Drive

by Tim Falconer

  Ever since Cyrus Avery used his influence to bring Route 66 by the front doors of his tourist court, café and service station, the Main Street of America has been about making money. That’s just one more reminder of how central the car is to the world economy. For decades, General Motors was the largest corporation on the planet, while Ford, Chrysler and several oil companies weren’t far behind. Steel, rubber, glass and plastics industries also benefited from automobile manufacturing, while many other businesses grew rich catering to drivers.

  Even though a lot of the old motels, diners and other enterprises have closed, nostalgia tourism may be the last great hope for the Mother Road. Brad Nickson, a small, dark-haired man who wore running shoes and jeans without a belt, is the Tulsa County representative for the Oklahoma Route 66 Association, a group of more than three hundred people dedicated to promoting the past and present of the old road. Born on the thirty-eighth anniversary of the birth of Route 66, he moved to Tulsa from Texas in 1997 to work for a software firm. Chris and I met him for lunch at the Metro Diner on Eleventh Avenue. Now mostly a busy but otherwise unremarkable strip of light industry, fast-food joints and used car lots, Eleventh is dotted with the occasional gem from the past, including the Desert Hills, a renovated 1953 motel with rooms lined up diagonally to save space on the lot and a gorgeous neon sign featuring a giant green cactus. But most of the past is gone: Nickson’s organization had planned to help a Tastee-Freez outlet repaint its sign and building, but the franchise closed. “Sometimes,” he admitted, “we don’t get there in time.”

  The state has just over four hundred miles of the old road, the most in the country, but the Oklahoma Department of Transportation, which needed some convincing just to allow the city to erect a sign at the exit to Eleventh Street, remains reluctant to put up Route 66 signs. “I’ve heard their reasoning is they don’t think it is a safe highway,” said Nickson. But the bureaucrats finally designated the old road a scenic byway, and if the association can obtain similar status from the feds, money from Washington is a possibility.

  Small towns struggle to attract travellers to their Route 66 legacy, but so do bigger centres. “Tulsa’s had a long-term problem,” explained Nickson, “because once you hit Catoosa, it’s real easy just to take the interstate all the way through Tulsa and suddenly you’re on your way to Oklahoma City and you have no clue of what all you’re missing here.” But in 2004, the city hosted the International Route 66 Festival, which pumped nine million dollars into the local economy—and spurred the Desert Hills to refurbish its sign.

  Tulsa County also launched a fifteen-million-dollar project to revitalize its twenty-four miles of Route 66. The money, raised through a voter-approved one-cent increase in the sale tax, will improve streetscapes; add decorative gateways; erect a sculpture of Avery and a Model A Ford meeting a horse and wagon from the oil fields at the Cyrus Avery Route 66 Memorial Bridge; and build the Route 66 Experience, which, though Nickson avoids the word “museum,” will be an interactive museum. In addition, the city saved a sixty-foot sign for the old Meadow Gold dairy in 2004, when the building was being demolished to make room for a car dealership. The restored sign will go up somewhere else. The long list of ideas to revive Route 66 would have cost eighty million dollars, he explained, “So there were some tough choices to make.”

  After lunch, Nickson invited us on a tour, put on oversized aviator sunglasses and led us to his black PT Cruiser Limited Edition. When I asked if he was much of a car guy, he demurred. But I noticed that he kept his six-year-old PT Cruiser in immaculate condition—most days he drives his Chevy pickup—and had added an eight ball to the top of the gear selector and hung black fuzzy dice from the mirror. “It’s one of the most fun cars I’ve ever owned,” he said, and it later came out that he was a founding member of the Tulsa Area PT Cruisers, a local car club. He’d also sold a beloved two-door 1953 Ford Ranch Wagon so he and his wife could buy their first house in Tulsa, and his father had been a hot rodder. More than that, though, Nickson’s demeanour changed noticeably once we were in the car. In the diner, he’d seemed reserved, nervous and a little nerdy, but behind the wheel he loosened up, laughed at our jokes and revealed his own dry sense of humour, teasing me about my old car and suggesting I take advantage of one of the many used car lots in town.

  Used car salesmen may suffer from a reputation as cartoonishly shady characters with slick patter, but more than twice as many people buy pre-owned vehicles as new ones. It may not be as lucrative as manufacturing automobiles, but there’s still a lot of money to be made selling cars. Or renting them. Nickson showed us the building where Thrifty Car Rental started in 1958. With a thousand locations in sixty-four countries, the company is now one of the largest in an industry that started in 1918 when Walter L. Jacobs, at the age of twenty-two, started renting a dozen Model T Fords in Chicago. Within five years, his revenues had reached one million dollars. In 1923, Jacobs sold the business to John Hertz, who changed the name to Hertz Drive-Ur-Self System and then sold it to GM in 1926. It later had a great rivalry with Avis, which started when Warren Avis opened up shop at Detroit’s Willow Run Airport in 1946. In response to being the second-largest rental agency, Avis launched its celebrated “We Try Harder” advertising campaign in 1963—and tripled its market share. The original businesses on Route 66 were mom-and-pop operations, and though most of them are now gone, Nickson is convinced there’s a growing fascination with the old highway. He suggested that different people are drawn to different elements of it, including the architecture, the history, the economics or even the music. (As he drove us around, he played a recording of the Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour show. It was the episode about places, which I thought was a bit calculated, though I appreciated the effort.) Taking a trip on the old road is also a great excuse for people to slow down a bit or simply enjoy a great drive. His main interest is the history, but Nickson, whose grandfather ran a Holiday Inn in Gallup, New Mexico, is increasingly fascinated by the economics. “Route 66 has always been a commercial road,” he said. “It’s still a commercial road and it will probably always be a commercial road.”

  EVEN CHARITIES TRY to make money off Route 66 nostalgia. Shortly after noon on Saturday, we hit the first annual Depew Route 66 Auto Show, a fundraiser for the Depew Education Foundation. Sixteen gleaming classic cars, including a black 1954 Buick, a blue-and-white 1957 Bel Air and a red 1959 Chevrolet Impala, sunned themselves in the parking lot of the local high school’s gymnasium. Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day” blared from the loudspeakers as we introduced ourselves to Bill Inman, one of the show’s organizers and the president of the foundation. A tall man with broad shoulders, and dressed in a denim shirt, polished cowboy boots and a white Stetson, he urged us to buy some raffle tickets, boasting that one of the prizes was a .30-06 rifle.

  About halfway between Tulsa and Oklahoma, Depew is one of those towns the interstate forgot. The discovery of oil nearby in 1911 spurred growth until the 1940s, but today, the oil and the Route 66 traffic are gone and Depew has a population of a little over 560. That can make life a tad uninteresting for the teenagers who live there, according to the members of the high-school debating team who were selling hot dogs and barbecued bologna sandwiches to raise money so they could travel to Indianapolis for national championships sponsored by the FFA, the youth organization formerly known as the Future Farmers of America.

  “Nothing ever happens here!” insisted a tall, giddy debater.

  “We had three funerals this week,” one of her friends corrected her. “Two on Wednesday and the other yesterday. It was a car accident, and they say he was under the influence.”

  “And there was a murderer a few years back,” pointed out another. “Yup, he shot his girlfriend and her mother right here in town, then he holed up in the church tower, and they walked right by him for three days!”

  “And there’s a nudist camp about five miles outside town!” squealed another young woman, but as the others sniggered, she quick
ly added, “But nobody here goes there.”

  “Other than that, it’s dull, dull, dull,” she continued. “Nobody comes here except to take pictures of Spangler’s.” The kids laughed at the thought of anyone wanting to photograph the old general store on what was once Route 66.

  Along with wanting to grab a hot dog and hear the town gossip, I was curious about the students’ relationship to the car. The debating team had already won the state championship by arguing that ethanol was good for the environment, created jobs and helped the war on terror by reducing oil imports. One of the debaters was Evan Newpher, a seventeen-year-old junior. A small, wiry kid with a few freckles, he was also a running back and linebacker on the school football team. He wore blue shades, flipflops and a grey FFA T-shirt that read “Characters Under Construction.” Eighty percent of his classmates drive to school, he estimated, and 90 percent of those arrive in pickups. Newpher gets around in a 1993 Chevy pickup, a hand-me-down from his sister. But he really wants a Honda Element. “It’s a little bit fuelefficient,” he explained, “and it’s a different-looking car, so it’s something that fits my personality.”

  Young drivers aren’t the only ones who’ve severed their bonds with Detroit. Several members of the Guthrie Flashbacks car club were lounging under a canopy in the middle of the show. One of them, Dennis Doughty, was there with his 1960 Chevy Impala. A retired attorney who lives in Edmund, Oklahoma, he also owns a 1959 Impala, two Ford trucks and a Mazda Millennia that his wife drives. He bought his first import, a Honda, after he was disappointed with a 1977 Chrysler Cordoba. “I couldn’t keep it out of the shop,” he said. “It wouldn’t run half the time.” Now, his loyalty is to older Chevys. “It seems like General Motors has forgotten about styling and what the customers want. We’d like to have something that looks nice and drives nice and is dependable and economical,” he said. “The Japanese are providing the kind of cars that people want.”

  As for loyalty to Detroit, he drawled: “GM doesn’t give me a paycheque.”

  “But isn’t what’s good for GM good for America?” I asked.

  “That’s what GM says, I guess.”

  Actually, no one at General Motors ever said what’s good for GM is good for America—at least not publicly. What GM president Charles E. Wilson, who later became secretary of the Department of Defense, did say was: “What’s good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa.” Today, most people toss around the bastardized version, perhaps because they assume that’s what he really meant. Regardless, the Big Three, with their shrinking market share, do not power the economy the way they once did.

  Whatever happens to the American automakers, it’s hard to imagine cars not being a central part of the lives of the people who live in this part of the country. One of the locals at the show was Blackie Farris, who was showing off a black 1954 Buick. Wearing a plaid shirt, black jeans that were torn at the knee and a brown cap covering his bald pate, the seventy-seven-year-old rose out of his chair with the help of a cane and told us he did all the restoration work himself. Chris asked him how many cars he owns. “Eight to ten altogether,” he said, “plus those that don’t work.”

  After the prize ceremony—there were sixteen piston trophies, which worked out well for everyone—the owners got in their cars and started their engines, creating a loud and thrilling rumble.

  Chris, who collects old people the way crazy ladies collect cats, was saying goodbye to Farris and remarked, “That sounds even better than it looks.”

  “It’s supposed to.”

  And then we watched all the old cars drive away.

  Later, Chris told me I had to stop saying I was researching our relationship with the car because people were not so much confused as nonplussed. “It’s like saying you’re writing about our relationship to air.”

  WE FINALLY FIGURED OUT that we’d been doing it all wrong—at least when it came to hotels. We were spending our days desperately trying to stay on Route 66, and then as soon as it was time to find a place to sleep, we’d gone looking for a big, new high-rise hotel off the Mother Road in the hope we’d be near some action. That had worked out fine in Springfield, but in Tulsa we’d ended up in the middle of a ghost downtown and we both deeply regretted not staying in the Desert Hills motel. Then, in Oklahoma City, we’d ended up next to Bricktown, a tourist-infested bar district.

  Fortunately, we’re just slow, not completely stupid, and it took us only four nights to realize we should have been staying in old Route 66 motels. So on Sunday our destination was the Trade Winds Inn in Clinton, Oklahoma, if for no other reason than that Elvis Presley stayed there when he drove between Graceland and Los Angeles. After doing some big-city stuff—visiting an art gallery and a good independent bookstore, where Chris bought a copy of The New York Times and I bought yet another Route 66 guidebook—we headed west again. The torrential rain took some of the pleasure out of the sightseeing, but we made our way through Yukon and El Reno, over the Canadian River on the Pony Bridge and on to Weatherford and into Clinton. As we checked in at the Trade Winds, I asked the clerk about the restaurant next door. “It’s good,” he said. “It’s not fast food, but it is good food.” He was half right.

  As Eric Schlosser makes clear in Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, the automobile helped to create the fast-food business. Decades later, we know that aside from its generic banality, the fare must share at least some of the blame for our obesity epidemic with the car culture it’s part of. But the two industries continue to feed each other: in 2006, GM and McDonald’s cooked up a deal that saw the fast-food giant distribute forty-two million toy Hummers in Happy Meals and Mighty Kids Meals. Back in Baxter Springs, Kansas, we had wanted to have lunch in a Route 66–era diner, but couldn’t find one. The sad fact is that chains have killed off most of them. So we stopped at a Sonic Drive-In, which had a menu board with speaker system at each of the car bays. We ordered and a young woman brought our food before we could even figure out whether or not we were supposed to go inside to get it. In fact, there was no seating or service inside. (Many drive-ins and drive-thrus refuse to even serve pedestrians and cyclists.) Sonic bills itself as “America’s Drive-In,” and despite the modern—dare I say, ersatz—look, the chain of 3,200 restaurants in the United States and Mexico has its roots in the Top Hat drive-in that opened in Shawnee, Oklahoma, in 1953. The company adopted the Sonic name in 1958.

  A&W, which started in 1919, was one of the first restaurants to offer curb service. Drive-in restaurants, which began appearing in the early 1920s, featured carhops—often young women on roller skates—delivering hamburgers and similar fare on trays that hung from a car’s window. By the 1950s, these places had become ideal hangouts for teenagers. “The drive-ins fit perfectly with the youth culture of Los Angeles,” according to Schlosser. “They were something genuinely new and different, they offered a combination of girls and cars and late-night food, and before long they beckoned from intersections all over town.” But as the demographic bulge aged and became pressed for time, more and more people wanted to be able to eat while on the move. And so the drive-thru, which had first appeared in the late 1940s, became increasingly common.

  Cars waiting in long lines at drive-thru windows increase emissions, but that isn’t the only worry. When a McDonald’s franchise wanted to replace its existing restaurant on a busy Toronto street with a new one that would include a drive-thru in 2001, area residents—using the slogan “A live-in community … not a drive-thru”—fought the plan because they didn’t want more traffic, more danger to pedestrians, more noise, more garbage, more smell or more pollution. Joe Mihevc, a city councillor who helped pass a by-law forbidding drive-thrus within thirty metres of a residential neighbourhood, found one more reason for stopping these sops to drivers: “If you have to eat the stuff, at least get out of your car and move your gut around a little bit.”

  It’s not just food anymore. Drive-thru banks and drive-thru pharmacies are commonplace, a
nd we now have drive-in churches—the first one opened in 1955—and drive-thru libraries and even drive-thru wedding chapels in Las Vegas. Some people are so in love with their cars that they don’t want to get out of them for anything.

  AFTER DINNER IN CLINTON, we found the second-floor room with the plaque on the door saying the King used to sleep there. It was the high point of our stay because the Trade Winds turned out to be less than we expected. A two-storey motel, it had become part of an international chain, but it was still a dump. Our room—which looked out on a depressing inner courtyard with a filthy, all but waterless swimming pool—had heavily stained brown carpeting, dirty orange bed covers and grey sheets. We sipped beer and read The New York Times, laughing at the thought of reading the great big-city paper in a seedy small-town motel. Then we went to sleep with most of our clothes on.

  During my road trip, I stayed with Best Western, Courtyard by Marriott, Days Inn, Doubletree, Drury Inn, Embassy Suites, Hilton, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Select, Kimpton, La Quinta, Loew’s, Ramada Limited, Wyndham and many independents. Travelling in the fall, I avoided peak-season rates and paid as little as fifty dollars a night and as much as two hundred dollars, but the connection between the rate and the quality of the hotel was often fuzzy. Not at the Trade Winds, though—it was the cheapest and the worst.