Route 66 Exhibit

On Saturday Ron and I again ventured out, this time to the Albuquerque Museum in the Old Town area where the Museum has a special exhibit marking the 90th Anniversary of the fabled Route 66. The exhibit was entitled “Route 66: Radiance, Rust and Revival on the Mother Road” and celebrates the art, history and pop culture surrounding the Route.

I was especially interested because in July 1952 as a child of 8, my parents, brother (5), and I traveled Route 66 from Los Angeles to Amarillo while traveling to New Jersey to our new home.  We traveled in a two door new Buick with a small low sided trailer behind with all our must have treasures for when we arrived before our moving truck.  My brother and I shared the back seat but squabbled all the way over one or the other of us being on the others side.  The front of our car sported a canvas bag filled with water in case the radiator dried up in the very hot, dry weather and a window air conditioner in the front passenger window to keep my mother (pregnant with my soon to be youngest brother) cool as we traveled across the country.  I have memories of Native Americans with tables along the highway through Arizona and New Mexico and traveling part of the trip through the desert after dark when it might be cooler.  I’m not sure how much cooler it was.  We made many stops along the way at local service stations where a uniformed attendant filled our tank, washed our windows and checked our tires, oil and water while we used the rest rooms and perhaps partook of a coke from the ever present coke cooler out in the front with the attached bottle opener for our glass bottle.   No pop tops in those days.  We also stopped along the way and ate our lunches including big slices of watermelon and then had contests to see how far we could spit the seeds.  Such fun!  We left Route 66 in Amarillo to travel to Galveston to visit friends of my parents before heading further east and north to New Jersey.  Why would you want to be in Galveston in July?  It’s hot and very muggy there. 

It is worth noting that Route 66 was established in 1926, was 2,338 miles long, crossed eight states and three time zones.  It was the pathway for migrant workers, postwar veterans, tourists, hippies and nostalgia junkies and was the first of its kind.   Its popularity swelled in the 1950’s. In 1985 the government decommissioned the road and it officially ceased to exist. 

Route 66 wound across 380 miles of New Mexico through Tucumcari, Albuquerque, Gallup and the Navajo Reservation.  Today, Albuquerque still boasts 16 miles of the Mother Road, the longest single-city urban stretch of the highway in the U.S.  It is also the only spot where the highway crosses itself with a north south axis stretching from Santa Fe to Los Lunas and then back east west to Gallup and the Navajo Reservation.

The exhibit was filled with a great deal of information about the road through New Mexico and Albuquerque but we felt lacked pictures which we had hoped to see.  There were, however, old neon signs, tourist souvenirs and vintage highway signs.  In addition, there were many paintings from famous artists such as Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock and others.  You could also step into a booth and record your own memories of the Route.  An interesting exhibit and a fun outing.

A quote from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath sums up the significance of Route 66.  “66 is the path of people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there, from all of these the people are in flight and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads.  66 is the mother road, the road of flight.”