Fucking around getting off to 15 coop would come out and we'd go down to moon eyes and stuff. And so then to get back up to my place in the dessert, you'd have to go through Victorville. And Victorville has 66,
Rose EP43: so really early on, you know, I think Beal's Wagon Road is sort of like the beginning, uh, which is, uh, 18.
Rose EP43: Fair enough. I'll say that. I, uh, do anybody that knows me knows that I admire how much we knew in the past.
Rose EP43: Right. Yeah. The, the part worth
Rose EP43: she was outrageously boring. Uh, because English is a subject I like quite a bit. Maybe you know that I've published some things. I've done some writing. I enjoy doing writing. I enjoy reading. I think
Emily EP43: Okay. You're just really ra you're just really ragging on her.
And they were like, you can't do that. You can't just take a study hall instead of English. But the one thing that she was into that. That later really resonated with me was that she would talk about how in the summer when she was off, she would traverse Route 66 and she showed us a slideshow and she had a station wagon and it showed her out in the mud roads.
Rose EP43: Then for me, the first trip was in 2011, uh, with Denny Smith and he had a shop in St. Louis, uh, or outside of St. Louis Hamill, Illinois, route 66 rides. And we were gonna go to the Council of Councils, which was in Anaheim, California. And he was like, we're gonna drive as much as 66 as we can. And I was like, sounds awesome.
Rose EP43: Springfield is just a little jaunt off the beginning, not too far off the beginning. And so you got Cozy Dog around there and you've got, you know, uh, bill Shea's place is pretty close, uh, in Springfield, which I didn't get to go to, but I, I want to talk about that.
Rose EP43: Pretty much. I mean, we, you know,
Rose EP43: And Staton is like, I think, uh, I see Hamill right below it. It's probably like 20 minutes. I mean, I went to Hamill. I went to Denny's shop and used to hang with Denny all the damn time. Um, yeah. So I mean, it's an hour and 10 from Springfield to Hamill, you know, so not much. I haven't missed a whole lot of it, but I mean, there's a lot of gyms in Illinois. Oklahoma is a, is a special part of it anyway. Uh, what do, what
Rose EP43: mess. This, this is the mid twenties and um, some of the notes that we got was that, uh, that, you know, your early roads are converted wagon roads and that as cars became cool, grassroots organizations called Good Roads Organizations came about to improve motoring for early drivers.
Emily EP43: wonder what the maps were like.
Um, so it says that, you know, some of this stuff overlapped got pretty confusing. So the Secretary of Agriculture selected a board of state and federal highway officials to standardize a national highway system.
Rose EP43: and this one don't do And I was like, yeah. And he's like, do you know why they didn't? And I was like, well, you can tell me what you read it as because we didn't find one definitive answer over and over again.
Rose EP43: Now, one of the things that, what I read Yeah. In a, in a different book. Yeah. It said, um, but the route from Virginia Beach to Springfield, Missouri, which, which classic wrong, long roofer, sort of wrong roofer, classic, wrong roofer. Uh, did did say sort of this, he was like, it was another route through Kentucky or whatever, which is relevant.
Rose EP43: is it those two things? Yeah. Or is it like Thomas H. McDonald? Just calling them and just being like, for fuck's sake, wrap it up here. Hit the
Uh, Kentucky didn't seem to like it. Um, which, you know, I, I have really very little to say about that. The, all the time I've spent in the state, I don't never really heard shit about it.
Emily EP43: maybe that one.
Rose EP43: and then I'm assuming that November they're like getting shovels is more what we're talking about. If, if somebody wants to come along and comment that, like please
Rose EP43: like when you think about it. So it's like, it's not like, it's not like that would, like if you, if you change that, right. If it was like 1% of the population had cars, then 80% of the population might not know somebody that owned a car.
Uh, 235 to 240 million. Americans actually drive, uh, and that's approximately 86% of adults
Emily EP43: Probably encourage people to more people to get cars because then they could travel distances. Mm-hmm. And like also the proliferation of middle class cars. Yeah. With Ford. Sure. Who else was making middle
Rose EP43: or it was for me, I'm just gonna say for me, so the road, if we didn't state, this goes through Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, smoke, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. In 1929 of the 1200 miles west of Oklahoma, only 64.1 miles were paved.
Rose EP43: Yeah. And yeah, so, so like 33 to 38, the works program administration, the wpa, and the CCC, no p At the end of that, the Civilian Conservation Corps worked to improve the road, and by late 37 it was pretty much all paved.
No more wars. No more wars.
Rose EP43: talks about Cisco Clifton's filling station and he's talking about like in even a big black Cadillac, spent $7 there once and he's like, there's always a checker game and a conversation and it's kind of makes me think of 66, like all these old, all these old gas stations, like the, the story in Cisco Clifton's filling station is that the highway got moved.
Emily EP43: Yeah. And it also, it got replaced by like, the freeway off ramps are generally gas stations, motels, and fast food chains. So they kind of, it really sort of dulled the, um, variety, what you would get Yeah.
And how you just sort of see nothing and you could just drive exit to exit and you get there quickly. But you don't see America that way. No.
That's the little lure of that, uh, Emily EP43: Yeah. Because we, um, much like trying to see all the attractions on Route 66, you can't really, um, hit all of the, all of the history of it and all of the cool
mean still if you get pulled over or something.
Rose EP43: Or like, please, or like, please don't be rude to our employees about it. Yeah. Because they get a lot of grief. But right around Goffs, there's a cut through and the last time I tried to drive it, the road was closed and I think it was closed due to washout, but it's just part of the road where there's embankments on either side and it's popular to go take old cans and spell things out in cans and rocks.
I hadn't been back to it in a long time. And I'm out there by myself and it's the desert and it's scary
Rose EP43: like, and that happens in like New Mexico. And so there are times where I would try to, like, sometimes you get boned because you'll, you'll be like, I'm gonna hop off and I'm gonna ride the frontage road, and the frontage roads ends and then you have
Emily EP43: Ooh, And we did it all Route 60 16. And Denny and his, uh, his girlfriend and mom and stuff made all these signs that were all 66 related. And then we had, um, uh, our friend Derek, uh, he's a sign painter and made us a bunch of mother load signs, like one of 'em is in the shop. And so we had all of these really cool signs and we auctioned them off to people.
Rose EP43: Yeah. Yeah. Lemme see if, because I don't have any of 'em, uh, memorized just off the top. Mm-hmm. Let me see if I can find one really quick for you. Because they're pretty enchanting because, I mean, I've seen 'em in person, but it's not, I'm just not, he tried to cross first sign next one as Fast train, neared next sign. Death didn't draft him. Next sign he volunteered. Ber Mehave.
Emily EP43: Oh, okay. So they made interesting. So their whole thing was making sort of poetic road signs for their marketing.
Emily EP43: That one's really good. Wow. Those are brilliant. It.
Emily EP43: Yeah. It said that they took the signs down and like sold them to collectors.
Emily EP43: Yep. That was when it got decommissioned. But then, uh, so basically the rise and fall of the road was actually, was also the rise and fall of the towns. Yeah. Because they, they got gutted.
Rose EP43: Occasionally, yeah. Occasionally. We pick up each other's notes here and it says $10,000. So 10 million, goodness.
Emily EP43: uh, gimme a quick answer. Quick and sweet. Do you think, so this, this highway was a new, kind of a new technology, right? Um, and like we said, there wasn't a ton of people that had cars.
Rose EP43: So, yeah, sure it happens. But I think that you
'cause I was like, I'm gonna hit our spot. You know, even though I was by myself and I was like, they were like taking their leathers off and like real slow. And I just like, you know, I didn't want to get out and have to like talk to them and like, 'cause they just didn't look like the kind of people that would like somebody like me.
Rose EP43: And then they're like, that thing's pretty cool.
Rose EP43: Well, it was an old Conoco gas station, and then it was also, uh, as far as I can tell you, it was a hotel. But let me, let me get out this lovely book and I could read you a little bit more history. Let me flip. I'm in Oklahoma.
Bill Cody, okay, here we go. The U drop in in Shamrock is one of the most recognizable Route 66 landmarks in large part because it appears in the mythical town of Radiator Springs in the 2006 animated Pixar film Cars
Ooh. Buyers. Buyers wait. Sellers remorse upon his death. In 57, his wife Bebe, sold it to Grace Brenner, who renamed it Tower Cafe and added a Greyhound bus station. I didn't know that part. In the early seventies as a fitness station, the building was painted in a red, white, and blue color scheme. That's terrible. the following decade, John Tyndall Jr. Saw,
Rose EP43: surprising for a bank. Yeah. After extensive refurbishment that was funded with a $1.7 million federal grant and included restoration and replacement of the original neon trim. It reopened as the offices of the Shamrock Chamber of Commerce and Visitor Center preservation of many original design features such as glazed tile accents and distinctive architectural elements led the property be listed in the National Register of Historic Places in September of 97. Like I said, still a little sandwich shop in there. Very cute spot to stop. Very nice people. I mean, it's iconic. I mean, yeah, you gotta, you gotta stop. It's just so easy. Yeah. And you know what you go by on the way there, just up the road from there. What,
Emily EP43: and a a lot of, uh, interesting factoids about it and Yeah.
Emily EP43: I saw something about the Cadillac Ranch that was started by a architecture collective called the Ant Farm.
Emily EP43: Oh, okay. It said that they were people privately, it said that people were, um, encouraged to paint it now.
Rose EP43: to get the job. And like, apparently it's not an uncommon thing, oh,
Emily EP43: Hmm. I wonder what that was for. Yeah, because they painted, um, in 2020 they painted them black with Black Lives Matter, um, on the like in lettering that you could read on the, and then they also painted, um, yeah, in, I
Emily EP43: cute.
Rose EP43: you know, through the middle of the roof cut straight down.
Rose EP43: and then he's got some signage, good signage, you know, and then he is got like the, 'cause in Arizona, there's the giant hair and so he's got hair. It is, uh, patches and stuff like they have mm-hmm. So he incorporates other, you know, he's, he's, he's bringing in other parts of 66 to it, but he has Hump into Please Trailers.
And the old man was like, this is 66. And he was like, no, see you mean over there? And finally the guy grabbed him by the arm, dragged him out in the road, stomped on the ground. He's like, he's like, I just thought he was senile. He must have thought I was stupid. And he's like, he grabs me by the arm, takes me out in the middle of the road, stomps the ground, and says 66.
Rose EP43: so, uh, our friend Kirsten wrote in and she drove 66. Uh, she went on sort of life changing trip a few years ago where she just went out and did some gallivanting in her van, lived out of her van 'cause she works remotely. So it was, it was possible.
It puts you on the interstate a lot, even if you turn interstates off. So it was pretty challenging to follow it for me when I did the whole thing. The other thing that's interesting with the history, which I'm sure you know, is that it was more meant to be taken from east to west and a lot of the info and guidebooks assume you're going east to west, which makes sense for the time when Route 66 was made more people were trying to, uh, do that. Uh, and I kind of clipped off the bottom of, uh, what, what that message was. Sorry. Um,
And I was like, oh, really? Because some of the radio, one of the radios I had was a dispatch radio from Tuum Kari on 66. And I was like, well, you need this. And I gave that to them. I was like, this is actually you, you should take it back home. Tuum Kari is cool because that's where like the Blue Swallow Hotel is.
Rose EP43: it's, it's really fucked up. Like there's broken glass on the ground. If you look around the photos of the van and like people just tear shit up.
Emily EP43: 85 feet deep or Rose EP43: And they were just like, they swim there every day or whatever, you Rose EP43: and that's the beauty of it right there.
The only other time I've driven Parkway was up north in, in New York, leaving, uh, coming outta Massachusetts. So. Um, it would be a beautiful section of road, even though it's beat to shit. Yeah. And then it basically dumps you out of the Ur Uranus Fudge Factory.
Rose EP43: So I dropped in there to get some fudge. I do love fudge, but they had loads of knickknacks and like tons of like straight outta Compton shirts. But they say like straight outta Uranus, they know exactly what they're doing. They
Rose EP43: No, I just mean like it's all he ate, but then at one point the red meat and stuff like, made this perfect storm and really made his gout super bad. Like we were at, I remember we were at a nationals and had to go get his gout medication 'cause it was flaring up on him.
Emily EP43: You see any little donkeys?
Rose EP43: Yeah, I wish, yeah, I wish that I could have got burgers because when I was reading about it in this book that the owner had, uh, he'd uh, he'd been an engineer in the twenties in the steam days.
The people in that diner were really nice. It wasn't my favorite Eaton, but for how cold we were in the van, uh, it was nice to get inside somewhere and they were very nice and. It was quite dangerous, but Seligman's another one if you're going west, which, which, like Kirsten mentioned, I was almost always going west to east and there was a time where, where Corey and I did go record in Chicago, and I'm assuming I, I must have traipsed along some of it up there in that Chicago area, even though I said I haven't driven it.
Rose EP43: Yeah. Okay. Uh, let me think about a, another spot or two. Um, I don't know. That's, I guess that's a lot of my faves.
All these different, like a grasshopper and a beetle and like maybe a cockroach, I don't know, maybe a butterfly. Uh, but I tried to find it and then it was like the bug ranch, which is the VW bug place, which is along there, and I couldn't find anything. And then I looked up the bug insect route 66, and I think it was a total fake out.
Rose EP43: It's huge. It's an enormous crater. And it, it was like, it was one of those things where you're like, oh, we'll walk right up there. And then like three days later, you know, like it was a long
Rose EP43: Oh yeah, the, the, the depart, the Department of the Interior wouldn't let this guy launch his steam rocket. And then like the, the guy that bought the whole city of Amboy was like, you can do it in my city. That's awesome. And there's like, there's like a post office and one time I went to the post office in Amboy while I was traveling 'cause I wanted to mail somebody something from 66 and the guy was like, yeah, so this isn't really like, it's not really a post office. Like I was trying to mail out magazines.
Rose EP43: all the little rooms and they're like little block buildings and they're like each follow each other along. Yeah. And then there was like the, you know, diesel trains are still going through there. And then there was like a couple of, uh, there was like a burn down auto shop and we, we wandered through that 'cause it had like gas pumps and stuff in it.
Rose EP43: What have we done? Yeah, I think so. I, I refrained, but I was like, uh, yeah, I did that. Yeah, that's a good MythBusters thing. Like, can you use, uh, stitch together goldfish bags as a space blanket? Oh, can you? No, can you? No. I was just thinking we, could bust that myth sometime. Nice. That looks fiery.
Rose EP43: oh. That won't work. Throw some of those little wood chips in there. No, no. This is on top.
Emily EP43: oh. I don't have a question.
Rose EP43: That's okay. We'll get it here in a second. Nope, that's a problem for 10 minutes from now, but it is, so don't you worry. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll stir something up. You'll be pleased.
Rose EP43: That's okay. We'll get it here in a second. Nope, that's a problem for 10 minutes from now, but it is, so don't you worry. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll stir something up. You'll be pleased.
Rose EP43: That's okay. We'll get it here in a second. Nope, that's a problem for 10 minutes from now, but it is, so don't you worry. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll stir something up. You'll be pleased.
Emily EP43: Sweet.
About this episode
The conversation traces Route 66 from its early days as a barely paved highway to its later decline and the impact that had on the towns along it. Along the way, the speakers swap memories and observations about roadside landmarks, restored buildings, and odd attractions like Cadillac Ranch. They also note how the route is often presented for east-to-west travelers, which shapes the guidebooks and the experience of driving it today.
