It’s The Pitts: The Mother Road

I know exactly when I fell in love with the West. 

I’ve always been proud to call myself a westerner, but an entire new world opened up to me at the age of five when we took one of only two vacations we ever took together as a family – both of them to Missouri – to visit my grandparents on my father’s side. It was the only two times I ever saw them. 

I guess you could have called us “reverse Okies” because my father’s family came out to California during the Dust Bowl days, and here we were headed back on the same road – a road called Route 66.

This is when my infatuation with the West began. We took what was also called the “Migrant Road” and the “Road of Flight.” It was a two-lane, mostly-asphalt highway stretching from Los Angeles to Chicago. 

Route 66 introduced me to parts of the West I’d never seen, and I loved every minute of it. 

The Mother Road became so famous, there was even a popular television show I never missed called “Route 66” featuring two guys in their Corvette who “got their kicks on Route 66.”

Route 66 was also called “America’s Main Street” because the empty intervals were broken by trading posts, gas stations, motels and restaurants selling everything from “genuine” Native America moccasins made in Japan, to petrified wood salt and pepper shakers. 

In the Arizona and New Mexico Native American trading posts, one could buy Kachina dolls, cowboy hats, belts and horns from real Longhorns. In Texas and Oklahoma, there were tiny vials of black crude.

Route 66 was littered with huge, unique billboards advertising gila monsters and mountain lions just 30 miles down the road and real rattlesnakes in Santa Rosa, N.M. 

The Jackrabbit Trading Post billboards featured huge jackrabbits telling kids in the backseat they should nag their parents to pull in so they could buy “authentic” feathered headdresses and cap guns. 

Further down the road in Post, Texas, one could stop to see a real jackalope – a cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope. I still have a postcard of a cowboy mounted on one. 

And who could forget the Burma Shave signs which chopped up funny messages in multiple signs divided by miles of highway like the one saying, “Don’t hang your arm out too far, it might go home in another car. Buy Burma Shave.” 

Gas stations were an oasis on Route 66, and even before the car stopped rolling, car doors would fly open and everyone would head for the restrooms. 

I’d never heard of Whiting Brothers gas stations before, which were advertised on long yellow signs.

Nor had I seen a Mohawk, DX, Horn Brothers, Skelly, Hedges or Phillips 66 station where they not only washed the windows, they checked the oil and the pressure in the tires, offered free ice for the ice chest and they’d fill the water bag hanging off of the front bumper that most cars carried in case the radiator blew – all for only 29 cents per gallon of gas.

Mostly we ate out of our ice chest, but I’ll never forget the potato soup in Shamrock, Texas; the fried chicken at Ptomaine Joe’s Place; the Iceberg Cafe in Albuquerque, N.M in the shape of an Iceberg; the Mexican restaurant formed like a sombrero; a café cobbled together to look like a shoe and the orange juice sold from a roadside stand in the shape of an orange. 

A huge cowboy advertised The Big Texas Steak Ranch in Amarillo, Texas, and it’s still there today, only in a different location. And one can still get a 72-ounce steak for free if they eat it and all the fixins.

Many of the cars we met on Route 66 had a bumper sticker advertising the Meramec Caverns in Missouri or the Meteor Crater in Arizona. 

My biggest regret was we didn’t stop to spend one night in a Wigwam Village teepee so I could see the inside of one. I also never got to put any change in a Magic Finger’s Mattress featured in multiple “motor courts.” 

Funny, in two round trips to Missouri, I never did get to see a single jackalope. Come to think of it, I have never seen one. 

But I’m still looking.