The Rock Cafe is Rocks Back to Life

It’s been a popular Route 66 stop since 1939 and a year after fire gutted everything but its stone walls, The Rock Café in Stroud Oklahoma has reopened. The café was named for its walls made of rock removed to build Route 66 between Oklahoma City and Tulsa.
Owner Dawn Welch has kept busy cleaning up the restaurant, considering her own cooking TV show and writing a cookbook called Dollars to Donuts.
More about the Rock Café on OldRoutes.com
And other Links
Story about reopening with video from NewsOK.com
Rock Cafe's Blog
Owner Looks Back on year from news9.com.
Buy Dawn Welch's book, Dollars to Donuts.


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MERRY CHRISTMAS from OldRoutes.com

and a Happy and Safe New Year of enjoying Old Routes!

Tucumcari via France

The Route 66 song got its kicks while skipping right by Tucumcari, New Mexico. I guess Bobby Troup couldn’t get every Route 66 city in his song. Even so, Tucumcari, New Mexico was an oasis for US 66 travelers near the Texas-New Mexico border.
In 1901 the railroad came and Tucumcari was born. In 1926 the road in and out of town was numbered US 66.
The city has some of the more famous hotel signs along old 66. The neon 1939 Blue Swallow Motel is a favorite with “refrigerated air.” The artistic rendition of Route 66 and the tailfin-lights of a car is certainly worth seeing as is the historic train station. You can click on the pictures for a bigger view.
Like most old routes cities, they were bypassed by a newer highway. France 24 TV News recently did a story on the downturn of the Tucumcari’s economy and you can see it here. It’s interesting to see the European view on 66’s demise. If you didn’t know better, the story could make you think that 66 was bypassed last month.
Tucumcari was named for Tucumcari Mountain to the southeast of town. This mountain was the inspiration for Radiator Springs Mountain in the movie, “Cars”. You may have seen real life pictures of the area if you watched the TV show, “Rawhide”. The star of Rawhide, Clint Eastwood, returned to film a scene for the movie, “For a Few Dollars More”.
It’s easy to find old 66 here as they have renamed it Route 66 Boulevard.

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Links
City of Tucumcari
Tucumcari in song, movies and TV
Tucumcari Chamber of Commerce site with more visitor information

On the Move should be on your bookshelf

If you removed all the text from On the Move, the photos and illustrations could stand alone to make this an excellent book. The book is a cooperation of National Geographic and the Smithsonian Institution and it shows. The book is filled with clear jump-off-the-page pictures dating back to the late 1800’s. I’m so used to thinking of the past in monochrome black and white or at the best brownish sepia. This makes the color from the past so bright with new photos of old transportation equipment from the Smithsonian’s collection. I never imagined the color of the past in the rich red gas pump, the glorious green locomotive, or the 40’s golden yellow Dodge school bus.

On the Move gives a great overview of not only facts and figures of transportation, but societal changes that were part of it. Thankfully, it’s getting harder to imagine a time when there was a need for “The Negro Motorist Green-Book” to find a place where they could buy gasoline or get a meal or warm bed for the night. Suburbia grew first from mass transit and then from speedy travel on high speed non-stop freeways. A new culture was built around the car, while other urban cultures were split in two by Interstate highways.

For the lover of all roads or the Road Geek like me, the photos of road building, old roads, gas stations and even advertising to take me back to a time. This was a time before I was born, when modern transportation and travel was like an infant with so much to grow and so much to create.

This book is partly based on the Smithsonian’s exhibit “America on the Move” which just reopened in Washington, DC. The History Channel also produced a DVD also called On the Move 1876-2000.







Copyright 2008 All the World Travel and oldroutes.com

RG's New Ford Sport Coupe

When the Old Routes were first built, it could be a rough route… mud, potholes, washboard, sand… cows, fences, angry horsemen, even gates to open. The cars weren’t much better, especially by today’s standards.

In our day of hot or cold beverage holders, entertainment systems we can talk to and GPS to guide us to the nearest Starbucks with a drive thru… it is very hard to picture what is was like to take a road trip in the early 20th century.

This picture might help. Late May 1930 R.G. Thompson had had enough of that ole Hudson Brougham. It was a pretty warm day, but he left his tie and coat on hoping the car salesman wouldn’t try to take advantage of him. He headed out from the Stock Exchange Building up 4th Avenue and uptown on Westlake to the William O McKay dealer. The Depression was tough and Eddie Pinkman was eager to make a sale. Too bad R.G. couldn’t get more in trade for the Hudson, but the sparking clean rust free Ford black paint clinched the deal. The Radiator cap added real style, too. Eddie didn’t get much commission for the sale. After all, he sold a new Ford Sport Coupe for only $679.25, but he was happy for the sale and happy to be working. As he headed back in the office, Eddie looked down Mercer Street at the closed Ford Assembly Plant wondering if it would ever open again.

Even though R.G. had to pay for the freight, oil and a tank of gas, he had a few dollars left for a couple of options.
-Spare Tire; at least it wasn’t one of those mini spares! You can’t have a spare without covering it and locking it up. Wise decision R.G!
-Bumpers, real steel bumpers, not those fiber-plastic bumpers we use now. Bumpers were protection for the car, and helpful to push someone out of the very common mud hole.

It was only a year into the depression, so he was conservative in going for solid steel wheels rather than those fancy spoke wheels. The seemingly unending Seattle drizzle and the unpaved roads keep the wheels covered in mud anyway. The temperatures are mild enough to go without side windows as well; after all, that’s what we have coats and hats for.

R.G. enjoyed his Ford for many years, driving up and down Pacific Highway US 99. Many times work took him to Spokane on the Sunset Highway US 10. On those hot summer days he watched that shiny radiator cap carefully for overheating. The cap would too often disappear in a cloud of steam as he headed up the steep hairpin turns of Snoqualmie Pass. Thankfully, if he had real mechanical trouble, he belonged to the Automobile Club of Washington (AAA). Since 1926 they had contracts with “reputable garages” to offer emergency road service for members.

A few years later, R.G. was one of the early managers for Centennial Flour Mills, which is still a major food company, based in Seattle. Besides being a far distant cousin, R.G. hired my mother-in-law as his secretary. Seattle was a much smaller town back then.

Some of this story is true, some is daydreaming. That’s the best way to drive an Old Route, enjoying what you see and also what is written between the double yellow lines.












Copyright 2008 Dan Smith

What the Sam Hill...?

There was a man named Sam Hill who believed in the future of good roads. You may have heard that exclamation of, “What in the Sam Hill…?” That was considered a polite substitute for using the word, “hell”, and came along before this Sam Hill was born.

Hill was a mover and shaker of the early 20th century, making millions in railroads. He knew royalty and other world leaders and traveled the world to learn about how to make good roads… but a darker side was that his home life was not idyllic.

Some of the projects that Sam Hill was behind include:
- The Pacific Highway from Canada to Mexico (US 99 and US 101)
- The Peace Arch on the US and Canadian Border
- Maryhill Museum
- Attempting to start a Quaker community called Maryhill
- Running a phone company in Portland, Oregon
- A copy of Stonehenge as a Memorial to Klickitat county soldiers who had died in World War I
- The Columbia River Highway (US 30)
- The first paved road in Washington State.

He was such a good roads advocate, the US 97 Columbia River Bridge was named after him. The bridge is within sight of Maryhill and the Stonehenge Memorial.

There’s too much of Sam Hill to put in one blog, so I’ll be writing more about Sam Hill and his love of roads, later.

Can't wait for the next Sam Hill blog? Read your own Sam Hill book. The Prince of Castle Nowhere or Sam Hill's Peace Arch.

Links
- Maryhill Museum on Sam Hill
- Sam Hill from HistoryLink.org
- Where the Sam Hill is Maryhill?

Roadsters, Rumbleseats and Country Drives - Review

The video of Roadsters, Rumbleseats and Country Drives gives a nostalgic look at the growth of the automobile from its beginnings and how the car changed our culture. It has lots of sharp video of restored automobiles on the road and well as excellent archival movies and stills from the early 20th century. While this video has a happy “Good Ole Days” focus on the old cars and the driver’s memories, it also has a quick history of the first of the country’s first roads. Highways highlighted include the pre-automobile National Road. Also called the Cumberland Road, it was begun long before the car in 1811 and was also the first road to break though the Appalachian Mountains. The Lincoln Highway and Route 66 are also given their due as part of America’s love of their cars and the nostalgia of road trip.

The video is very well produced, not amateurish. The hard core road geek will know most of the road trivia presented, but it's so well produced, it is easily enjoyed.

Get this video here.

More web information on the National Road

When the National Road was numbered it became US 40, read more at Route40.net.
The Lincoln Highway book
A Guide to the National Road

Help preserve and find out more about the Lincoln Highway.