Around 7 a.m., Saturday, in a lot beside the shuttered Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, a strange set of cars and trucks began to gather. Three Model As. A couple of ’60 convertibles. A 1964 Chevrolet Impala station wagon. Also, a big bull on trailer wheels.
“Am I in the right place?” asked a man in one of the Model As.
“Going to Chicago?” asked a guy in a white Denali.
“I wish I could do the whole thing,” said Joe Hernandez of Pasadena, wistfully standing by.
This was the starting line for roughly 70 drivers who gathered to celebrate the centennial of Route 66 with a 2,448-mile, 20-day caravan to Chicago. Most had come from outside California to share an adventure with fellow “roadies” and boost awareness of the classic scenery and independent businesses along the eight-state route.
But soaring gas prices and hesitant international travelers have added uncertainty to a trip that was always going to be a logistical challenge. Day 1 alone might terrify an L.A. commuter: From the Pacific to Pasadena by surface streets, including miles on Santa Monica and Colorado boulevards.
“I don’t know how it’s all going to happen,” confessed Gary Daggett, president of the Old Route 66 Assn. of Texas. But he and his wife, Stephanie Daggett, have more than a little Route 66 experience to draw upon.
“This is our 30th trip over 20 years,” Daggett said. “You can’t see everything. There’s so much… You start meeting the people, you get hooked on the people.”
Shortly before their 8:30 departure time, organizer Rhys Martin called drivers together.
“Leaving here is going to be a little complicated,” he said.
Martin, who is part of the Route 66 Road Ahead Partnership, is president of the Oklahoma Route 66 Assn., and serves as manager of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Preserve Route 66 initiative. For the journey, he is driving a ’64 Chevy Impala station wagon with a GPS unit inside so that armchair travelers can follow his journeyon the web.
“It’s going to be impossible to keep everybody together,” he said during preparations. “We’re encouraging people to spread out and support independent businesses rather than all going to one place and demolishing the kitchen.”
In song and literature, the route is celebrated as an east-to-west journey. This caravan, running in the opposite direction, will travel from California through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri to Illinois.
From Santa Monica, the Day 1 schedule took drivers to Beverly Hills City Hall, Grand Central Market downtown for lunch, the Chicken Boy statue and Galco’s Soda Pop Stop in Highland Park, then an overnight in Pasadena.
Day 2 takes the group from Pasadena to Barstow. Day 3, from Barstow to Needles. On June 25, the caravan is due to arrive in downtown Chicago.
The loose procession was led by a core group of 15 cars, including representatives of all eight states on the route. Since anyone can join or leave the caravan at any time, the number of vehicles will vary by the hour.
Through the decades, the road has grown from an American artifact into a global symbol of small-town Americana. Many merchants, restaurateurs and hoteliers along 66 now say that their summer customers are mostly travelers from abroad, especially Europe. One of the caravan’s drivers, in a rented pickup truck, was Dries Bessels, co-founder of the Dutch Route 66 Assn.
Though the Model As will surely raise eyebrows on the road, the caravan’s most startling element is the fiberglass bull representing the Amarillo-based Big Texan Steak Ranch restaurant, one of the event’s sponsors.
“It’s the same one my dad brought home in ’71. His name is Big Moo,” said Danny Lee, who co-owns the restaurant with his brother, Bobby Lee. “He’s 12 and a half feet high. About 500 pounds. It’s all fiberglass.”
In 21 cities along the drive, the Big Texan team aims to stage nightly steak-eating contests, giving free dinners to anyone who can eat 72 ounces of steak, a baked potato, three shrimp, a side salad and a roll in 60 minutes.
The caravan’s first challenge came at the Santa Monica Pier, where there was no room for the cars due to a construction project, World Cup preparations and a Children’s Hospital fundraiser. Instead, the caravan gathered by the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Drivers strolled over the pier for a photo op, then returned to their cars.
“Herding cats,” said George Kulakowski of Huntington Beach, at the wheel of a 1931 Ford Model A Panel Delivery truck.
Another challenge awaited in West Hollywood, where Santa Monica Boulevard (a.k.a. Route 66) was busy with crowds for the city’s WeHo Pride Street Fair. By plans laid ahead of time, most caravan vehicles detoured around the party while select caravan cars followed a police escort through the action.
This way, Martin said, “another community along Route 66 gets to share its identity with the community at large.”
By 11:15 a.m., Martin’s car had reached Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake. Meanwhile, assorted other parades and caravans are traveling Route 66 in other states this year, most of them concentrate on short segments.
By 12:45 p.m., caravaners had met the mayor of Beverly Hills and rolled through West Hollywood’s Pride festivities, arriving at Grand Central Market, running slightly ahead of time.
On May 30, some 3,596 classic cars joined a “Capital Cruise”on Route 66 in Tulsa, becoming a Guinness Book of World Records holder for the largest parade of classic cars, drawing an estimated 100,000 spectators and overwhelming local traffic.
In Arizona, the Williams Historic Route 66 Car Show was set for June 5-6. In Texas, the Amarillo-based Texas Route 66 Festival is running June 4-13.
In those states and beyond, the caravan from Santa Monica will find hotels and motels in every kind of condition, vintage neon, road food, blue states, red states and purple states.
As a package of Times stories described in May, some landmarks date to the highway’s days as a scene of Depression desperation in the 1930s, others to its giddy postwar years in the late 1940s and ‘50s.
Route 66 was created in 1926 as a highway stitching together hundreds of local roads. Nicknamed “the Main Street of America” by its boosters and “the Mother Road” by John Steinbeck in “The Grapes of Wrath,” the highway inspired Bobby Troup’s song “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” in 1946.
But economic life along Route 66 has been precarious since the late 1960s, when interstate highways and chain hotels began stealing traffic away from the older, slower road. After Route 66 was decommissioned as a highway in 1985, about 85% of the old route remained in use, often as small-town thoroughfares, country highways and frontage roads alongside Interstate 40.
Efforts to save and rebuild the route as a historic resource began in the late 1980s and gained ground after the 2006 release of the Pixar/Disney animated features “Cars,” which tells the story of the highway’s rise and fall. In small towns like Tucumcari, N.M., and Seligman, Ariz., the highway remains central to local identity and economy.
This year’s centennial improvements along the route “are things that are going to go into the future,” Martin said. “The real impact is going to be next year and the years after.”
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