On Route 66, a Traveler is Born
The Mother Road turns 100, and the beginning of everything in Tulsa, OK...
This week on The Escapologist…
Checklist: The Route 66 Centennial
Essay: What Happens in Tulsa
Checklist: The Route 66 Centennial
This year marks the 100th anniversary of of Route 66, the first highway to connect the Midwest to the West Coast along a single unbroken route from Illinois to the Santa Monica Pier.
Winding across eight states and past some of the continent’s most striking scenery, it is bucket list travel writ large – the kind of thing that everyone and their dad (quite literally) wants to do someday, and no wonder. It’s hard to find a single US attraction that has so many layers of knotty cultural meaning – the rise of the automobile, the romanticized American west, midcentury nostalgia, the road trip as freedom. And on and on.
Of course, there are tons of events planned for the anniversary across the entire route. Here are a few interesting tidbits to check out ahead of the celebrations at the end of April and into May.
Though Route 66 technically begins on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, the epicenter of this year’s celebrations is Springfield, Missouri, which sits directly on the route and is considered the “birthplace” of Route 66 because local officials suggested the name. (Route66Kickoff.com)
The TODAY Show will broadcast live from Springfield on April 30, and the town is hosting a number of special events including a speaker series, a car show, and a caravan rally. (Today.com)
The United States Postal Service is releasing special stamps commemorating the centennial. They’ll be available on May 5. (United States Postal Service)
Route 66 travels through the tribal lands of more than 25 indigenous tribes. The American Indigenous Tourism Association just released American Indians and Route 66, which helps travelers see the Mother Road through the eyes of its original inhabitants. There’s also an itinerary that includes indigenous sites along the route. (American Indigenous Tourism Association)
Many places along Route 66 – local businesses, classic signage, and landmarks – are in need of preservation and restoration. The National Trust for Historic Preservation offers grants to do just that. Additionally, the Trust also is supporting a measure before Congress that would name Route 66 National Historic Trail and open it up to additional funding. (National Trust for Historic Preservation)
I am still learning about the close alignment between Route 66 and the Green Book, a travel guide published from 1936-1964 that helped black motorists travel safely and comfortably to destinations across the US. The National Parks Service offers a solid intro, and the list of extant (and not) Green Book sites along Route 66 is fascinating. For a more general look at the history of the Green Book, check out Driving While Black by Gretchen Sorin. (NPS, Bookshop.org)
Google Arts & Culture has created a visual guide that lets you explore major landmarks and learn some history. (Google)
Because I’m never one to pass up a beautifully designed, ultra-niche travel guide that is more or less useless for planning a trip, I give you Wildsam Route 66. You are welcome. (Wildsam)
What Happens in Tulsa
Standing at the foot of the Golden Driller in Tulsa, Oklahoma, there was not much else to do but take pictures. I clutched a 110 film camera and the day was clouded over, the sky a solid sheet of gray spitting the occasional bout of angry slantwise drizzle. We were umbrella-less and underdressed, both of us in Dr. Marten boots and coats that were defenseless against wind or rain.
We took a taxi from downtown to the Tulsa State Fairgrounds where the driller stands as sentinel and host, 76 feet tall and painted gold, the word TULSA emblazoned on his belt buckle. We were too young to rent a car and we’d arrived in Oklahoma without a clear solution to that problem in a place where public transportation was more a suggestion than a city service. We waited for buses that never came. We bummed rides from friends who lived in town. And we called taxis because – we certainly didn’t know – you couldn’t just hail one on the street.
Built for a 1952 petroleum exhibition, the driller stands with legs splayed in swaggering self-confidence, one elbow propped up on an oil rig. He looks into the distance, as though he’s regarding a field of oil derricks that stretch to the horizon. He’s made of plaster that covers a steel frame and he’s currently the seventh-tallest statue in the United States. Given the definition of his solar plexus, it’s not entirely clear if he’s wearing a shirt, but he’s definitely wearing gloves, his oilman’s hat, and workman’s boots. The weather does not seem to faze him.
Decades later, it is still hard for me to surround this excursion with any kind of sensible context. It is, like all matters of the heart, hard to explain. But the short story is that our favorite band was Hanson, and we were in Tulsa, their hometown, to see what they saw.
Hanson, for the uninitiated, is a band consisting of three brothers who wrote, recorded, and played the kind of sunshine-laden, garage-forged American pop-rock that has never quite been cool, but has had its cultural moments. One of them came in 1997 when their first single, “Mmmbop,” went to number 1 on the Billboard singles chart. Taylor Hanson, the band’s angel-faced lead singer, was fifteen years old. Drummer Zac was eleven. Eldest brother and guitarist Isaac was seventeen, like us.
My best friend Corinne and I were obsessed – young enough to scream at concerts and swoon over cute boys but old enough to grasp something… else… whirling around this anomaly of a band. The songs spoke to our yearning teenage hearts. (“All I care about is you and me and us and now,” sang Taylor in his gravel-caked, post-pubescent tenor on “If Only.”) But the more we learned about Hanson – a hobby fueled by a wondrous new toy, the internet – the more we grasped that while we were all approximately the same age, there was a broad cultural divide between us.
The Hanson boys were the three eldest of seven homeschooled children. They were raised in the Tulsa suburbs in an evangelical Christian household and while there were no direct religious messages in their music, there was also a marked absence of the opposite. No sex. No drugs. Angst was delivered in soothing tones. There were sweet, heartfelt songs about their late grandmother, about feeling awkward as a teenager, about standing for “principles.” As a girl trying to pick through the rubble of mid-1990s popular music – of hypersexualized Britney Spears, of the strippers-and-cocaine ethos of Guns n Roses, of Kurt Cobain’s suicide – Hanson was a balm.
I had divorced parents, a working mom, and a father who was either absent or combative, depending on the day. I had one sister, a spotty attendance record at Sunday mass, and crippling anxiety about AP exams and college applications. It is no wonder that this whole other kind of teenager – seemingly gentle, earnest, wrapped in family and protected from chaos – became a point of fixation.
I think we went to Tulsa just to see if it was real.
I did not have a passport. I had only flown on an airplane one other time in my life, to go to Orlando on a trip with my high school chorus. I had never traveled anywhere without a supervising adult. It never occurred to me that there were things to see in and around Tulsa that were not directly related to Hanson, partly because fandom can be so myopic, and partly because I simply did not know how to travel. How do you know how to travel if you’ve never traveled?
To give you a sense of my total inexperience not just with travel but with life, there was a moment when Corinne and I seriously discussed traveling to Tulsa from Boston by Greyhound bus. The thought of purchasing an airplane ticket boggled the mind. When it came time to book, I did so over the phone, not quite trusting the internet with so important a task, or so much of my money.
Everything we saw on that trip, like the Golden Driller, feels frozen in its own bubble. Sites, events, entire days existed entirely without context, one odd moment after the next. Walking across a divided highway under churning green skies, wondering if the tornado sirens would go off. Seeing the city’s skyscrapers at a distance, how they seemed to spring up all of a sudden, sandy and gray, amidst miles and miles of fields. Eating at a lunch counter that looked like it had tumbled directly out of the 1960s, where I spotted something on the menu I had never heard of – chicken-fried steak. Seeing commercials for unfamiliar stores on the hotel TV. Deciphering swing-y south/midwestern speech patterns while everyone we met tried to navigate all the missing consonants in our Boston accents. Calling in to a local radio show. Having dinner with other fans at a strip-mall Mexican restaurant that the Hanson boys had named as a favorite.
We went to Mayfest, a local street festival and concert, where Hanson had cut their musical teeth years before, when their ages were literally in the single digits. It was here that we tried a rare delicacy — Dip N Dots, a deconstructed ice cream in the form of rock-hard, dime-size pellets that made your teeth ache.
At one point, having run out of Hanson-related things to do, we told a local fan friend that we planned to checkout an all-ages goth club. I will never forget her shock and incredulity, her slow, drawling response. “Oooh kaaaaay, you do not wanna do that.”
This is how we ended up in her car on a weeknight, slow-driving past the split-level suburban house where the Hanson kids grew up. It seemed far too small for the raising of seven children, not much bigger than my own house. The windows were dark. A black SUV sat parked in the driveway, one that we speculated belonged to their personal assistant. The Hanson family, by then, had enough resources to move onward and upward, even though they were still based in Tulsa. (We knew details like this. Fans do.) You can predict how this ended for a carful of teenage girls and their muddled ideas of what it meant to be “inconspicuous” — the inevitable creak coming from somewhere near the house, us cutting the headlights. I somehow managed to pick up a stone from the driveway before we tore off, all of us shrieking to wake the dead. I still have it.
We were thrilled. We did not see much of anything. Hanson’s first album, after all, was called Middle of Nowhere. But we had come home with bragging rights – hard currency in fan circles. We had been. We had borne witness. To what? It wasn’t clear.
What I would give for a new Tulsa trip, one not quite so tied to my youthful obsession. The irony of this, of course, is that Hanson is more entrenched in Tulsa today than they were back then. They are local heroes now, baptized by nostalgia and a substantial discography that makes their early singles seem like exactly what they were – kid stuff. They are local music history, the inheritors of a legacy that goes back to the earliest days of country music, to Woody Guthrie, to Leon Bridges. When I first set foot in Tulsa, they were a mere trend.
In the ensuing years, Tulsa has become, and maybe always was, a city of Art Deco walking tours and acclaimed chefs, of the Bob Dylan Center Archive and a museum that commemorates the history of Black Wall Street. There is also the Philbrook Museum, with its gardens inspired by Villa Lante in Lazio, Italy. I’ve actually been to Italy and seen the original. I know it well enough to get the references. How things change.
Route 66, which bisects the city roughly east to west, is paid tribute in the form of neon signs, a visitor center, and small businesses that survive from that era. The city has even raised funds for a museum called OKPOP, which honors the rich musical and pop culture legacy of the city. I have heard that it will feature… guess who.
It is not all so uncomplicated, the trajectory not so straight. Hanson has never quite been able to live up to the hopeful ideal of our teenage imaginations – as if anything could. Taylor was married with a child by age 19. Between the three of them, they now have 15 children, which is lovely and utterly aligned with the traditions of their own family but is simply not a life I ever dreamed of for myself.
There is darker stuff, too. I unfollowed Isaac on Instagram years ago when he started reposting videos that I can only describe as “manosphere lite.” In 2020, fans found one of Zac’s social media accounts where he posted racist, sexist, and homophobic memes. That incident, rightfully, blew up to the degree that Zac offered an apology – an unprecedented mea culpa for a band with songs and albums that still cling, if somewhat more loosely, to a sense of nondenominational wholesomeness and righteousness.
Sitting in a place of not knowing, of unanswered curiosity, is uncomfortable, but sometimes the alternative is worse. Growing up will teach you that, too.
I know fans who quit the band for good after that. I have never quite been able to, mostly thanks to Taylor Hanson, who does not appear to share his brothers’ ideologies. He’s also spent the last decade founding and growing a charity organization that alleviates food insecurity, where else, in Tulsa. Even Taylor, though, has signaled that things are changing. In a recent post on Hanson’s web site, he alluded to tensions in the band, a move to Los Angeles. Suddenly the brothers are promoting solo projects — something that was never part of the Hanson equation.
A few days later, however, Taylor was on Instagram promoting a show at historic Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa — another place we neglected to visit on our trip. Another thing to add to a future itinerary, now that I know what I know.
The show is a tribute concert to Leon Bridges. Taylor is on the bill as a solo artist. I probably won’t be there this time, but you never know when you’ll have a good reason to go back to Tulsa.