Route 66: The Highway and Its People [Paperback]

Quinta Scott (Author), Susan Croce Kelly (Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 1990

U.S. Highway 66 was always different from other roads. During the decades it served American travelers, Route 66 became the subject of a world-famous novel, an Oscar-winning film, a hit song, and a long running television program. The 2,000 mile concrete slab also became a seven-year obsession for Susan Croce Kelly and Quinta Scott. They traveled Route 66, photographing buildings, knocking on doors, and interviewing the people who had built the buildings and run the businesses along the highway. Drawing on the oral tradition of those rural Americans who populated the edge of old Route 66, Scott and Kelly have pieced together the story of a highway that was conceived in Tulsa, Oklahoma; linked Chicago to Los Angeles; and played a role in the great social changes of the early twentieth century.

Using the words of the people themselves and documents they left behind, Kelly describes the life changes of Route 66 from the dirt-and-gravel days until the time when new technology and different life-styles decreed that it be abandoned to the small towns it had nurtured over the course of thirty years.

Scott's photographic essay shows the faces of those 66 people and gives a feeling of what can be seen along the old highway today, from the seminal highway architecture to the grainfields of the Illinois prairie, the windbent trees of western Oklahoma, the emptiness of New Mexico, and the bustling pier where the highway ends on the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

Route 66 uses oral history and photography as the basis for a human study of this country's most famous road. Historic times, dates, places, and events are described in the words of men and women who were there: driving the highway, cooking hamburgers, creating pottery, and pumping gas. As much as the concrete, gravel, and tar spread in a sweeping arc from Chicago to Santa Monica, those people are Route 66. Their stories and portraits are the biography of the highway.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Quinta Scott and Susan Croce Kelly pay homage to Route 66, the "great diagonal highway," in images and words that sharply evoke the past and flesh out the legend the highway has become. The two-lane blacktop--traveled in John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Bobby Troup's ever-popular postwar jazz tune, and a filmed-on-location television series of the '60s--is recalled in duotones of motels, cafes, gas stations, and trading posts, along with many of their owners. Interviews with the proprietors and the travelers they served, along with people like sign painter Jack Fuss and cave promoter Lyman Riley, provide much of the color.

From Library Journal

Route 66the late, lamented American Main Street that ran from Chicago to the Pacificis here given life once again. Those who served its travelers for nearly 50 years (selling Indian artifacts, "hamburgs," and chunks of petrified wood, or renting rooms, patching tires, and digging the wounded out of head-on collisions) offer memories both enthusiastic and touching. Now bypassed by impersonal interstate highways, the civilization depicted in the book's numerous photographs is faded and crumbling. An enjoyable and rewarding book on a uniquely important road that turned the heat up on the American melting pot. Timothy L. Zindel, Hastings Coll. of the Law, San Francisco
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press (September 15, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0806122919
• ISBN-13: 978-0806122915
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 8.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #776,933 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am the photographer/author of The Mississippi: A Visual Biography (University of Missouri Press, 2010) and of Along Route 66 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), the photographer of The Eads Bridge(University of Missouri Press, 1979 and the Missouri Historical Society, 1999)and Route 66: The Highway and Its People(University of Oklahoma Press, 1989).

I have received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. I exhibit nationally. Numerous corporate and museum collections hold my work.

I blog at quintascott.wordpress.com and at alongroute66.wordpress.com. Visit my websites: quintascott.com, alongroute66.com, MississippiRiverPhotographs.com (under construction), and if you live in the St. Louis Area, twotanktours.com for interesting short trips along the Mississippi and the American Bottom.

I live in Waterloo, Illinois, close to the banks of the Mississippi, not far from the Ozark Hills, and in the midst of Illinois wheat filelds.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Photograpic view of the social life along old 66, March 30, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Route 66: The Highway and Its People (Paperback)

This books contains all that is needed to make the reader -or viewer- want to travel the road, even just by looking at the pictures. It isn't called a photographic essay for nothing. The text is more social oriented and is probably one way to look at the 20th century and its cultural heritage along Historic Route 66. Those readers going travel old 66 might be a little bit disappointed that it does not give many clues to find the locations easily. This is a book about an icon on its own terms.

A must in your library if you're interested in Route 66.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Book on Route 66 in Print, July 28, 2004

By 

A Central Illinoisian in Chicago (USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Route 66: The Highway and Its People (Paperback)

All too many Route 66 books focus on the Kitsch and the primary colors one could see on the Road, and are written in a jokey, 'weren't people in the old days a hoot' style that wears thin in a few pages.

This book by contrast, takes a more serious look at the Mother Road. The photos are by turns otherworldy and 'down home' and the writing is crisp, factual and engaging. I found out more than I ever expected about the Road, its rise and fall, and the people on the road and in the towns along its path.

It's reminiscent in many ways of some of Studs Turkel's oral histories, as the people 'of and on' the road tell their stories in first person, but here you also have the advantage of the journalistic and historical perspective the writer offers, and the undeniable impact of the photos, which tell stories that mere words cannot.

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Some quotes from press reviews of the book include:

Wall Street Journal
'...while the new interstates are faster and safer, it is impossible not to miss old Route 66. Fortunately, the words and pictures of this delightful book preserve the memories of a road that ran through everyone's life.'

Library Journal
'Route 66-the late, lamented American Main Street that ran from Chicago to the Pacific-is here given life once again. Those who served its travelers for nearly 50 years (selling Indian artifacts, 'hamburgs,' and chunks of petrified wood, or renting rooms, patching tires, and digging the wounded out of head-on collisions) offer memories both enthusiastic and touching. . .
An enjoyable and rewarding book on a uniquely important road that turned the heat up on the American melting pot.'

Arizona Highways
'Susan Croce Kelly and Quinta Scott spent seven years traveling the route from end to end, interviewing and photographing the people and structures that gave old 66 its flavor. The text is carefully researched and well written, and the 93 photographs (appropriately, black and white) provide convincing images of ordinary people and places lacking the glamour of those at either end of the 2,200-mile-long line.'

Booklist
'The evocative photographs and interviews pay tribute to thousands of small businesses and the people who fueled, sheltered, and entertained millions of travelers. This is a fascinating study of individual entrepreneurs and the growth of advertising, as well as a paean to a vanished way of life.'

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I recommend this book to anyone interested in histories of the 20th century, the impact of the automobile in American life, and to anyone who appreciates fine photography.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars About the people on 66, April 22, 2000

By 

Cheryl Nowka - See all my reviews

This review is from: Route 66: The Highway and Its People (Paperback)

I really enjoyed this book as it was one of my fisrt to purchase about Route 66. This book didn't cover only the road but also took you from town to town and introduced you to the People. Great photography added to the experience. This is one book I read over and over.