Getting Your Shticks onto Route 66

In case you hadn't noticed, this is the 75th anniversary of Route 66, the first transcontinental highway, as Bobby Troupe noted in his classic hit tune," from Chicago to L.A.". Albuquerque didn't make it into those famous lyrics, but it made up for that lack in a big way by holding a humongous fete the weekend of July 20. (No matter that the actual birthday is in November: the mandate to hype summer tourism superceded mere historic accuracy.)

And quirky old Albuquerque figures into the construction of the so-called Mother Road in a bizarre way that trumps all piddling details. It seems that the incumbent governor of New Mexico was miffed that the extant highway put his home town at a distinct disadvantage to Encino, the hometown of the man who would unseat him in the gubernatorial race of 1926: to get to Santa Rosa from the Big A, you had to take either of two circuitous routes, one to the mountains to the North, the other through Encino in the South.

When the A-residing governor lost to the E-residing opponents, Mr. A put into plan a last minute insult to his winning opponents. He ordered two construction teams to start off from A and Santa Rosa, with the challenge to meet each other before he went out of office January 1, 1927. Thirty days to build 62 miles of road. They fell a few miles short, but a serendipitous snow storm kept the new governor from serving papers stopping the construction.

Talk about highway soap opera. That road now includes Central Avenue, the main drag of A and the main focus of the celebrations--with Old Towne, a gloriously spruced up Theater District,with huge world class tiles on the sidewalk explicating the historic buildings, at one end and the Fairgrounds at the other, where most of the Hoopla centered.

Half way between is the 66 Diner, a splendid little abandoned gas station (1934) into a tasty collocation of memorabilia--the front end of the car Jimmy Dean died in, Phillips 66 signs of every ilk (the Tulsa based oil company cashed in on the publicity by staging an auto race in which the winner was alleged to have achieved the then astonishing speed of 66 miles per hour). The decor includes a chrestomathy of hub caps hanging from the ceiling. I chatted up two documentary makers from RAI, and ended up giving them an interview for Italian TV. (They wanted to know more about the Italian section of Philadelphia where I live.)

Halfway between Old Towne and the State Fair lies the University of New Mexico, which entered the lists of attention attracting with a swim in filmathon, including naturally the Henry Fonda version of "Grapes of Wrath" (1940), and a radio series by UNM professor David Donahue on the history and people of the road. Overdosing, anyone? The high point of the weekend was the Steinbeck dinner, where the writer who made the Mother Road notorious and memorable was honored.

A prelude to the dinner was an outdoor reception for the scores of writers and painters and photographers who have made a specialty of the lore of the road, principal among them being Mike Wallis (yes, he despises the cheapshot allusions to his otherwise differently spelled TV celeb) the 75th anniversary edition of whose classic book on the road was on sale for $23.95 in paper.

But there were cookbooks on the road, memoirs on the road, garden books on the road. And a friendlier bunch of schmoozers you've never run into, heady in their transient moments of triumph. The lead celebrity was the 74 year old barber from Seligman, AZ whose father founded the shop in 1926, who has created a minimuseum on the Road.

But let us not forget what made the Road great, viz., the automobile that took the Okies from their desert Hell to the putative Heaven of California. If ever our country was an auto-cracy, it was in Albuquerque that glorious weekend. Take the Noe's, she an art teacher at Gallup NM High, he the mechanic for "over 200 vehicles for the School District" as he proudly put. They were sitting regally in camp chairs next to their 1929 Model A, a bronze-tinted masterpiece.

Henry Ford would have been elated to see their pride. And they were but two of hundreds of happy couples talking to interested visitors about how they came to refurbish their antiques. For God's sake, there was a contingent of 40 Packard lovers from Canada, brandishing their Golden Oldies. And a gaggle of Germans had shipped their Old Glories over by freighters at a cost that could keep a school district in gas and oil for a decade.

Especially interesting to me was a claque of primitive trailer lovers. They made their primitive overnighters from scratch, the contemporaries of the first auto hotels before some marketing genius dreamt up the term motel. One sported a Grandma-derived patch quilt of astonishing beauty.

And there was an entire flea market selling with remarkable diversity every conceivable variant on an auto-centric culture, including highly motivated groups like historic preservationists, state tourism authorities, and simply good old floggers of transient trash. Never have I seen more benignly obsessed sweeties going about their self-appointed rounds. If only our politics displayed similar commitment and intensity. We wouldn't then be facing a society slowly being torn apart by the unanticipated results of an uncritical automotive mall society.

As Steve Lopez, the peripatetic Diogenes of American journalism, put it in yesterday's Los Angeles Times, commenting on the horrendous incident of teen violence against other visiting teeners,we have been raising a generation of latch key children, entirely bereft of moral values, whose de facto church is the automotive mall, the dark side of Route 66. A side those celebrators appeared to have not the least awareness of, as they flogged their idiosyncratic shticks onto the increasingly potholed Route 66.

(Incidentally, I learned at this fete that Ike Eisenhower started the Interstate Defense Highway System, which chopped up and bypassed the old Route 66, because he was impressed by the German Autobahn Hitler had bestowed in the 1930's as a stimulant to an ailing economy.) Roads lead sometimes in unanticipated directions.

There is no doubt that the advanced West is basically an AUTOcracy. Every recession begins with barely subdued terror that auto sales are lagging. It's a fiscal treadmill kept running by rebates and leasing and other forms of giving the auto economy a boost. Shortly after participating in the Route 66 Hoopla in Albuquerque, I found myself in Baden-Baden for a show at their Kunsthalle entitled "ICH BIN MEIN AUTO", an exhibition that promised much more than it actually delivered. It really amounted only to an agglomeration of auto-related images, most of them as mediocre as the aspirations by which AUTOcrats position themselves psychologically on a continuum from Model T Ford to the latest Mercedes.

No analysis of the urban chaos spawned by our car-dominated cultures. No evaluation of the fatuity of analyzing one's character by its auto buying habits. In short, just a hip but meaningless collection of "Art" tangentially connected with the automobile. There wasn't even the visual satisfaction of seeing, say, Sonia Delaunay's synchromatically bedizened Flivver, the center piece (literally) in the atrium of the Zurich museum touting her achievements in multiple media over seven decades.

And so on to the largest auto show in the world, the 59th running of the IAA in Frankfurt, where 1100 exhibitors from 40 countries will try to beguile an expected million visitors to opt for their frills. DU BIST DEIN AUTO is the most pathetic slogan of an "advanced" industrial capitalism. Even the egghead weekly, Die Woche, runs a photo of four beguiling moppets with their model cars, getting in the act of defining themselves by their automotive habits.

There are all kinds of unfilled needs in the world. A capitalism fixated on creating fantasy desires will just exacerbate the gap between real needs and artificially created desires. We need some industrial statesmen who can make these obvious failures into a political agenda. Meanwhile, autos are in the saddle, so to speak, and really ride mankind.