Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 26

Travel 2 SectioVi 11 Chicago Tribune, Sunday. May 22, 1983 Route 66 bypassed, renamed or abandoned still has plenty of kicks left ft mi Continued from page 1 designating and numbering of roads. In its heyday, 66 ran triumphantly through parts of seven states. But since 1956 the Federal Highway Administration has been methodically replacing the Chicago-to-Los Angeles highway with different parts of the interstate system: 1-55 from Chicago to St. Louis; 1-44 from St.

Louis to Oklahoma City; -1-40 from Oklahoma City through New Mexico, and Arizona all the way to Barstow, then 1-15 from Barstow to San Bernardino and MO to Santa Monica and the pacific Ocean. There are only two small stretches where Route 66 is officially part of the transcontinental highway system: at Williams, and McLean, and that's only because the interstate construction hasn't been completed. These two spots are the last vestiges of a long and bitter battle by the Sixty-Sixers, people who live and work along the road, to save their highway. 'For the people who lived alongside the highway, Route 66 was a window on the rest of the world, bringing in new ways, new people and that most important commodity, cash. For 30 years, the window was wide open, then as interstates bypassed or replaced the old hard road, the window slowly closed.

But it's not completely shut yet, for the Sixty-Sixers are survivors, just like their highway. IF YOU'RE impatient, a trip along Route 66 is not for you. If you insist on having your meat rare and cannot exist without pushbutton telephones in your motel rooms, you'll never enjoy the ride. But if you really want to explore the great belly of the continent, among the good ol boys who debate the value of dry farming, and the folks who keep homemade pickles in the back of their service stations, then you can still get your kicks on Route 66. It dead-ends from time to time, and sometimes disappears entirely for a few miles, but Route 66 still is its own road most of the way from Joplin, to the Arizona-California border.

It's there in the other states-Illinois, Missouri and California but harder to find and called by different names. In most places, 66 has been reduced to a secondary route, running alongside the interstate or winding off several miles on an adventure of its own. IT BEGAN IN Chicago as Jackson Boulevard at Lake Shore Drive, merging with Ogden Avenue U.S. Hwy. 34 just west of Ashland Avenue.

From there, old Route 66 slashes through the Southwest Side, roughly paralleling its new incarnation, 1-55 the Stevenson Expressway. Then it plunges into the suburbs Cicero, Berwyn, Brookfield-Riverside finally breaking out into the countryside, the vast rolling flatlands of Illinois, where it arches westward. Old 66 wanders through little Illinois towns, rolls through the historic Lincoln country around Springfield and heads south into the coal mining district. Mostly, it is the access road to 1-55 and the business route through the towns. People still tell stories about Al Capone and his cronies traveling up and down the old road and the wars between the Capone fang from Chicago and the gang from East t.

Louis, South from Litchfield, people talk specifically about Benld as a place where Capone used to spend time. Perhaps because of that connection, Benld had a dance hall in the 1930s that was a regular stopping place for the big bands. The Benld Colosseum still stands, but the biggest excitement these, is an annual Italian Festival and spaghetti dinner that the town hosts every ummer. '-BUT PEOPLE don't like to be identified tthen they talk about what used to go on in Benld. went on in Benld.

It was almost a protected area and the cops steered clear of it," said ope Litchfield resident. J'Guy Lombardo, Sammy Kaye, Kay all of 'em they all came through. I Shaver could figure out how they got those 'bands because there's nothing there. Even 3oday, for a town its size, Benld still has a lot. Route 66 in eastern Oklahoma, where it setting in more ways than one pn America's original superhighway.

many businesses closed as open. Galena is a monument to the heyday of the lead mines for which' it is named, as desolate and gray as the mountains of slag that define landscape. THE LEAD MINES and their innards continue to be an important part of the landscape through the 15 miles of Kansas and Into the northeast corner of Oklahoma. But it's not the mines that necessarily bring people to Miami, Okla. Across from the courthouse In Miami is Laverae's Marriage Parlor, where a marriage license and the price of the ceremony about (40 can get you married on the spot.

"The state lab at the courthouse win get a blood test out in an hour," says Laverne Harris, a big, dark-haired woman who likes to go fragging on summer nights. "After you get your Blood test, you pick up your marriage license and we'll marry you. People just walk in usually, but when we're not open they have to make an appointment." Laverne was married by a local justice of the peace on her husband's lunch break in 1955. Later, she went to work for the JP and took over the business when he died. Oklaho runs in tandem with U.S.

Hwy. 60: The sun time. In some areas, it is possible to find as many as three incarnations of Route 66, within a few yards of one another. IN OTHER places, the road was obviously rerouted to make travel more direct between towns. Simply by asking folks where Route 66 used to De can often elicit a fascinating conversation about the history of the locale and "who was in charge when it was paved over there," and "who pocketed a bundle of money" when the road was rerouted and repaved in some other place.

Changes in the road location also resulted in problems for businesses along the highway. In Worden, 111., the Schlecte family changed the main entrance of their nightclub from the front door to the back to accommodate one highway move, and have moved the building at least once. In Missouri, Lester Dill couldn't move his cave, but he painted enough signs to make sure travelers knew where it was. Every kid who grew up in the Midwest during the 1950s remembers Meramec Caverns, Route 66. Mo.

They saw "Meramec on the sides of buildings and in large white letters on the roofs of barns. Dill, who died two summers ago, learned he could get the space for free if he painted the whole barns and so he did, all over the Midwest and West. Today, there still are a few barns, but they say Staunton, instead of Route 66. Like many others, Dill was bitter about the "THAT INTERSTATE took all of us guys and ruined us," Dill lamented. "They could have named it 1-66 just as easy.

All the, people knew Highway 66. We had the Route 66 Association, there was the song, and "The Grapes of Wrath And to the next generation there was the television show People like Dill capitalized on those imag-. is of taverns." During World War II, Route 66 became a military road. It was the route GIs and their families took to assignments on the West Coast and it was the shipping route for armaments to and from McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis and dozens of military bases farther west.

People at the volunteer fire department in Mitchell, 111., remember the war. "Everything passed through here," said "Piccolo Pete" Routh, a volunteer fireman who plays the saxophone in a local band. "This here was one of the hottest spots in the U.S. with all that equipment going through." "THIS HERE" doesn't look much like a major artery of commerce. Route 66 in Mitchell is strictly a local road, long ago bypassed by 1-55.

The Chain of Rocks Bridge across the Mississippi, which once carried all the people and equipment west, is closed. Nobody objects, as the bridge turned a corner in mid-river and traffic had to stop to let big rigs get around the curve. With the interstate and without the bridge, Mitchell has become one of the quiet backwater towns that doesn't change much anymore. In Mitchell, they still talk about the dog track that opened in 1927, and about The Fight. The Fight was in 1893 and is commemorated on a faded sign in a swampy riverbottom trailer park west of the railroad tracks.

The sign reads; "Nameoki Feb. 5, 1893. Longest Queensbury Rules ever to go to a knockout. Harry Sharpe KO'd Frank Crosby in the 77th Round; 5 hours, 5 minutes." In this part of the world, some events make a lasting impression. Other events, like the paving and marking' of the road, had less permanent impact.

In many places, Route 66 ran like the channel of a river, first in one place, then in another, on the political currents of the es linking Route 66 with adventure and urged travelers not to wait for California, but to get their kicks along the way. His cave is still there, about three miles off Route 66 and 1-44 and 60 miles southwest of St. Louis. The tours haven't changed much in the last quarter-century. You still hear Kate Smith singing "God Bless America," see elephant and teddy bear rock formations, spend a few seconds in total darkness and watch as stalactites change as different color lights are focused on them.

As a state, Missouri has more commercial caves than any other; Meramec Caverns is among (our major show caves along Route 66. The others are Onondaga and Fantastic Caverns, both farther south in Missouri, and Grand Canyon Caverns, 1,500 miles down Route 66 in Arizona. ABOUT 150 miles beyond Meramec Caverns at Halltown, just outside Springfield, old 66 Mo. Hwy. 96 veers away from 1-44 and reverts to the way it was.

From Halltown to the Kansas border, the yellow concrete pavement is like a time machine, past old frame gas stations, farms, small cafes, Mickey Owen's Baseball Camp and in and out of little towns that practically aren't there anymore: Miller. Albatross. Plew. Avilla and Rescue, to Carthage, the county seat of Jasper County, a proud country town with big white gingerbread houses on shady streets and a gold-domed courthouse made of Carthage stone from the granite quarry nearby. From Carthage, the road, drops south to Joplin, and regains its name with the first signs that actually say U.S.

66 into the lead mining comer of Kansas. Galena, is as hot and ugly a town as you'll find along 66. The State Line Tavern may or may not be open it changes hands on a regular basis and in town there are as ma banned JPs in 1969, so Laverne doesn't, perform weddings, but she pulls everything together and has two ministers on call. Inside the white frame house is a tiny chapel three pews to a side decorated with candles and blue cloth flowers. Laverne will take your picture with her Polaroid camera and sell you silk flowers to carry.

"Sometimes people call me the next day and say to tear up the license, but I can't do that," Laverne says. She can, however, sell you a Just Married sign for $1. MIAMI IS IN the green hills country of Oklahoma, but by the time you get to Claremore, you know you're in Indian terri tory. Claremore is the home of Will Rogers and thrives on the comings and goings of Faces of the Sixty-Sixers au; 1 1 trsMukLltik 1 Brother and sister Carol and Orville Schlecte left, third generation Sixty--Sixers in Worden, III. Bill Nelson below, Arizona highway worker, cowboy and dude wrangler: "The Fish and Game people have changed everything we don't need no educated guys to make those rules." people to tne win Kogers Memorial on the edge of town.

Downtown, the Victorian Will Rogers Hotel with still-operating mineral baths was dedicated to the cowboy, just as Route 66 became the Will Rogers Highway in 1952 as part of a movie promotion. Across the street from the Will Rogers Hotel, Dave's Indian Trading Post is an excellent source of good silver and turquoise jewelry at reasonable prices. Norma Cul-lison, the proprietress, and her late husbandthe Dave for whom the shop is named are true Sixty-Sixers. They used to travel up and down Route 66 buying and 1 selling Indian crafts and Western souvenirs. "We'd go west and pick up Indian stuff," says Norma, who may be wearing as much Indian jewelry as she has for sale.

"Then we'd come east and sell it. Dave, he liked that, being on the road." They drove a Cadillac laden with luggage and children and pulling an eight-foot trailer. Norma especially remembers a 1955 yellow Coupe de Ville Cadillac, "Everybody all over the country knew the Cullisons," she says. "They could see us coming." THROUGH MOST of Oklahoma, Route 66 still is a viable road, saved by the fact that interstates there are toll roads. These two facts cause Oklahomans to get excited.

A mention of Route 66 to many Oklahomans triggers suspicion, and a common question is: r'Are you for it or against it?" The fight to save their road has been long and bitter. In Sapulpa, just south of Tulsa, where Grace Lee Frank Smith designs pottery for the Frankoma Pottery Works that her late husband founded and her daughter runs, they were worried about the coming of the interstate. "This road out here was 33 and 75 and 66, the busiest road in the state," Mrs. Smith said as she put finishing touches on a set of mugs ordered by the local telephone company. "We thought we'd be ruined when they took it away from us.

We thought we'd lose our retail trade, and that's a big part of our business." But they weren't, and didn't and you still can tour the plant where potters, glazera and, other craftspeople are turning out 1983 versions of the same green-brown Frankoma pottery that has been made alongside Route 66 in Sapulpa for almost half a century. A FEW MILES west or Sapulpa, where 66 crosses the interstate at Wellston, is a treat, a place in mostly dry Oklahoma where you can get delicious barbecued rib dinners and a cold beer. The Pioneer Camp Tavern is an landmark. to a 1920-viniege tourist camp and a concrete totem pole with Continued on page 23 i ij-'f-m, 'fT" 1 jt ft" Buster Burris above relishes the days when his tow truck in always was first on the scene of wrecks on Bloody 66. Ruby Denton remembers when the interstate opened at Groom, "On the second of June in 1980 at 1:15 in the rrWing they tore apart." Too tough to be a casualty of the Interstates, Norma Cullison still runs Dave's Indian Trading Post In Claremore, just as she and her husband used to: "We'd go west andj-pick up Indian stuff, then we'd come east and sef -a.".