Route 66: The First 100 Years
By By Jim Ross and Shellee Graham
St. Louis: Reedy Press, 2025, 2025
Hardcover, 208 pages, $42
Reviewed by Paul Sherman
Is Route 66 cool again?
The winding Chicago-to-Santa-Monica asphalt passage that brought so many Americans west and fueled so much midcentury pop culture, including a homonymous popular song and TV series, has enjoyed numerous post-heyday stages.
“America’s Main Street” has moved through replacement by wider, straighter Interstate highways in the 1960s and 1970s; decertification by state and federal highway authorities; decay and disregard; rediscovery and a push for preservation in the 1990s and 2000s; and the ho-hum quality that eventually set in, when an imitation Route 66 shield sign in a retro restaurant or other business became as clichéd as airbrushed illustrations of Elvis, Marilyn, or James Dean.
Jim Ross and Shellee Graham’s Route 66: The First 100 Years, an ambitious and well-assembled coffee table book published last year in advance of Route 66’s 2026 centennial, is a bid for renewed relevance, for itself and for its subject. The bid is partially successful, sometimes more for Route 66 itself than for its own content.
In a sense, this new book aims to be a successor to Michael Wallis’s influential Route 66: The Mother Road, a previous coffee-table book that refocused attention on the highway during the 1990s. Like its predecessor, there are dozens of great photos to enjoy, many taken by the authors, who have a good eye. The layout also shows off these images to great advantage.
But the Ross/Graham and Wallis books have more text and historical detail than your average coffee table book. They’re not just eye candy. Much of the difference between them lies in the 35 years that have elapsed since the release of Wallis’s book. Three+ decades after Wallis, there are fewer original Route 66 resources (people, buildings, businesses) for historians to work with, which adds to the challenge of relating the route’s history in a fresh way. For instance, while readers get an interview with musician-composer Bobby Troup about the creation of his song, “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” from Wallis, Ross and Graham rely on secondary sources while covering the song that captured the road’s appeal so well, since Troup died in 1999.
That’s not to say Route 66: The First 100 Years fails to sometimes find creative ways to tell its story. One of my favorite sections includes 11 postcards of attractions — from Arizona’s Painted Desert to St. Louis’ Hotel Jefferson. The focus here is not just the views on the front of the cards. It’s also the messages on the back. All these cards, mailed between 1929 and 1962, have interesting tales of motor lodges, Indian pottery, roadside mishaps, and the like.
The new book also occasionally shines a light on historically underrepresented aspects of Route 66. This includes chapters on Native Americans and women, as well as a section on the Negro Travelers’ Green Book and, more specifically, Wellston, Oklahoma’s Black-owned Threatt Filling Station. Threatt Filling Station operated through 1974 and has more recently been restored in hopes of opening as an interpretive center this year.
The writing on the Green Book is generic (more about that later), and the authors fail to cite historic Route 66 locations listed in the book (the National Park Service lists several dozen online). But the Threatt Filling Station and other preservation efforts of the last three decades are where Route 66: The First 100 Years best adds to its subject’s narrative. Still, there is a struggle here for text that goes beyond the superficial. Route 66: The First 100 Years is only lightly sourced – there are no footnotes (well, two over 200 oversized pages), the bibliography is slim, and rarely are the words “according to” encountered. Sometimes the historical details feel as if they could have been taken from websites or other secondary sources on the Internet. Because it doesn’t happen all that often, instances in which the authors truly engage with sources— for instance, a section about Two Guns, Arizona, in which they try to sort out newspaper accounts of various crimes – or draw from their own experience – another section about the restoration of the Painted Desert Trading Post — are fairly obvious. Other sections suffer in comparison.
At its worst, the writing here can be generic (the aforementioned Green Book section, among others) or shallow. One example of the latter concerns a woman for whom the authors found a cancelled 1956 paycheck in a long-closed Texas cafe and motel. Her occupation is unknown. After pulling up birth, marriage, and death records for the payee, the authors somehow declare “[S]he embodied the spirit of the times, when folks earned their way without complaint and were thankful for what they had.” Somehow, I don’t think that complaining was invented after the 1950s and that this mysterious woman and others who toiled on Route 66 were not immune to discontent. It’s Route 66, not the Yellow Brick Road.
Similar oversimplification of American society comes in an assessment of the TV series Route 66, which debuted in 1960, and its two protagonists: “The virtuous tone set for the new decade by TV’s Tod and Buz served as a last hurrah for sustaining wholesome values, which were soon derailed by acute shifts in culture and politics.” Not only is this a wrongheaded take on the TV series — as in its contemporary, The Fugitive, the America of Route 66’s wandering characters is riddled with injustices — it also suggests that the morality of the 1960s establishment was somehow superior to that of the 1960s antiestablishment (it wasn’t). And this take is at odds with the complexities of Route 66, the book sometimes details.
For a book that at least pays lip service to Blacks’ struggles to enjoy “The Mother Road,” includes a chapter called “Villains and Victims” and a spread on car crashes, and digs into the sordid history of St. Louis’ Coral Court Motel, such shallow sentiments ring false. While we can all find something to love in Route 66’s history — be it architecture, mom-and-pop businesses, or colorful ephemera — we’re best off without the “good old days” airbrushing. Especially if you want to get beyond the ho-hum.
Paul Sherman once slept in a wigwam on Route 66.
This book review originally appeared in the (enter journal content block) The SCA Journal is a semi-annual publication and a member benefit of the Society for Commercial Archeology.
More Book Reviews