Missouri to Kansas

The shower at the Munger Moss Motel made a sound like a jet engine was taking off. Not unlike the sound of the kerosene-fired car that an eager docent at the Transportation Museum had demonstrated to me (recorded on his phone, of course). The Munger Moss's painted bathtub reminded me of my childhood home, and the bathroom sink was the deepest I’d ever seen. I could easily refill my insulated water bottle in it.

 

There was a bowling alley, Starlite Lanes, across the road. We’d thought about having a game after supper, but it had started to rain really hard by then, and we were too fatigued! The rain would continue all night and throughout the next day’s drive, though fortunately with not nearly the same intensity.

 

Bowling alleys, functioning or “ghost,” are another thing you see regularly along Route 66. Bowling was the kind of activity that brought people together a lot in the days when this was the Main Street of America. In fact, twenty years ago Robert D. Putnam published a book called Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. People's disconnection from their neighbors surely fed divisions and is part of the reason many Americans don’t know or trust one another today.

The restored, though defunct, "Subway" west of the Frisco railroad underpass

For our evening meal, Mrs. L. had recommended Dowd’s Catfish down the road. We figured she would know, so a short time later we were dining on hush puppies (“what are these?” –T.), fried okra, and of course catfish. You could eat a lot of fried food on Route 66, and the main vegetable is coleslaw—when they aren’t selling macaroni as a salad or side dish. For lunch at the Town Tavern, I’d had a cheesy brat with tater tots. It was like a glorified school lunch. 

 

By contrast, in St. Louis we’d had a good Indian meal, although we had to take it back to the Airbnb and eat it there. Whereas in small-town Missouri masks were a thing of the past, in the big city they were still required in indoor businesses, and the Indian restaurant was still doing takeout only. It is probably worth mentioning here that if it weren’t for Indian Americans you’d rarely get a bed for the night along Route 66, never mind dinner. (A very high proportion of American motels are run by Gujarati families—although Mrs. L. was from Iowa.)

 

Maybe it’s worth talking about masks now, because while U.S. COVID-19 cases have fallen by half since September!, that doesn’t mean the pandemic is over. States and other jurisdictions have their own rules about these things, and because we are good guests, we follow mask requirements wherever they’re in place. If they’re not required, we wouldn’t wear them outdoors. Indoors, I expected to wear a face covering if the place was crowded or I was in close proximity to other people. In the event, I can’t think of one place that's been crowded on Route 66. For the most part, we have the road to ourselves.

 

As T. is hearing impaired, it makes a big difference in communication if someone is wearing a mask. Essentially, there isn’t any, unless the person lowers their mask to speak to her. It’s much more rewarding when she can have conversations with people we meet directly, rather than waiting for me to repeat something they said. (I’m ashamed to say I didn’t realize how little the world accommodates people with a disability until we were dealing with one.)

 

Back on the road in Missouri, I started seeing more colorful billboards: “Lowest cigarette taxes in America” (and you could tell). A Confederate flag, followed by a sign that read “Fascism=Privilege [sic] Oligarchy.” A Trump sign and another that said “Biden/Dump Trump/Vote Democrat/Support the Working Class/Support Education.”

Neon sign, Rest Haven, 1936 West Bypass route, Springfield

Bobby Troup sang about getting your kicks on Route 66. I was getting a kick out of the contrasts. In Springfield, the neon sign for Danny’s Service Center was actually lit up in the middle of the (rainy) day—neat! Then there was another defunct gas station, but this one had its pump made up into a free little library. Not a bad selection, either: one was The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine.

As we sailed past old barns, many buildings made of stone, in the Ozarks, T. said “In my head I’m singing ‘This Land Is Your Land.’ You can sing it if you want.” So I did. Woody Guthrie seems to me to encapsulate Route 66. He wrote from the 1930s to the ’60s, and his songs range from the tragedy of the Dust Bowl to America’s ultimate road trip (and most biting patriotic) anthem.

Restored Modern Cabins, Greystone Heights

Because Route 66 was America’s Main Street, it connects the main streets of small towns with those of major cities. To the interstate, a town like Bourbon or Lebanon is reduced to an exit, if it’s lucky. But on Route 66 we simply followed the main street all the way to Tulsa, Oklahoma. And here we come to another road, older even than the railroad, that Route 66 followed for a time. Segments from Rolla to Springfield, Missouri are the same path as the 1838 "Trail of Tears." 

 

This refers to the 1,200-mile march along which the U.S. Army forced tens of thousands of Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Creek people from their ancestral homelands to reservations in “Indian Territory,” at the cost of at least 4,000 lives. The Trail of Tears is the reason the Cherokee, who used to live where I was born and grew up in what is now Tennessee, reconstituted their Nation in Oklahoma. As a matter of fact, thirty-nine American Indian tribes now call Oklahoma home, and you can learn more about them at the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City. But that was still two states away.

Route 66 from Springfield to Carthage is a special drive away from Interstate 44. There was a slight detour due to a road closure at Halltown, but we were back on the Route by Paris Springs. Unfortunately, the late Gary and Lena Turner’s labor of love, the “Gay Parita” 1934 Sinclair Station, was closed. We had to admire this paean to Route 66 from the outside.

Winding west, we crossed a 1926 through-truss bridge over Johnson Creek to reach our first ghost town, Spencer. Luckily, someone has taken the trouble to restore Spencer and it’s quite picturesque.

We entered Carthage over the viaduct and were greeted by more public art.

The Boots Motel, a classic motor court, has also been lovingly restored.

 Carthage also has a drive-in movie theatre, and this one is still in operation.

Halloween movie--and more glass blocks!

If you’ve been following the song “Route 66,” you’ll know that we couldn’t leave Missouri without going through Joplin. Before leaving England, I’d been under the impression that I’d be offered pie in a diner every day of this trip. But Granny Shaffer’s in Joplin was actually my first slice of pie.

Original 66 goes through downtown Joplin.

We were ready for our third state. 

Another big Coke bottle, Joplin, Missouri

When people on the east or west coast use the insulting term “flyover country,” they mean Kansas.

There are only thirteen miles of Route 66 in Kansas, and it’s the only one of the eight states whose section of the Route was completely bypassed by the interstate. In other words, Kansas Highway 66 is still the main road across that corner of the state. The reason it only cuts across the southeastern corner, instead of crossing Kansas horizontally, is Cyrus Avery, whose home state was Oklahoma. Avery, sometimes claimed as the father of Route 66, was a member of the federal highway board and persuaded his colleagues that the road should have more mileage in his state. Indeed, there are more drivable miles of the Mother Road in Oklahoma than in any of the other states. But we didn’t want to rush through Kansas, so we made several stops.

Our first sign that we were in Kansas was the State Line Bar. That, and the strip of yellow brick that lay across the road.

I loved the yellow brick road, and you know why? There was no marker or sign indicating “Kansas” anywhere. Nothing saying “Look out for the yellow brick road!” as any other Route 66 state would have. No. Kansas just has the yellow brick road, because everyone knows its most famous story: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

And now we have to talk about L. Frank Baum. Because in addition to the Wizard of Oz stories, Baum also published The Saturday Pioneer (in South Dakota, of all places), and some of his editorials frankly called for a final solution to what might be called “the Indian problem”:

 

The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.

 

I quote this editorial not because I think we should stop reading books by L. Frank Baum. In my view, if we must shun artists with whom we lack moral synchronicity, there will be precious little art left to enjoy. What interests me is the clause “having wronged them for centuries.” Even as he ghoulishly proposes genocide, Baum is perfectly well aware that the way the native people have been dispossessed is wrong. 

 

We are often tempted to excuse people in the past on the grounds that they didn’t know any better. But Baum did. He could not imagine white settlers and American Indians coexisting peacefully in the same country, yet he knew where the blame for the problem lay. Nor was he alone. In 1881—ten years before Baum’s editorial quoted above—H.H., a pseudonym for Helen Hunt Jackson, wrote the first serious study of U.S. federal Indian policy. It was entitled A Century of Dishonor. Jackson wished for her book to be as illuminating as Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been about slavery, and she mailed a copy to every member of Congress with this provocative note:

Look upon your hands: they are stained with the blood of your relations.

 

Not knowing any better isn’t one of the deadly sins. Greed is.

Old Riverton Store (1925), still delightful even after the passing of Mr. Nelson in his hundredth year

To make the most of our few miles in Kansas, we took a couple of loops. One was over the 1923 Rainbow Bridge at Brush Creek. There were once three “Marsh Arch” bridges just on the Kansas section of U.S. 66, but this is the only one that remains.

And then there was a short stretch on the south side of Baxter Springs, that loops behind a shopping center. It was so short that we missed our turn, so T. doubled back. And I’m glad she did, because on that quiet road, which we had all to ourselves, a deer walked right out in front of us. It stopped and looked at us, as deer are wont to do, and we were going slowly so we just stopped and looked back.

 

Some of our best pictures are the ones we didn’t take with a camera.