The Road Less Traveled Kicks Just Keep Getting Harder To Find, So Route 66 Towns Look To Nostalgia For Survival

They shine in the barber’s eyes as he talks - memories of an era he lived through and watched ebb.

He walks his streets, and the echoes are everywhere: echoes of a town that claimed his lifetime loyalty. Of travelers long departed, cars long obsolete, and an important, exciting road that led people to important, exciting adventures.

Two decades have passed since the echoes replaced reality - 2 p.m., Sept. 22, 1978, the day that wiped the grin from Angel Delgadillo’s face. He rose from the barber chair he inherited from his daddy, walked outside, pursed his lips and watched everything slip away.

That day, Interstate 40 opened a mile away to carry cars back and forth at 70 mph. In an instant, the 9,000 automobiles that passed through town each hour vanished and the legendary U.S. Route 66, Seligman’s life force and main street for three generations, became a relic.

“I stood out there, looked either way and saw nothing. We, the people of these towns, had been forgotten. It’s sad when the world forgets you,” Delgadillo says.

“Our home,” he says, “was history.”

Trapped in a landscape shaped by and for the road, Seligman joined the list of death-row towns condemned by the very brand of progress that originally energized them - a new, faster highway system. Businesses closed. People left. Buildings decayed.

Then something curious happened. Today the barber waits in his shop and, once again, the cars pull off. Americans and Germans, Japanese and Scandinavians, they come with cameras and money just to see people like him - him, Angel Delgadillo, 70, who cuts hair and carries the torch of another age.

He encourages this interest. Because for him - for all of those who still populate the towns and not-quite-towns along the 2,400-mile expanse that once was Route 66 - it offers a narrow chance at a future.

Today, the “Mother Road,” a cauldron of American memories real and wished, lives again.

Today, people are looking at communities like Seligman for more than just food, phone, gas and lodging.

Today, Angel Delgadillo’s grin has returned.

Not so long ago, journey mattered as much as destination. And between 1926 and the 1960s, Route 66 was the ultimate road trip through the essence of pioneer spirit - the American frontier.

Those lands - the Midwest and Southwest - were the regions that inspired Disneyland and its two-thirds-scale American experience. And 66 in its heyday was an equivalent of Disney’s “PeopleMover,” except the landscape it traversed was real life.

It meandered through Adventureland’s undulating hills, mountains and desertland so novel to touring easterners. Through Frontierland, with its promise of unfettered access to all parts of the once-wild West. And most of all through our Main Streets - the patch towns that grew from Western settlements and, decades later, formed the dots connected by 66, the first federal highway to link the Mississippi River to California’s boomtown shores.

It began in Chicago, dipped south to Texas, then snaked through the Southwest to Los Angeles and the Pacific. It carried cars through major towns like Oklahoma City, Amarillo and Albuquerque, but its heart was the in-betweens - dusty places like Tucumcari, N.M., Barstow, Calif., Seligman. Nineteenth-century Americans may have pioneered this frontier, but in this century, 66 helped populate it.

This highway had something its horse-trail predecessors lacked: From the day 66 opened in 1926 - parts paved, others simply dirt-and-gravel roads elevated into mass use - it and the American obsession with the automobile evolved together.

Driving was still an adventure. Windows were left open. Automatic gas pumps, automatic tellers and drive-through speakers had not supplanted human contact. And what better vacation than to pack the family and head west to picture-postcard places like the Painted Desert, the Grand Canyon and Hollywood?

“You were actually living instead of being projected through space in some enclosed, air-conditioned vehicle,” says Terri Ryburn-LaMonte, who teaches a course on Route 66 at Illinois State University.

When Depression and dust storms filled Oklahoma with scarred fields and destitute farmers, Okies packed belongings and drove west on 66 looking for fruit-picking work in California. Shippers turned to trucks to augment trains. And, since 66 was assembled from local roads, it acted as a regional highway that streamlined a vast patchwork of commerce and transit.

What grew from this combination of local and national travelers was an individualistic landscape of motels, restaurants and gas stations, built by entrepreneurs who believed drivers passing at 35, maybe 45 mph would be enticed by colorful signage, pull off and participate in whatever good or service was for sale.

The road, in effect, was an advertisement for itself. And the towns along it were happy to reap the economic benefits.

Then, in 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, enamored of smooth roads he saw in Germany during World War II, launched the Interstate Highway System as an American Autobahn - a limited-access, high-speed way to ride.

In the Southwest, it was I-40. Each year another segment opened, often paralleling 66, sometimes bypassing a town by mere yards.

Ribbons of smooth macadam unrolled across the land, placing travelers atop their landscape rather than within it. In 1985, the government decommissioned U.S. 66 into official nonexistence.

With each new section of interstate, towns whose livelihoods rested upon the attractions-at-roadside layout were left to grapple with the consequences.

The lucky few located at freeway exits, like Seligman, hung on - barely. The in-betweens were left to fall away.

For the people of those places, life - and landscape - changed forever.

“Corn dogs bought this place,” says Bob Waldmire, a vegetarian whose father, Edwin, invented the hot dog on a stick.

Waldmire’s is one of the odder roadside tributes to Route 66 - a cluttered home-visitors’ center-biocenter in what once was the Hackberry, Ariz., general store.

By most estimations, Hackberry exists no more. A good 10 miles from the nearest interstate exit, it simply folded after I-40 opened. No reason to come. But Waldmire, now the town’s only resident, is providing reasons again - a tray of snacks and root-beer barrels, a wealth of Route 66 memorabilia and a refuge from the Arizona sun.

Waldmire, a compact 52-year-old with an abundant, graying beard, grew up along 66 in Illinois and has never strayed far from it. He belongs to the fraying tapestry of people who hold out along the road for business, nostalgia or because they know nothing else.

Their environment is a curious combination of natural and human works. When 66 was decommissioned, it disintegrated into an assortment of frontage roads, Main Streets and roadway eventually paved over by interstates. Tourists trying to retrace old 66 today face an obstacle course of dead ends, crumbling pavement and sporadic signage.

Though parts that pass through cities like Albuquerque still thrive, many stretches of 66 are dilapidated and neglected. And nature, with typical ashes-to-dust efficiency, has retaken many of the smaller places - entire towns, in some cases.

Amboy, Calif., during Route 66’s heyday a town of 500 people, is today only a cafe-motel and a post office sitting silently in the high desert. In Cubero, N.M., where Hemingway wrote “The Old Man and the Sea,” a motor court crumbles slowly, its rusty bedframes visible through rotted wooden doors. Outside Topock, Ariz., a decades-old blue sedan pocked with BBs is being slowly reclaimed by sun and sand.

“Any road would do to show what the interstate has done. But this is the place to do it,” Waldmire says. “Here, the little serendipities, they’re not sanitized. They don’t conform. And now that people are tired of the sameness of everything, they’re coming back.”

Those who remain in the places that hang on echo the same theme by the dozen: America as a nation no longer values nuance - and should. So they believe tapping into the past can effect a phoenix-from-the-ashes revival.

There is Luis Garcia, a retired parole officer who carves his own canes and lives at the El Rancho Motel in the once-raucous Mojave Desert town of Barstow, Calif. “You go into a place and it’s not like it used to be,” he says. “You used to go, ‘Hey - how are you? What’s going on?’ Everybody knew everybody. Now you go in and they say” - he makes a sour face - ‘What do you want?”’ There is Shiraz “Sam” Kassem, who runs the immaculate El Vado Motel in Albuquerque, where Route 66 becomes Central Avenue for several miles. He sits in the lobby in his silk bathrobe and talks late-night 66 trivia with guests. “Everything is the same now,” he says. “You have a burger shop with no name and a great burger, and people still go next door to McDonald’s. I don’t get it.”

And there is Lora Mulligan, who volunteers at the Route 66 Museum at the foot of the San Bernardino mountains outside Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. To her, people who travel 66 today are atypical: They’ve learned to slow down and have imbued the Mother Road with longings for a more relaxed life that may or may not have once existed.

“Today you get into your car and rush to get ‘there,’ wherever that is, and you hop out and do it and then you get back in your car and rush to get back again,” she says. “They’re looking for something - anything - more simple again.”

In Hong Kong, a South African wearing a Route 66 T-shirt asks, “Do you know Angel Delgadillo?” In Europe, an ambitious entrepreneur is trying to trademark the Route 66 name and shield. In Pennsylvania, 750 miles from the nearest stretch of 66, its highway shields and other memorabilia are big souvenir-shop sellers.

Along the old road itself, within the landscape Steinbeck immortalized in “The Grapes of Wrath,” Route 66 markets itself irrepressibly. Kingman, Ariz., and Needles, Calif., among others, offer the Route 66 Motel. There are Route 66 diners, Route 66 tattoo parlors, Route 66 souvenir centers. In Gallup, N.M., there’s even a Route 66 adult video store.

Summers across the highway corridor feature Route 66 “fun runs,” car shows, parades, cookouts. Inevitably, someone from the road’s history or pseudohistory - Martin Milner, who played Tod to George Maharis’ Buz on the old “Route 66” TV series, or maybe Bobby Troup, who wrote the song “Get Your Kicks on Route 66” - signs autographs and talks with folks.

This interest intensified during the 1980s and is still growing. The appetite for history is ravenous, and 66 provides a living history of itself - a landscapewide please-touch museum. Bob Waldmire’s guest book brims with names, many foreign. Angel Delgadillo’s barber shop is papered with business cards.

“The search for things as they used to be is a lost cause,” says David Lowenthal, author of “Possessed by the Past,” a book about the heritage movement. “But it works in an unusual way on Route 66. It’s a complicated interplay between the demands of the tourist industry and people who see themselves as having a stake in their own past.”

In Seligman, businesspeople, seeing increased tourist traffic, are trying again.

The Aztec Motel, closed for years, is reopening. Four new subdivisions have sprouted; retirees are moving in. Many attribute it to the 66 revival.

“People are starting to see the potential in this town again,” says Sandy Baugh, who runs the chamber of commerce.

Slowly, places like Seligman are re-emerging, helped by trinkets, people and philosophies in their push toward continued existence - and using Route 66 to tap into the legends and desires, personal and national, of our particular moment in history.

“People want to meet people like Angel and me. They say, ‘You’re the real America,”’ says Delgadillo’s brother, Juan, who runs the Snow Cap, an old-time hamburger-taco stand.

Angel and Juan Delgadillo have made themselves icons of their own environment. They are featured in Route 66 books in a dozen languages. Busfuls of foreign tourists debark in front of their establishments and begin photographing them.

Like period actors at Colonial Williamsburg or Plimoth Plantation, they and their counterparts are role-playing. But in many cases the roles are their real lives. And the fantasy helps their reality endure.

“This small-town America doesn’t exist anymore. But, a generation beyond, we’d like to think it still does,” says John Craft, an Arizona State University professor who produces documentaries on his state’s segment of 66.

“We look at these people and they have become our sages,” he says. “And Angel did it for a useful purpose: His town was dead. He had to do something. So he became Floyd the Barber.”

The men who built it called Route 66 a road to the future in an age when forward, not backward, was the fashionable place to look.

But today, the interstates tell America’s story: unimpeded destination without process or distraction. Frontier domesticated with call boxes every half-mile. Everything an establishing shot instead of a closeup. The Disneyland train has become an express.

Efficiency and safety vs. serendipity and diversity. Which is better? Who is to say?

The people of Seligman will say the interstates ignore a sunshine America - a land where motel guests still talk to each other. Where the gas-station bathroom doesn’t require a key. Where the road promises adventure and rampant, irrepressible, entrepreneurial individuality.

Maybe that land never existed. Maybe it doesn’t matter. It will exist now, if people like Angel Delgadillo have anything to say.

He has retired from cutting hair, though he often obliges visitors. He and his wife, Vilma, sit in their dimly lit museum adjacent to the barber shop, listen to road songs on a phonograph and greet visitors - sometimes 30 a day.

Now and then he walks outside, tilts his plastic visor against the blazing sun and looks down the Chino Street section of old Route 66 toward the Interstate 40 ramp.

And he worries no more about people and roads that pass Seligman by.

“How exciting to see this blossom,” the barber says. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think somebody would ever ask me to autograph a book. I now have a role to play, and I play it to the best of my ability. And I have a great reason. When Route 66 was alive, Seligman was a place to pass through.”

“Now,” he says, grinning, “it’s a destination.”