Nostalgia & Route 66

Dixie

I know that this image isn't from Route 66, but I would like to invite readers to post their Route 66 photos along with location information.

Every May I go on the Run For The Wall for POW/MIA awareness and education. Since I have to ride my Gold Wing from Alabama to Los Angeles, I always leave early and pick places along the way to shoot.

This year I and a few of my cohorts are riding to Chicago to pick up and take what's left of Route 66 all the way to the Santa Monica Pier. We will leave my home in Alabama to head to Chicago. I figure that by noon on May 6th we will on our way on 66 from Chicago. Then we will spend the next 10 days travelling as much of the old road as we can. I understand that there is still a good 85% or better of the old roadway still remaining.

I've picked up a number of documentary Route 66 videos and books. The DVD's are pretty good, especially the almost 3 hour one hosted by Martin Milner from the old 60's TV series entitled Route 66. The books, however, leave a lot to be desired in that most of the photography isn't much better than poor snapshots.

At any rate, I would like to invite the readers of this post to show us their Route 66 photographs. I am going to use this thread as a reference to make a list of "must see & photograph" places along the way so please help me as much as you can by providing the location of the shots you add. I've never been on any part of Route 66 except maybe a quarter of a mile or so while travelling on I-40 in the southwest when stopping to eat or sleep.

I appreciate any help and ideas anyone can provide for my Route 66 trip.


I can't provide a Route 66 post since I haven't been there yet, but I will get the thread started with some other highway nostalgia dating back to the 1930's. When Rock City, near Chattanooga, TN opened most of the advertising was done by paying farmers a small fee to let Rock City use the barn walls and roofs for advertising. Some of that still goes on today as can be seen in this photograph of an old barn sitting in a junkyard along side old US 11 in northeast Alabama.

Of course, comments and suggestions are always welcome.

Click on the image for EXIF data.



Please add to the thread with Route 66 photographs. Please list locations.

Dixie

I'm beginning to think that no one is getting their kicks on Route 66 anymore? :cry

Dixie

One last attempt to get some Route 66 images.

from Route 66.

grimace

I wish I could contribute but I have nothing from route 66. :-(

wholenewlight

I got nuttin'

But I sure like your "Rock City" shot.

Not mine but a few good shots here

Angelo

Hey Dix - six days past but I found your post!

This sounds like a great idea and a fun trip. I'm envious.

I'll have to dig out some pre-digital snaps I have of an old mining town just outside Kingman AZ, I can't think of the town name right now, where orphaned mules, once used in the mines (and their offspring) roam free.

It's a place right out of the old west, with wooden sidewalks, the abandoned mine in the middle of town.... good stuff.

ian408

Should be a great motorcycle trip.

I've not been along 66 but some day, I hope to make the trip--before it is
gone completely.

ginger_55

Sounds great, Wish I could contribute! If I see an old shrimp boat on the rd, I will post on your thread. Will tell you it is Route 66, smile, and you can hunt for the old shrimp boat!

ginger (Will be a great thread, someone must live near that rd.)

Gerber

OK, here are a couple of mine...



And another...

Dixie

wholenewlight wrote:

I got nuttin'

But I sure like your "Rock City" shot.

Not mine but a few good shots here

Thank you, John. I spend hours going through the galleries you linked. They were exactly what I had in mind and did a great job of giving the approximate location. Thanks again.

Dixie

Angelo wrote:

Hey Dix - six days past but I found your post!

This sounds like a great idea and a fun trip. I'm envious.

I'll have to dig out some pre-digital snaps I have of an old mining town just outside Kingman AZ, I can't think of the town name right now, where orphaned mules, once used in the mines (and their offspring) roam free.

It's a place right out of the old west, with wooden sidewalks, the abandoned mine in the middle of town.... good stuff.

Thanks, Angelo, I'll be looking out for the scans.

Dixie

Gerber wrote:

OK, here are a couple of mine...



And another...

Thanks, Gerber. Where were these taken?

3rdPlanetPhotography

I'll get some 66 pics when the weather shapes up. I have lots of place here by St. Louis.

Angelo

Last Stop
Hey Dix -

I thought I'd offer a little assistance. Just consider me your personal GPS!

Here's a shot of your final destination. Print it out and tape it to your bike so you don't miss it!

JeffW says: "If your tires get wet, you've gone too far!"

Angelo

Dixie wrote:

Thanks, Angelo, I'll be looking out for the scans.

in the meantime... I remember the town is named Oatman and here's some info:

http://www.kingmantourism.org/to-do-and-see/day-trips/oatman.php

Dixie

Angelo, thanks for the information and link. I checked it out briefly and will head back to it later tonight.

pathfinder

I mised this one originally Dixie - Sorry...


"Standing on the Corner in Winslow Arizona, And such fine sight to see....
It's a girl, my lord, in a flat bed Ford, slowin' down to take a look at me!!"




The Comet II, restaurant in Santa Rosa NM -
http://nenewmexico.com/tours.php?title=Route%2066:%20Historic%20Route%2066&search=route66.php

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The WigWam Motel Holbrook Arizona



Outside Amarillo Texas



Not on Route 66, but on Route 40 I suspect in Goodland Kansas - Van Gogh's easel

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I would like to follow Rt 66 with a camera sometime also - 2 wheels? or 4?

pathfinder

I found a few more - most of these were shot last Spring returning from Yosemite -


A mural in Winslow Arizona




WigWam Motel again Blue-Yellow Polarizer
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Petrified Forest - Route 66




Petrified Forest - Route 66

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Route 66 Springfield Illinois

Frog Lady

San Bernardino rte 66
every body sing along:

If you ever plan to motor west,
Travel my way, take the highway that is best.
Get your kicks on route sixty-six.

It winds from chicago to la,
More than two thousand miles all the way.
Get your kicks on route sixty-six.

Now you go through saint looey
Joplin, missouri,
And oklahoma city is mighty pretty.
You see amarillo,
Gallup, new mexico,
Flagstaff, arizona.
Don’t forget winona,
Kingman, barstow, san bernardino.

Won’t you get hip to this timely tip:
When you make that california trip
Get your kicks on route sixty-six.

---

ok, I can try to get out this week end (if the weather cooperates) and see what I can find of the old rte 66 for you. I know they have a 60's era hot rod car show every fall (http://www.route-66.org/index.htm) but I don't think that'll help you now And apparently the 1st McDonald's (1948) was on rte 66 in SB and that site, while no longer a MickyD's is another rte 66 museum (San Bernardino Route 66 Museum
1398 North "E" Street
San Bernardino, CA 924905
Phone: (909) 885-6324
Hours: 10AM to 5PM Daily
Admission: Free)

there's also the California state rte 66 museum (http://www.califrt66museum.org/home.html) in Victorville, Ca (a little podunk town off of I-15 just before it crosses over the Cajon Pass into the San Bernardino/LA basin)

happy trails.

Colleen

photocat

New Mexico Albuquerque Route 66


I did part of route 66, this is Albuquerque, I wanted to do more but my husband was in a hurry to get to Las Cruces.
I still get my kick on route 66, I live in Europe, so don't always have the chance of snapping in the States. I dream of doing the whole route one day...
There is more pics in my New Mexico 2006 gallery...

http://photocat.smugmug.com/gallery/1213597

photocat

More Route 66


I think this is either Los Lunas (leaving Albucuerque) which is part of the old route 66, or it is Truth or Conseqences, not too sure... I bet it is the first part.
Just leaving Los Lunas. Sad part is that I have to do most of the shooting from the car, driving... Well, husband driving and me snapping.
If it were for me, we would never get anywhere as I see so much nice stuff in the States...

Dixie

Frog Lady wrote:

ok, I can try to get out this week end (if the weather cooperates) and see what I can find of the old rte 66 for you.happy trails.

Colleen

Thanks, Colleen, I'll be looking for the posts.

saurora

photocat wrote:

I did part of route 66, this is Albuquerque, I wanted to do more but my husband was in a hurry to get to Las Cruces.
I still get my kick on route 66, I live in Europe, so don't always have the chance of snapping in the States. I dream of doing the whole route one day...
There is more pics in my New Mexico 2006 gallery...

http://photocat.smugmug.com/gallery/1213597

Photocat...these are wonderful!!! Makes me want to pack my bags and camera and GOOOOOOOO!!!! You do a pretty darn good job for having an impatient hubby! Not easy to do drive-by-shootings as well as you do!!!

Dixie

Thank you to Pathfinder and Photocat. Now we are cooking. These are great photos.

Path, I especially like the one of the building, eagle, and couple in Winslow, AZ. Gonna have to find that building on my way through come May. Is it real or is it Memorex, partly painted on the side of a building, etc?

Photocat, I love the one of the old building in Truth or Consequences (?), NM. I will definitely be looking for that building.

photocat

maybe we need to plan fourteen days together... I could have stayed a week in Albuquerque alone... Love the south west of the States. I call it photographers paradise. I am used to shoot out of the driving car, it is that or having no pics...

pathfinder

Dixie wrote:

Path, I especially like the one of the building, eagle, and couple in Winslow, AZ. Gonna have to find that building on my way through come May. Is it real or is it Memorex, partly painted on the side of a building, etc?

These are statues, not murals. The eagle is a statue on the windowsill. There was a chain ink fence around the building when I was there last spring, that is why the lower portion of the building is cropped out.

The WigWam motel in Holbrook was interesting also, maybe because I remember seeing in driving out to Ca in 1963 on route 66. :

kkart

photocat wrote:

I did part of route 66, this is Albuquerque, I wanted to do more but my husband was in a hurry to get to Las Cruces.
I still get my kick on route 66, I live in Europe, so don't always have the chance of snapping in the States. I dream of doing the whole route one day...
There is more pics in my New Mexico 2006 gallery...

http://photocat.smugmug.com/gallery/1213597

What a GREATY series of shots you have....spent some time looking thru em all this morning. I found this one pretty interesting http://photocat.smugmug.com/gallery/1213597/3/56817191 makes ya seriously wonder about the guy he pulled over with the officer having his hand on his gun.

Dixie

photocat wrote:

maybe we need to plan fourteen days together... I could have stayed a week in Albuquerque alone... Love the south west of the States. I call it photographers paradise. I am used to shoot out of the driving car, it is that or having no pics...

I know what you mean. I never seem to have enough time for the all the shooting that I want to do as I travel through an area. Since I do the driving at least I can stop to take the shots I like. I'll have to come up with a schedule or as good a one as a person can make when travelling on two weeks using backroads from Chicago to Los Angeles. The only two dates I know for sure right now is that we will be leaving Chicago on May 6th and arriving in Santa Monica on May 15th.

If I have Internet access maybe I can post daily updates and a few shots from each day as we travel along.

Dixie

pathfinder wrote:

These are statues, not murals. The eagle is a statue on the windowsill. There was a chain ink fence around the building when I was there last spring, that is why the lower portion of the building is cropped out.

The WigWam motel in Holbrook was interesting also, maybe because I remember seeing in driving out to Ca in 1963 on route 66. :

Thanks for the info, Pathfinder. I kept looking at it trying to figure if it was a building, a billboard (the lights at the top made me wonder about that), etc. I'm definitely going to have to try and find this building.

Angelo

Dix - a burger and a beer await your arrival
L.A. THEN AND NOW

A Hip but Controversial Hangout Spans Eras

By Cecilia Rasmussen
Times Staff Writer

March 19, 2006

It survived bootleggers, Prohibition, carousing movie stars, tattooed bikers, the rise of yuppie pool halls — and a decades-long battle stemming from an anti-gay slur posted over the bar.

Now, nearly 80 years after it opened, Barney's Beanery in West Hollywood remains a hip hangout, combining tourist glitz with biker cool.

The joint, with its low ceilings and wood-beamed simplicity, evokes the days of Jean Harlow and W.C. Fields. Rusted out-of-state license plates line the bar, and yellowed newspapers decorate the ceiling.

With a menu that includes breakfast burritos, chili cheese dogs and Dom Perignon, Barney's has always been a chic roadhouse. And the owners have been as loyal as the customers; there have been just four owners in 79 years.

The original, John "Barney" Anthony, was a Los Angeles native who attended UC Berkeley before joining the Navy in World War I. As a Navy cook, he served sailors French onion soup and his special blend of mouth-watering chili burgers.

His shipboard recipes were such a hit that, in 1920, he opened the Beanery in Berkeley. The modest hamburger and chili stand included a sign that read: "For Men Only."

Anthony was a rough-and-tumble character who perhaps didn't think women had the cast-iron stomachs to handle his chili.

Warmer weather and the newly opened Route 66 encouraged him to move back home, where, in 1927, he purchased a small shack in the tules surrounded by a poinsettia field.

With an electric trolley running down the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard, the 1880s railroad town of Sherman was emerging as a tidy suburb of sprawling Los Angeles and a neighbor to the free-spending movie-industry crowd.

Anthony was betting on America's migration west via the year-old "mother road" from Chicago to Los Angeles. On this stretch of the highway near La Cienega Boulevard, he opened Barney's Beanery.

Its popularity was swift and destined to survive the trolley's eventual demise.

"It is a little wooden shanty, with a whole row of cheap floor lamps illuminating the counter, and a dinky little bar down at one end," said a literary film magazine, Rob Wagner's Script, in 1942. Times reporters from the 1950s and '60s called it "wholesomely crummy" and a "hilarious little mecca for bigwigs and bums."

Barney treated his famous customers as if they were Navy buddies. He offered free advice, lent some of them money and took out-of-state license plates as collateral on dinner bills, according to a 1945 article in Hollywood Nightlife magazine.

Clark Gable and Errol Flynn kicked back in the shadows there. Steve McQueen shot pool and drank beer. Janis Joplin drank her last screwdriver there and carved her name in a tabletop that now hangs from the ceiling. Jim Morrison and the Doors hung out nearly every night.

Singer Linda Ronstadt was sometimes seen sneaking through the kitchen door to meet her boyfriend, then-Gov. Jerry Brown, who waited inside sipping Irish coffee. The French onion soup was a favorite of former California Gov. and Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren.

Film-industry types routinely rented the place for Oscar-watching soirees and wrap parties. And in 1951, a week before the Academy Awards, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin held an Oscar spoof there called the Mickey Awards.

"It was the first time in years anybody dared to laugh at Hollywood out loud," a Herald Examiner reporter wrote in 1951. "One irate press agent said the whole thing was 'anti-industry' and demanded it be called off."

The awards were the brainchild of Ezra Goodman, a Time magazine correspondent who, along with other film-industry reporters, felt that he was treated as a second-class citizen.

Studio producers told Lewis and Martin that they couldn't spoof the Oscars, said Johnny Grant, Hollywood's honorary mayor, in a recent interview.

But the show went on. Searchlights pierced the sky and wide-eyed fans filled the temporary bleachers outside.

Grant, then working as a disc jockey, welcomed stars as they arrived. "The press used to get together and pull off some real doozies," he said.

For the occasion, emcees Lewis and Martin rented the antique automobile — an Isotta Fraschini — in which Gloria Swanson was chauffeured by Erich Von Stroheim in "Sunset Boulevard." (The film was up for 11 Oscars that year; it won three.)

Von Stroheim accepted the Mickey for best performance by a foreign convertible. Burlesque legend Tempest Storm won for the "best two props" in a black and white production — her breasts.

The restaurant's more recent notoriety stemmed from the infamous sign and matchbook covers that proclaimed, in coarse language, that gays weren't welcome. Anthony posted the sign over the bar in the late 1940s.

The slur raised no eyebrows for years. But in 1964 a Life magazine photographer immortalized Anthony and his sign, and controversy grew.

Anthony ignored objections to his sign, which he said originally had been a joke. But by the late 1950s, as beatniks and rock 'n' roll types began to supplant his Hollywood clientele, Anthony became considerably less tolerant of the bohemian culture and homosexuals.

He was immune to the protests but not to aging: He died in late 1968, at 70.

His family sold Barney's to Irwin Held, who kept the sign and matchbooks. Activists unsuccessfully tried to prevent the transfer of the liquor license and, in 1970, held a three-month demonstration outside and inside the restaurant.

Led by gay minister Troy Perry, who had founded the Metropolitan Community Church in 1968, and Morris Kight, co-founder of the Gay Liberation Front, protesters marched on the sidewalk and occupied tables for hours, drinking cold coffee. (Management refused to refill their cups after the first serving.)

The Gay Liberation Front sued, but Held prevailed. He defiantly proclaimed that the sign and matchbooks would stay because they were part of Barney's history.

Perry vowed that he would never set foot in the restaurant again. "I only went in there once before to see the sign I had heard so much about," he said in a recent interview. "That sign set it all off for me, and we started planning the protest."

When West Hollywood incorporated in 1984, the Barney's sign helped prompt a city ordinance banning discrimination against homosexuals. In 1985, facing a $500-a-day fine, Held reluctantly removed the sign and jettisoned the matchbooks.

"For the first time in my life, I know how MacArthur must've felt at Corregidor," he moaned to a Times reporter, referring to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's 1942 retreat from Japanese invaders on the fortified Philippine island.

In 1991, even with the offensive sign long gone, Barney's became a target when Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed a gay-rights bill.

"Protesters banged on and threw bricks through the windows," Held said in a recent interview.

In 1999, poor health forced Held to sell Barney's to David Houston and Avi Fattal, who kept the place virtually the same. That applied to the joint's notoriety too, which wasn't exactly what the pair had in mind.

Houston said that when he bought Barney's, he naively thought the word would get out that there was a "new sheriff in town" with a different attitude. But gays still refused to go there.

One might say that resolving this long-standing dispute required divine intervention. Last year, Houston invited the original protester, Perry, into Barney's. Perry accepted and shook Houston's hand.

"I believe in redemption; I'm a clergyman," the minister said in the interview. "I felt like [Houston] was really genuine. He didn't have to do this."

The relieved Houston said in an interview: "We hope to exclude no one and cater to anyone who has an appreciation for fattening food, good chili, beer and loud rock 'n' roll."

pathfinder

Dixie wrote:

Thanks for the info, Pathfinder. I kept looking at it trying to figure if it was a building, a billboard (the lights at the top made me wonder about that), etc. I'm definitely going to have to try and find this building.

Ya can't miss it - It is the most prominent spot in Winslow Arizona. It is right across the corner from this...:):