For a century, Route 66 has been America's most legendary highway A winding ribbon of dreams stretching from Chicago to the Pacific.

But nowhere does its heart beat louder than in Oklahoma.

From the grinning face of Buck Adams to the shimmer of the blue whale Oklahoma holds more drivable miles than any other state and maybe, just maybe, more of its soul.

This is route 66 What is a road?

A concrete slab with a painted stripe.

A way to get from here to there.

But some roads are more.

Much more.

Before the mother road.

The country was a patchwork of dirt paths, wagon trails, and loosely connected byways.

Travel was rough, uncertain, and slow.

More endurance than adventure.

before route 66, there were various trails that went through the United States from the east to the west And, you know, there were no automobiles before then, so there wasn't really a need for an actual road to travel.

Before automobiles really became affordable, most people, they never ventured probably more than 50 miles from the place they were born.

You know, unless they could afford, rail traffic or, steamships or something like that.

They were confined to a horse and buggy.

So mobility was greatly limited.

Well, Henry Ford changed all that.

(Music) So we had a lot of cars coming out.

But the problem was we didn't have many paved roads, even in some of the cities, mostly paved in the bigger cities, at least with cobbleston But out in the country, it was just dirt.

The early roads were owned by counties, municipalities, and the state.

Oklahoma didn't have a highway department until 1924.

Two years later, they connected several state highways and portions of the Ozark trails into one winding stretch that became U.S.

66. it was born in 1926, that was a pivotal time because we were between wars and we were on the wagon.

But it was a time of prosperity.

And about the same time, this U.S.

highway system came into being.

And granted, roads were still pretty rough at the beginning, but that didn't stop anybody.

And so it really put America on the move, changed the whole social, cultural landscape of the country in the 20th century.

the father of route 66, Cyrus Avery, was a Tulsa businessman and the first Oklahoma highway commissioner.

who was on all the committees that were developing the US numbered highway system.

He is the reason it started in Chicago and in curve down, you know, through Illinois, Missouri, through Oklahoma.

And just coincidentally, it went by his business in Tulsa.

He was the one that stood up and said, look, if we connect Chicago to Los Angeles through Saint Louis, it could be the strongest commercial corridor in the country.

more than 2500 miles, three time zones, eight states.

And it really worked.

And it became immensely popular.

And from the get go, used almost constantly, it took several years to construct it because you can imagine the equipment in the 1920s.

They had to do it by hand.

And they had, you know, graders to grade the road, pull by horses or mules, it took until the late 30s to finish paving all the road.

And some people didn't want it paved out in western Oklahoma, definitely in the Texas Panhandle.

You know, those farmers and ranchers made a few bucks by pulling, tourists and travelers out of the muddy bogs caused by rain in that red earth.

They wanted the route paved uniformly to certain standards from Chicago all the way to L.A.

Well, that took 11 years.

And during that process, there were hundreds of changes to the pathway of the route.

Some of them were very minor, some not so minor.

And that's where the politicking came in.

Most of the towns, obviously wanted the highway to come right down their main street or through the heaviest business district of their city.

In Oklahoma.

The route enters at Quapaw, just south of the Kansas state line, and it threads its way through communities on a diagonal, going through Vinita, Claremore, Catoosa, Tulsa, and on through Bristow, Stroud, and Chandler, down through Arcadia and over to Oklahoma City, where it turns west along the I-40 corridor and proceeds through El Reno, Bridgeport, Weatherford, on to Clinton, Elk City, Sayre, Erick, and Texola.

we went from the highway coming into existence in 1926.

Everybody getting on the move and excited about this this whole new thing, And unfortunately, within just three years, we had the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression.

John Steinbeck interviewed a lot of the dustbowl Okies, and they were talking about how they were dependent on the road.

They were dependent on route 66 for their survival.

As they would travel from town to town.

They had the hope the kindness of people would help them get gas or food or repair their vehicles.

And they said they were dependent on Mother Road.

So that's where the term coined the term the mother road.

this was a huge migration in the United States.

And they went west, following the scent of oranges and lemons to the San Joaquin Valley, That's when Bakersfield, I like to say, became the third largest city in Oklahoma, many people camped out along the road just put their beds out and just the best they could do just to get rest so they could travel on in their vehicles.

They declared, route 66, the Will Rogers Highway.

And we're putting up markers along all the way up to the ocean in Santa Monica.

There are still Will Rogers markers at the Blue Whale, Look to the right just as you're entering Catoosa, and you'll see a great concrete whale grinning from the side of a farm pond.

Travelers sometimes wonder, what is this doing here?

It has no business being you know, in this landlocked state.

But it's also a love story.

You know, Hugh Davis was director of the Tulsa Zoo for, for decades before moving out to Catoosa with his family.

And he loved critters.

And so the first thing he did was he built this giant ark for kids to come and have birthday parties.

He would take them on little nature walks so they could see scorpions and other things.

He had a little alligator farm and a snake pit.

And so it was this little roadside attraction out there.

And then eventually he built this whale as an anniversary present for his wife.

it became a swimming hole and was a local community gathering place, today it's one of the most beloved roadside attractions on the entire highway.

But originally it was it was just a present from a husband to his wife.

In the 1940s, World War Two stands out in our mind.

And the rationing of food and gas.

So the soldiers would have enough.

But this is also when the trucking industry came into place, because there was a need to, to haul the military supplies.

And also, the bus lines really came into place because many of the military people would travel by bus.

The soldiers, you know, to get back to where they were needed or home.

And many families traveled by bus due to the rationing of gas.

Soldiers and their families shared tearful goodbyes in front of the Rock Cafe in Stroud.

So the Greyhound would stop here and pick up the boys going to war during World War two.

And so that was an era.

You know, the last time I ever got to see my husband was at the Rock cafe when I put him on the Greyhound bus stop to go to war.

The roadside diner has been serving travelers almost as long as the route itself.

you get your chicken fried steak that hangs out over the plate.

And I have to explain to the people from overseas what a chicken fried steak is and what a chicken fried chicken is, because that's a different thing.

With peace and prosperity.

Many Americans took the opportunity to see their country for the first time.

in the 1950s, this is when the diner really came into place, because many of the military men were taking their families on route 66. hey, let's go, let's hit the road.

We want to go see all these places that we learned about when we were out West.

But we couldn't at the time.

And so this was this was one of the big sparks of the, of the vacation.

when I was an eight year old boy and my father backed his car down the driveway, our vacation, our adventure began right there, as they say, it wasn't the destination.

It's the journey.

took nine trips east on 66, 59 to 69, sitting in the back seat, soaking it all up, wanting to stop everywhere and dead, never stopping I love the billboards, the neon signs.

Dad would drive for the night.

Dad would drive straight through the night without sleeping.

I was fascinated by the billboards because they promised so much and we never stopped.

They would count down.

You know, the mileage.

Ten miles, five miles, one mile, a thousand yards and then Whoa.

You missed it.

That's what it would say on the sign because, whoosh.

we missed it.

we have more drivable miles than any other state.

And indeed, you can come into Oklahoma from Kansas on historic route 66 and exit into Texas and never have to touch the interstate.

Which means that's a lot of towns to see, a lot of people to meet and a lot of a lot of things to do.

there are so many really cool mom and pop motels to stay on route 66, you get to experience how travel used to be There'd be a pool, there'd be benches.

The vacation dads would compare how many miles they drove that day, and the kids would run around and play.

It was a kind of like a little, temporary village along route 66 every night at these motels, people always say, well, how long does it take to do the route from this point to this point?

Well, wait a second.

Depends on how many places you plan to stop and visit and how much time you spend there.

Miami has the Coleman Theater, which is, tremendous landmark, fully restored.

in, commerce people take a side trip a few blocks to see, Mickey Mantle's house.

And there's a statue of him.

route 66 covers over 400 miles in this state, and it goes through 14 different tribal nations.

None of them have totem poles.

And so although Totem Pole Park pulls in people as they're traveling route 66 as a roadside attraction, it's also a place where people can kind of learn a little bit about the authentic story of Native Americans.

We're nostalgic for all the different, brands of gas we had back in the day.

The different neon signs before the interstate made everything the same.

At every exit.

On 11th Street and Tulsa at the Meadow Gold District, you have the big Meadow Gold neon sign.

You've got restaurants and shops, you've got, Buck Adams, Cosmic Cowboy, and Stella Adams and a giant lumberjack and a giant, cowboy playing the guitar All down that whole drag it's just full of cool attractions.

You got Ike's chili, which has been there forever.

There's a big bronze sculpture next to the Arkansas River on route 66.

It's called East meets West, and it's a symbol of Cyrus Avery and his family.

And a in a model T encountering a, wagon coming from the oil field.

And it's representing the coming of the automobile and the change that that's bringing.

You know, you have places like the Threatt filling station in Luther.

That family owns a building that was the only African-American owned filling station on route 66 during the Jim Crow era.

in Arcadia, you have the round barn.

You have, pops on 66, which is what I call a new kid on the block.

people have been investing in historic route 66, pops in Arcadia with their 66ft tall pop bottle and hundreds of flavors of soda pop.

Oklahoma City, you have the Gold Dome Bank, and the giant Milk bottle and the Tower Theater.

West of Oklahoma City.

The route winds through Yukon and some visitors tour historic Fort Reno before trying an onion burger at Sid's.

Weatherford just built a really nice big space man out there.

you've got the Thomas Stafford Museum and Lucille's Roadhouse, which is a restaurant that pays homage to Lucille Hammons.

Her historic service station still stands near the community of hydro.

we have museums in Weatherford and Clinton in Elk City that are devoted to route 66 The museum here in Clinton, Oklahoma, is the largest museum from Chicago to Santa Monica It's known pretty well all over the world.

Many of our international visitors that visit here, say that they stop here because it tells the history.

international travelers that come through, it gets the end of the road and say that museum in Clinton was the best Route 66 museum.

No other museum will quite tell us the route 66 story with such, a wide like, lens and so effectively.

Pop Hicks restaurant here in Clinton was the oldest continuously operating restaurant along route 66, and it burned to the ground in 1999.

And we still have people from all over the world that want to come here, see Pop Hicks.

And just before you hit the Texas Panhandle, there's the hometown of actor Shep Wooley and singer Roger Miller.

Erick, Oklahoma.

Across Main Street, Cal Rogers opened a cafe that drew in locals from town and tourists from all over the world.

he told me one time that when he came to here, he was the 13th cafe there when he opened up, and he was the last one there.

People would say, that's the best food I've had since I left home.

And daddy would come back to the kitchen and he'd start snickering and say, I wonder where they found food that good at home?

Yeah, was very busy.

Always busy.

Hard to find a seat during the noon hour.

Lots of locals out there every day.

and then we had tourists that would wrap their trips through Erick so that they could eat at Cal's.

But times were changing between vacationers and commercial rigs.

The route reached a point where there was too much traffic and the highway could not keep up.

in 1954, President and Eisenhower, who had been commander of Allied forces in the war and was so enamored with the sleek, efficient German Autobahn highway, he signed in his sickbed at Walter Reed, recovering from a heart attack, the interstate Highway Act.

No one knew it at the time.

It was the death certificate for route 66, because this meant a series of interstates would be built all over the country, In 1979, Cal's Cafe moved from downtown out to the interstate.

The business did well.

The town did not.

the highway really was a killer.

I was meant for progress, but it took out a lot of towns.

just like a lot of other towns.

They just kind of died.

the older people stayed and their kids moved off and just kind of abandoned the town.

If you had today's interstate traffic driving down our stretch of route 66, you could not enjoy it.

You could not pull over.

You could not take pictures.

It would be horrible.

So the the interstate kind of killed route 66.

But then at the same time, it saved historic route 66 because there is no more U.S.

66 that died in 1985.

When the interstates came through, a lot of the highway was preserved, especially if it was a little bit removed from the interstate, and some of those stretches became state highways.

I love the original concrete, you know, right about Fort Reno, west of El Reno in western Oklahoma, all the way out to Hydro.

You have this section of pavement that is original concrete poured in the 1930s.

And so you drive over it and you can hear this friction because you go between these concrete panels.

And there's this bridge across the Canadian River called the Bridgeport Pony Bridge, which is almost a mile long, taking that drive, putting the window down with a good song, there's just nothing better.

the road is closer to the environment.

You can smell, the grass being cut, you know, you can clearly smell the roadkill.

You can, you know, but all your senses are impacted by this trip.

it's that aspect of it that really has drawn so many people from around the world to the, to the road, because it has become the world.

The classic road trip.

It's been estimated that fully 25% of route 66 tourists are international tourists.

They come from Europe.

They come from Japan.

They come from Australia.

They come from everywhere.

They fly in during their holiday.

And they love to come into America and travel the open road.

The other countries are small, We have a Harley group from Norway that travels here every year, my wife volunteers at the Arcadia round barn, and she told me the other day, just in the month of June, they had over 2000 visitors, and they had people from 27 different foreign countries.

in one month.

the comment I get most from people overseas is they can't believe how friendly the people on 66 are.

They are amazed at how friendly we are.

It, takes away a lot of the preconceptions about America.

The Mother Road has been celebrated in song, a 60s television series and Pixar's 2006 animated film cars.

Director John Lasseter had the idea during a road trip, and based several of the characters on the people he met.

The character Sally Carrera is based on Dawn Welch.

I go to the movie premiere and that's where I find out that the characters were built on us.

Michael Wallis is the only route 66 person that got to voice, a character.

The producer, he said, well, you know, I've, we've seen a lot of your TV stuff and we know you do a lot of speaking, and we really like your pipes, and we want you to be in the film.

So they made the sheriff of Radiator Springs, that 49 Mercury, me.

May Doc have mercy on your soul.

with that grill that kind of resembles my mustache.

And I loved it.

I mean, I was just blown away watching the movie.

I mean, I was in tears watching the movie, knowing how right they did get it.

It'll still bring tears to my eyes because they did such a great job with that movie.

that is why these kids are wanting to get out on the road.

I mean, they want that feeling also.

When it came out in 2006, business on stretches of 66 went up 30%.

But more importantly, it turned on kids to preservation to the old road, to the way we used to travel.

We need to keep the young people involved.

We need to build on that momentum.

That Cars started.

I hope over the next 100 years, route 66, you know, keeps its foot in the past because it is a road of history, but continues to find ways to integrate with whatever's next.

Maybe it's electric car chargers, maybe it's augmented reality experiences where you can put your phone up to your face and see an old building and then take it down and you see what it looks like today.

And continues to inspire people to, you know, take the off ramp and, experience, journey that, is unlike anything else.

route 66 was a road of humanity.

It was a road for every man and woman.

It was a road for rednecks or blue bloods.

Route 66 is always been a work in progress, and it still is.

It's it's still is.

It's a road of the past, the present and the future.

route 66 has is so ingrained in our culture now.

The people look at it the same as I do, and national monument or national park.

It's it's part of our culture.

It's part of our history, it's part of the legacy.

And so it's not going anywhere.

It's it's here to stay.

As the sun sets over the red dirt plains and neon signs flicker back to life.

It's clear that route 66 is more than just a memory.

It's a living legacy.

The Mother Road continues to wind its way through the hearts of those who travel it.

The spirit of route 66 has never truly disappeared.

And now, with a new generation discovering its charm, history an untamed sense of adventure.

The road is alive once more.

Ready to carry stories into a bright and boundless future.

You can watch this and other episodes of Back in Time on the PBS app or at oeta.TV/backintime.