More Oklahoma

Red Fork. What became the San Francisco Railway ran first to Sapulpa and later to Oklahoma City.

 

The good side of Route 66 is that it’s little used and therefore, very clean. We rarely saw litter. On the other hand, if you’re not careful, you can end up with a lot of waste, Styrofoam, and other throwbacks to a time when little attention was paid to the environment. Here are a few hints to mitigate the messiness of Route 66: take a reusable water bottle (I advise this anywhere in the world). Tap water in the U.S. is drinkable; there is no reason to buy water in plastic bottles. Some people don’t like the taste of water but if you can’t get it filtered, there are always lemonade or similar packets you can mix with it. Motels have ice machines to keep things cool. 

 

Not every place has recycling so ideally, take any cans, bottles, etc. along in a separate bag until you get to a place that does recycle. I had the most success at the national parks, which were actually side trips, but some Airbnbs had recycling too. Like everything else in America, it depends on the locality or state. On a car trip, you can spread out easily and not worry about having extra stuff like this—only when it’s time to pack to go home! But that was still two weeks away.

 

West of Tulsa, we had an opportunity to take a road even less traveled. This remnant of the Ozark Trail, which became part of Route 66’s original alignment, includes a brick-decked iron bridge (1925) over Rock Creek.

Defunct drive-in theatre, Ozark Trail

Bristow was a Creek trading post that later became a railroad town. We hadn’t really had breakfast so when we got to Bristow, I was glad to see the Donut Palace, “where the customer is king.” The young man at the counter asked where we were from and said he had cousins in England. There were two women working in the back, and the one who definitely wasn’t his mother said to me, “This family are the doughnut whisperers.” Mom shouted excitedly from the kitchen in another language. We guessed that they were Laotian because we remember the heritage of French baking in Laos, and these were about the lightest, fluffiest doughnuts I ever remember eating.

I continued to collect amusing place names (Little Polecat Creek), along with museums we weren’t visiting. I’d never realized how many little towns, and it seems most of the towns on Route 66, have some museum or other. We could not go into even every Route 66 museum, still less all the other museums, but each and every one must have a town that’s proud of it. Here are just a few museums we didn’t stop at—and I promise I am not making any of these up: grain elevator, vacuum cleaner, barbed wire, rattlesnake, and cookie cutter!

 

We did take the loop through downtown Depew, which was on Route 66 only from 1926 to 1928. Believe it or not, it was a busy city then, and Route 66 was its first paved road. Like so many other places in America, it was devastated by the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Depew

Stroud had two barber shops on the same street, which seemed impressive given the size of the downtown. Chandler had the Lincoln Motel from 1939, as well as a Route 66 interpretive center in the 1937 Armory, built by the Works Progress Administration. WPA projects employed over eight million people during the nadir of the Depression. 

Detail, Chandler Armory

They’re lovely structures, and we saw almost as many of them on our trip as buildings on the National Register of Historic Places. For example, the Arcadia loop of vintage Route 66 that preserves 1928 Portland concrete, where reportedly Paul McCartney once stopped for directions.

Arcadia also has the Round Barn, built by William H. Odor to prove it could be done.

Only a hundred-mile trip had brought us to our second of three state capitals on Route 66: Oklahoma City. Oklahoma City is a great example of the multiple conflicting stories of America. After indigenous peoples were forcibly relocated here to “Indian Territory,” agricultural techniques were developed that made this land valuable to the U.S. government after all. So it was opened up in 1887 to white settlement, and the “land rush” ensued. This stampede of pioneer spirit, as it appeared to some, also meant a second dispossession of the indigenous tribes. What had been their reservations would soon become the State of Oklahoma, and their way of life was largely lost to assimilation.

 

We took the 1926-54 alignment of Route 66 on Lincoln Boulevard, so that we could take in the approach view of the Capitol.

Unlike Tulsa, OKC was a city I’d been to before, on two family trips in 1987 and ’97. On that first trip, we’d visited the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. It’s now called the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, and this was one T. wanted to visit. I was curious to see what differences there now were in the presentation.

 

The young woman who sold us our tickets asked where we were from. “I love your accent” is what Americans usually say to T., but this gal said she’d done graduate work in Putney, a short distance from where we live! 

This imposing [copy of] a sculpture by James Earle Fraser is supposed to depict a weary American Indian warrior at the end of the struggle for the west. I remember this being the centerpiece of the main hall in 1987 too, but I was interested now to read some commentary on it from a Cherokee scholar. Dr. R. David Edmunds pointed out that the west was not straightforwardly won or lost, and that even after all the history of indigenous people who were not even considered U.S. citizens until 1924, “modern warriors” have been overrepresented serving in America’s wars.

The End of the Trail

It’s an enormous museum and we didn’t see all of it, but I very much liked their approach of adding to, rather than removing, items in their collection. Once again, we were seeing more than one American story from more than one point of view.

Father and Daughter at the Crow Fair, Bettina Steinke, 1978

On my family’s 1997 trip, we visited the site of the Alfred P. Murrah federal office building. Just two years previously, it had been destroyed in a terrorist attack. Unlike the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, this attack was by a white American, in fact a veteran of the U.S. armed forces; and at the time, this was an unprecedentedly deadly terrorist attack in America, killing 168 men, women, and children. 

The remaining walls of the Alfred P. Murrah building

When we saw the site in ’97, it was just surrounded by a chain link fence, with what seemed like thousands of note cards, flowers, and teddy bears. Today, the Oklahoma City memorial is beautifully designed, with a museum (of course) and chairs representing every person who lost their life.

Many traces of Route 66 through OKC have disappeared, even in the past few years. T. did spot this giant milk bottle, as big as the building it adorns on Classen Boulevard. This was a grocery store dating from 1930 and, although the once successful business is long gone, the milk bottle remains.

In Bethany, the Lake Overholser Bridge has not only been restored, but opened to traffic. Until the 1950s and the four-lane, this was a critical crossing on Route 66.

We heard church bells ringing when we stopped inYukon, Oklahoma, reminding us it was Sunday. Yukon is proud of its heritage, including its huge grain elevator and Chisholm Trail mural. The Chisholm Trail was the cattle-drive trail between ranches in Texas and the railroad in Kansas.

Note neon sign

Rare Standard Gasoline sign, Yukon

El Reno was a town made by the railroad and Route 66. Unfortunately, the railroad went bust in 1980. The current route through El Reno passes a rare twin-engine bomber from World War II.

The Chisholm Trail is also commemorated in Geary. The Arapaho and Cheyenne lived here before the land rush, and not much land was grabbed in Geary due to a horrific drought that lasted until 1896. We took the pre-1933 alignment of Route 66 north through Calumet to reach Geary.

Mural, Geary

From there, the pre-’33 route continues on dirt. 

Although we normally avoided dead ends and backtracking, we made an exception to reach the site of the 1921 Key Suspension Bridge which once reached Bridgeport. All that remains now are the anchor piers.

The “temp route” (1932!) led us back to paved, post-’33 Route 66. And that took us over this ¾-mile bridge across the South Canadian River. It gives an optical illusion because from the beginning, you can’t see the end of it. It uses thirty-eight small or “pony” trusses, and is called the Pony Bridge.

Jerry McClanahan enthuses that the road between El Reno and Hydro, dating from the 1930s, is one of the best drives on all of Route 66. Jessica Dunham urges drivers to cross the 1933 Pony Bridge (actually the William H. Murray Bridge) while we still can, because like other historic bridges on Route 66, it’s in danger of destruction. It’s one of many spots on our journey that featured in the film of The Grapes of Wrath.

 

We detoured just north of Route 66 to visit the town of Hydro, specifically the site of Lucille’s Service Station. There’s a modern roadhouse named after Lucille Hamons in town, and its owners have kept the original Lucille’s, now closed, preserved. She ran this station from 1941 until her passing in 2000, more out of love than for profit, which earned her the nickname “Mother of the Mother Road.”

Route 66 is not like driving from point A to point B. You’re always looking for something interesting. We didn’t always find it, but we were always looking for it. Amidst the farming towns and ghost towns we passed a gated community with huge houses, and T. sniffed, “They’re no better than they ought to be.” As we took the last bit of “local traffic” 66 to Clinton, Oklahoma, a tree drooping into our path almost completely blocked the way. T. negotiated around it, and the red wall of earth and rocks struck me as brilliantly Oklahoma. “We should have taken a picture really,” T. said.

 

Clinton, our stop for that night, is home to McLain Rogers Park, another project of the Works Progress Administration. That meant stone structures and another Art Deco neon sign.

Clinton also has the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum, and this, we’d been advised, was a must-see. There were many pictures of places we’d seen or were going to visit, objects of interest, and background information on each decade of Route 66. I knew that Dwight Eisenhower was the president whose interstate highway project had been the downfall of Route 66, but I hadn’t realized that he got the idea from the German Autobahn. Apparently, while leading Allied troops in the defeat of Nazi Germany, Eisenhower was simultaneously enamored of this engineering project, and thought the U.S. should have a more efficient system of highways. Fascinating.

 

We ate at a Chinese restaurant with just us and some Mexican families. In Oklahoma City, we’d stayed next door to the Woodridge Restaurant, where staff were Mexican, but not the food. Some of the best fried chicken of my life for dinner (we split the meal so we’d have room for cobbler), and we came back the next morning for breakfast. I’d enjoyed the biscuits and gravy, but I was glad to see some vegetables at Clinton’s Chinese Buffet. T. kept ordering salad but could not get used to the concept that in America, salad is served first, rather than as an accompaniment to the meal.

 

There was also a truck full of cattle parked outside our other choice, the Mexican restaurant. “You don’t get that in the U.K.,” as Alan used to say.