Get Your Kicks

After reading the first 16 chapters of The Grapes of Wrath, I thought that I was going to write a blog post about Route 66, because all I ever really knew about the road I learned from that Bobby Troup song, the Disney movie Cars, and all those random t-shirts and retro signs and mugs they sell at places like Spencer’s Gifts. I thought I was going to find the real story of Route 66, the one that matches up with all the worrying and leaving stuff behind and dead dogs and dead grampas from the book. But what I found so interesting about my research wasn’t anything I didn’t already know about Route 66, but how romantically people today look back on it. All the information I found describing the creation and rise in popularity and lives of the people who traveled it seemed so optimistic, so much more…I don’t know, fairytale-like?...than what the Joads experienced.

When the Joads need to stop for gas in chapter 13, the service station attendant thinks they won’t have any money. He complains about customers coming in and asking to trade things or begging for gas, and then says that he himself was thinking about packing up and going to California. But the online version of the National Museum of American History’s “America on the Go” exhibit paints a very different picture of small gas station owners. Lucille Hamons, known as the “Mother of the Mother Road,” seemed happy to take things instead of money in exchange for gas, and she is described as “self-reliant and generous.” Where Steinbeck shows a poor and hopeless man with no ability to take care of himself, never mind the strangers he meets from the road, History remembers an American ideal—a giving, independent women capable and willing to make the best of a bad situation.

In the book, families like the Joads and the Wilsons have no choice but to leave their entire lives behind, pile into old cars, and pray they make it to California. But the “America on the Go” exhibit chooses to focus on families like the Delgadillos, who thought they were going to have to pack up and leave Oklahoma—that is, until two of their sons became musicians and made enough money traveling Route 66 playing music to support the whole family.

But I guess the differences in the way the book portrays this road and journey and the way history remembers it are understandable. Cyrus Avery, the man “credited with creating the identity of Route 66,” envisioned it as America’s road, the Main Street of America. When it was built in 1926, it was supposed to provide people with the opportunity to see everything that country had to offer. And besides, it’s just easier to remember hard times for the things that were good about them. It’s easier to think about the service stations and stops along Route 66 that turned into thriving family owned businesses than to think of the thousands of families forced to give them their business when they were kicked out of their land and unable to support themselves. It’s easier to think of the Bobby Troups and the Merle Haggards than the Joads and the Wilsons. It’s easier to think that no matter how bad things get now, someday this will all be in a museum, and people will remember it fondly.