Stuckey’s humble beginnings as a pecan stand quickly grew to become a massive chain of stores between the 1940s-70s, serving pecan treats, meals, gas, and souvenirs to locals and road tripping families. While Stuckey’s experienced a marked decline during the late 70s, the granddaughter of the chain’s founder, Stephanie Stuckey, took over the reins in 2019 and has been steering the business in an upward trajectory ever since. As a classic road trip stop, roadies everywhere are thrilled to embrace a revitalized Stuckey’s once more.
36 Host of the Highways
By Rich Ratay
Uncover the story behind the first ever restaurant “chain” and how Howard Johnson turned rags to riches and became an American Empire that shaped the country’s leisure and travel landscape.
46 A Conversation with Diane Lane
By Brennen Matthews
From her unforgettable debut as a teenage star to the acclaimed performances that helped shape modern American cinema, Diane Lane has remained a luminous presence on screen for decades. Known for her witty sense of humor, versatility, and the rare ability to wear her emotions openly in every role that she tackles, she continues to inspire audiences and artists alike. In this conversation, Lane reflects on her personal and professional journey as an actress and mother.
56 Little House: To the Prairies and Beyond
From the deep woods of Wisconsin to the rolling hills of South Dakota, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life defined the frontier experience. Meet the extraordinary women behind one of the world’s most beloved book series and discover the indelible mark that she made upon the American imagination.
66 Wigwam Mania
By Nick Gerlich
Travel along America’s two-lane highways has always been a bit of an adventure but after World War II, things took a turn for the fun as businesses sought to use a variety of gimmicks and interesting tactics to pull travelers off of the road. Discover the full story behind one of the country’s most unusual venues.
ON THE COVER
Frog Rock in Pulaski County, MO. Photograph by David J. Schwartz – Pics On Route 66.
Painted Desert Trading Post, Chambers, Arizona. Photograph by Brennen Matthews.
This summer, I packed up the car and set out once again on a journey that I’ve come to know like an old friend — Route 66. As always, I started in Toronto and wound my way west until I hit Santa Monica, stretching the drive over two months. This wasn’t my first time — it was my fifteenth — but it felt different. Maybe because by the end of it I would call south central Arizona home, maybe because the centennial of Route 66 is just around the corner in November 2026 and there is an enormous amount of enthusiasm on the highway. Whatever the reason, I felt a kind of urgency this time, like I was chasing something before it changed. What I found out there was the same thing that has always made this road special: the people. Route 66 has this way of pulling together an unlikely cast of characters. I met couples from Germany and Norway who were absolutely delighted to soak in faded neon signs, families from Canada eager to absorb quirky roadside Americana, and folks from every corner of the U.S. who came with stories, cameras, and open eyes of their own. Everyone had their own reasons for making the trip — nostalgia, curiosity, bucket-list adventure — but what they all shared was a sense of wonder. They weren’t just traveling; they were stepping into a living museum of quirky, kitschy Americana. They were, in many ways, chasing apparitions of the past. But aren’t we all?
And woven through the excitement was something more bittersweet. In recent years, we’ve said goodbye to a few people who meant a lot to the road — Fran Houser of the Midpoint Cafe, Rich Henry of Henry’s Rabbit Ranch, and Albert Okura of Roy’s, to name but a few dear souls who departed too early. They weren’t just business owners. They were personalities who gave Route 66 its heartbeat, who made sure the road didn’t fade when interstates tried to push it aside. Their passing reminded me just how fragile this culture is — and how important it is to get out there, to meet the people, to hear their stories while you still can.
The road itself is shifting. “For Sale” signs seemed to be everywhere. David Brenner, owner of the Roadrunner Lodge in Tucumcari, New Mexico, has one in the lobby window. Brenda Hammit Bradley, a wonderfully funny and welcoming lady who has carried the Midpoint Cafe in Adrian, Texas, forward, is preparing to hand over the Midpoint. Connie Echols at the Wagon Wheel Motel in Cuba, Missouri, is ready to pass it on after more than 15 years at the counter. And Larry Smith, recent owner of Motel Safari in Tucumcari, has already closed his chapter with the motel and moved back east. Real estate — they’re about stewardship. They make you wonder: Who will step in next, and what kind of road will Route 66 become in the years ahead?
And yet, even with those questions hanging in the air, there’s energy building. Nearly everywhere I went, people were talking about 2026. Many towns across all eight states are already prepping — sprucing up signs, planning events, restoring buildings and anxiously waiting to welcome visitors. There’s pride there, and hope too, that the centennial will shine a light on their communities and remind people that the road still matters. Travelers I spoke with were buzzing at the thought of being part of it. Some were already planning their next trip, eager to say they were there when Route 66 turned 100. That’s the thing about Route 66 — it’s always been more than just a drive. It’s America condensed into a little more than 2,400 miles: the diners with homemade pies, the motels with neon blinking against desert skies, the conversations at gas pumps that turn strangers into friends. It’s a place where history and humor meet, where every faded sign or dilapidated building has a story, and where even in transition, there’s resilience. As I rolled into Santa Monica, eager to reconnect with the Pacific Ocean, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this trip had been less about nostalgia and more about momentum. The centennial is going to be big — not just because of what Route 66 has been, but because of what it can still become. Yes, the road is changing. Yes, the familiar faces are fewer. But the spirit is alive, and it’s pulling in new travelers, new caretakers and new stories. For me, that’s the magic. Route 66 is never static. It’s living, breathing, evolving. Every time you drive it, it’s a little different, yet it always feels like home. And as the 100th birthday approaches, I can’t think of a better time to be out there, windows down, taking it all in.
For me, my new starting point will be sunshine-soaked Arizona, but that too offers my family and I a fresh encounter with a road that we have grown to know and appreciate. Here’s to the next journey, the next neon glow, the next unexpected conversation with a stranger. The Mother Road is heading into its second century, and I, for one, can’t wait to see where it leads.
Blessings,
Brennen Matthews
Editor
ROUTE
PUBLISHER
Thin Tread Media
EDITOR
Brennen Matthews
DEPUTY EDITOR
Kate Wambui
EDITOR-AT-LARGE
Nick Gerlich
LEAD EDITORIAL
PHOTOGRAPHER
David J. Schwartz
LAYOUT AND DESIGN
Tom Heffron
DIGITAL
Yasir Ahmed
ILLUSTRATOR
Jennifer Mallon
EDITORIAL INTERN
Skyler Graham
CONTRIBUTORS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS
Army Historical Foundation
Brian Bowen Smith
Chandler O’Leary
Cheryl Eichar Jett
Dr. T. Lindsay Baker
John Margolies
John Smith
Marlow Chamber of Commerce, Marlow, OK
Mark Baylor
Olivia McClure
Rich Ratay
Visit Springfield, Missouri
Editorial submissions should be sent to brennen@routemagazine.us.
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ROUTE is published six times per year by Thin Tread Media. No part of this publication may be copied or reprinted without the written consent of the Publisher. The views expressed by the contributors are not necessarily those of the Publisher, Editor, or service contractors. Every effort has been made to maintain the accuracy of the information presented in this publication. No responsibility is assumed for errors, changes or omissions. The Publisher does not take any responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or photography.
THE MARLOW BOYS
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By Dr. T. Lindsay Baker
About an hour southwest of Oklahoma City stands a pink granite marker commemorating five brothers known as the men who refused to be lynched.
Visitors find it at one side of Redbud Park in little Marlow, Oklahoma, which takes its name from their family. Williamson Marlow and wife Martha Jane made their way from Tennessee via Missouri to Texas and Oklahoma in the early 1870s. For a time in the early 1880s the family lived on high ground between Rush Creek and Hell Roaring Creek where the little Oklahoma town named after them would later spring up. With five sons aged from their teens to late twenties, Boone, George, Alfred, Charles, and Lewellyn, they lived alongside the old Chisholm Trail, which during this time still carried a few cattle northward from Texas. In addition to farming, the sons collected loose cattle and horses that strayed from the passing herds, leading a number of their neighbors to wonder whether some of the livestock might have been stolen.
By 1885, the family again moved south across the Red River into Texas, settling around Graham, the rough-and-tumble seat of Young County. There the newly arrived sons with questionable reputations found themselves accused of horse and cattle theft back in Oklahoma, and in 1888, four of them were jailed in Graham to be tried in U.S. district court (which had jurisdiction for crimes perpetrated in the Oklahoma Territory). While detained there, a mob of locals threatened to pull the newcomers out of the calaboose and hang them for their purported crimes, for which no clear evidence was ever presented.
marksmen even in the dark, they killed three of the lynch mob and drove the others away, wounding several of them. Rarely did any victims of lynch mobs ever successfully defend themselves from such attacks. In the process, Alfred and Lewellyn lost their lives, leaving George and Charles each chained to a dead brother. George found a knife on the body of one of the assailants and used it to disjoint the ankles of his two dead brothers and thereby to slip off the shackles.
Though grievously wounded, the two surviving brothers managed to coerce the other two prisoners to drive the team and wagon in the dark twenty-five miles to the family cabin.
Ostensibly to protect George, Alfred, Charles, and Lewellyn from the threatening crowd, the local sheriff ordered them, with two other federal prisoners, to be transferred the night of January 19, 1889, to the lock-up in the neighboring county. Deputies leg-ironed the six men together in pairs to deter their escaping from the open wagon. The move in reality was no more than a ruse to expose the brothers again to members of the lynch party. At Rock Creek, two miles outside of town, locals with guns attacked the wagonload of six prisoners and their “protectors.” At the first gunshots the guards bailed out of the wagon, dropping their firearms in their haste, while the other two prisoners did the same. This left the Marlows on their own.
The four brothers, though chained together in pairs, took up abandoned weapons and returned fire. As skilled
Authorities rearrested George and Charles Marlow on their original federal charges, but the trumped-up charges were never proved. During this same time, Brother Boone, who had been indicted as well, was poisoned by a conniver in Oklahoma who had hopes of receiving a reward. The remaining two Marlow brothers in time relocated to Colorado, where near Ridgeway they both became successful farmers, stock raisers, and lawmen. As deputy U.S. marshals, their reputations from Young County daunted all but the boldest miscreants. Back in Texas the tables turned. The members of the lynch mob found themselves indicted for conspiring to injure prisoners legally under the protection of the federal courts. The cases dragged on for years until most of the accused assassins died or became enfeebled.
In the meantime, the surviving two brothers passed middle age and moved to live with their children in California and Denver. There they became respected elder members of their communities.
Federal Judge A.P. McCormick in 1891 likely summarized the events on Rock Creek in 1889 best when he declared:
“This is the first time in the annals of history where unarmed prisoners, shackled together, ever repelled a mob. Such cool courage that preferred to fight against such great odds and die, if at all, in glorious battle rather than die ignominiously… deserves to be commemorated in song and story.”
The Marlow Brothers’ audacity in facing down the mob indeed entered the lore of the West. Millions saw it fictionalized in the 1965 film, The Sons of Katie Elder, starring John Wayne and Dean Martin. And still, people drive to little Marlow, Oklahoma, to ponder the monument to the five brothers on horseback, and the Sooner State’s undeniable place in the Old West.
DEAD MAN’S CURVE
These days, the phrase “Route 66” usually conjures up images of classic cars tooling down a historic highway, their occupants leisurely taking in the sights. Picturesque stretches of curved road winding around sleepy towns seem innocuous. But once upon a time, it wasn’t all sweetness and light on the Mother Road. That slender ribbon of pavement carried heavy traffic – trucks delivering goods, everyday folks going to work, and emergency vehicles trying to get past all the rest. Passing a line of traffic on a narrow two-lane highway was a deadly risk. Worse yet were the sudden sharp curves that seemed to appear out of nowhere to a driver unfamiliar with the road. No wonder this storied highway was known for decades as “Bloody 66.” Crashes were numerous and wrecks often fatal.
Due to the propensity of early highway engineers to follow land section lines in their road-building, sharp turns weren't uncommon. Neither were the wrecks that ensued. And so, there are many Dead Man’s Curves in America, including a few on Route 66. One in New Mexico between Tijeras and Albuquerque is located on what is now known as State Road 333. Another, known as “Dead Man’s Corner,” is located a few miles west of the old railroad town of Afton, Oklahoma. A similar corner in Edwardsville, Illinois, caused drivers who couldn’t make the sudden turn to land in neighborhood backyards.
One “Bloody 66” site was the dangerous turn named Dead Man’s Curve at the northern edge of sleepy little Towanda, Illinois. Only a few minutes outside of Bloomington-Normal, this village is home to about 500 residents. Most days now, it's awfully quiet there, except for the gas station near the interstate ramp. But this village has a dark history with a once-busy stretch of the Mother Road. Ironically, Towanda’s “death curve” – today, just local streets – now appears to wrap around the modern station that is the center of much village activity.
“The original Route 66 began in Chicago and worked its way southwest... to Towanda in 1926,” said Fred Walk, a professor at Illinois State University, retired high school
teacher, and founder of the Route 66 Parkway, a landscaped stretch of original Route 66 at Towanda. “It was just a two-lane road, [with] one lane going north, one lane going south, and the entire road was only 18 feet wide, both lanes combined. So, you can imagine, it’s pretty narrow.”
As construction of the Mother Road neared towns and cities, in some cases, the road-builders created a bypass to go around the town instead of heading straight through it. “In the case of Towanda, imagine your road is going straight, and then it takes a 45-degree angle curve [to] swing around the village,” Walk explained. “Then it would curve and come back once it got around the town and continue heading in a straighter direction.” The bypass curves were extremely treacherous for motorists who didn’t know the road and hit the 90-degree turn at fairly high speeds, not knowing what was ahead.
“Drivers from the Chicago area that weren’t used to driving [Route 66] knew nothing [about] the road. Not knowing the conditions, there were many accidents that occurred at this curve,” said Walk. “There were people who were killed [here], hence the name Dead Man’s Curve.” This particular Dead Man’s Curve happened to have a house dangerously near it in its earlier days. “[The house] was run into on a number of occasions. And the guy finally decided, this is not a good place for a house, and he relocated [it],” laughed Walk.
“In 1954, Route 66 was expanded. They created a four-lane Route 66 with two lanes going north, two lanes going south with a median strip in between. When they did that, they essentially rounded off Dead Man’s Curve [so it] wasn’t nearly as sharp [and was] more of a gradual curve.” The curved roadway then became largely used by local traffic.
Today, you can still drive a piece of that old roadway if you jog off historic U.S. 66 and turn on Jackson Street to experience the curve into Quincy Street. Just below that is the much gentler curve of the later alignment encapsulated in the Route 66 Parkway, a linear park that accommodates walkers and cyclists. Once upon a time, traveling down Route 66 was perhaps a little less safe, but the adventure that the journey offers today is still the same unforgettable one of yesteryear.
–Pics On Route 66.
Photograph by David J. Schwartz
TULSA’S GOLDEN DRILLER
Many statues have risen and fallen along Route 66.
Countless Muffler Men populated the U.S. during their boom in the ‘60s; many have been junked, many have survived, and new iterations have cropped up, such as Buck Atom in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But Tulsa has another man—the tallest freestanding statue in the U.S.—that has survived since the ‘60s and is set to live far into the foreseeable future. As the winner of Kimberly-Clark’s 2006 Cottonelle contest among nine other quirky roadside attractions, the Golden Driller has demonstrated that his presence knows few equals.
Today’s Golden Driller is actually the third in a series. In 1953, Mid-Continent Supply Company of Fort Worth built the first Golden Driller—an angular, whimsical statue made of paper-mâché—to display at the International Petroleum Exposition (IPE), an annual conference for oil companies across the U.S. held in Tulsa, then known as the Oil Capital of the World. The first statue was such a hit that Mid-Continent Supply created a second statue in 1959 to replace it—this one a smaller, smoother version that climbed a rig at the Tulsa State Fairgrounds. This giant was also temporary, and for the 1966 IPE, Mid-Continent Supply brought back George S. Hondronastas, a Greek immigrant who designed the first statue, to design the third and final iteration.
Continent basically abandoned the guy, and the [county] of Tulsa took ownership.”
Tulsa County repaired the damage that the Golden Driller had accumulated over the years. Giving him a shirt to wear was considered, but after protests—including those of real oil workers who had worked the fields shirtless—the idea was scrapped. Since then, the Driller has only worn shirts as temporary decorations, as well as a few quirkier articles of clothing.
“I’ve seen him with a kilt for our Scottish Festival, and, most famously, recently, they did some temporary modifications to him to make him look like Elon Musk to try to get Tesla to come to town. I know that the Fairgrounds can basically treat him as a billboard within reason, and that’s a good way for them to raise money for his maintenance and for the Fairgrounds as a whole,” said Martin.
The Golden Driller—also known as “Giant Oil Man,” “Larry,” and “Golden Boy”—is a 75-foot-tall, 43,500-pound (21.75-U.S.-ton), monochromatic man of steel, plaster, and concrete. “His belt size is 48 feet in circumference, his shoe size is 393 DDD, and his [hard] hat size is 112,” explained Tulsa County Commissioner Karen Keith. The Driller’s right hand rests on an oil derrick that once served the fields of Seminole, Oklahoma, and his belt buckle once displayed “Mid-Continent” to signify his parent company, but once ownership was transferred to Tulsa County in 1979, the label was changed to “Tulsa”.
“In ‘79, the IPE was permanently canceled,” said Rhys Martin, President of the Oklahoma Route 66 Association. “Around that time, a lot of oil company headquarters were migrating to Houston; there was a big oil crash at the time, so the IPE essentially dried up. That same year, Mid-
Apart from a couple emergency surgeries—part of the Driller’s back had to be replaced in 1970, and a hole had to be cut in his leg to rescue a trapped cat in 1976—the Golden Driller has remained stable, permanently installed in front of the Tulsa Expo Center. In 2011, his brass and copper dedication plaques were stolen, but fortunately, the thieves were caught when they tried to sell the plaques in pieces to a scrap metal company. That same year, the Driller received a fresh coat of mustard paint with a waterproof finish, and he’s hardly needed a touch-up since.
“A funny story about him is that Fraispertuis City [amusement park] in France was opening an exhibit, and the Golden Driller was having its 50 th anniversary, and they read about it online, so they created a ride in honor of the Golden Driller, and they built [a replica of him], and then they flew us over to be part of the dedication of it,” said Keith.
The Golden Driller has been a tourist sensation ever since his installation, despite concerns about his appearance and representation of the oil industry in an age moving toward renewable energy. There is more to love about the Driller than what he was built for—perseverance and hard work, vision and daring, the history of energy and of Tulsa—these values and more embody the Oklahoma state monument. With his worldwide appeal and the girth to withstand 200mile winds, the Golden Driller is clearly here to stay.
Photograph by John Smith.
AMERICANA’S FINEST
By Cheryl Eichar Jett
The American road trip — those very words get your immediate attention and inspire idyllic daydreams of sunny days spent rolling down picturesque highways on the way to attractions and landscapes that you’ve only read about. But the romance of the road inevitably collides with the stuff of everyday life — the need for another tank of gasoline, the search for a clean restroom, the desire for a cup of coffee and a sweet treat, and the little niggling at the back of your mind that you promised to bring home a souvenir or two for Aunt Betty. Sure, there are modern travel stops along all the major routes that check those boxes, but once upon a time, there was a chain of roadside travel stores that served up sweet treats, inexpensive good food, kitschy souvenirs, and travel services better than anyone else. And they did it with an extra scoop of Southern charm and a slice of Americana style. That chain of blueroofed goodness was Stuckey’s, and it was a national treasure from the 1940s into the ‘70s.
Then, it slipped from the hands of the Stuckey family into a steep decline. Now, it’s quickly regaining its reputation. Stephanie Stuckey has been at the helm of the iconic company since 2019, and she sees reviving the great American road trip, whether a Sunday afternoon drive or a two-week vacation, as one of her guiding principles.
“It’s also celebrating the pecan. The two really go handin-hand because we started as a pecan stand on the side of the road,” Stephanie said. “So, we’re trying to embrace the history of the road trip. We became our most popular when the road trip peaked — that’s when we hit our high point. With the road trip coming back, which is pretty exciting, we are coming back. Everybody loves a comeback.”
The Father of Stuckey’s
In the newly incorporated city of Eastman, Georgia, Williamson Sylvester Stuckey was born in 1909 to William Ira and Sallie Lee Williamson Stuckey. A little more than two decades and one depression later, Sylvester, by then a law school dropout, was making one cent per pound buying pecans from local farmers around the Middle Georgia countryside and reselling them to a local sheller named Fred Bennett. Despite the Great Depression throughout the U.S. and Florida’s own depression brought on by two giant hurricanes in the late ‘20s, American tourists — granted, in smaller numbers — were still traveling to Florida in the 1930s. And Eastman was right on the path to and from the Sunshine State.
And so, with a borrowed truck and $35 cash loaned from his grandmother, Sylvester opened a humble roadside stand to sell packages of pecans to Florida tourists. To further eke out a living, he convinced his wife, Ethel Mullis Stuckey, to make candies from some of 1937’s plentiful pecan crop. Ethel put those pecans to use and learned to make pralines, divinities,
and the soon-to-become-iconic log rolls. The first “official” — that is, in an actual building — Stuckey’s roadside candy and gift shop plus gas station opened that year in Eastman on U.S. Highway 23. A candy production plant was soon built behind the gift shop to keep up with demand. The second Stuckey’s location opened in the late 1930s at Unadilla, Georgia, on U.S. 41. The next Stuckey’s that opened was in Florida, in a location just south of the Georgia-Florida border at Hilliard on U.S. Highway 1. More locations followed in the 1940s.
“Because of World War II and so many people sending candy to soldiers in the war, a lot of candy was produced,” explained Gary Yawn, retired insurance, real estate, and timberland entrepreneur; personal friend of Sylvester Stuckey; and Eastman local historian. “These young men came back from World War II, it was like an education to a young person, because when they got back, they got jobs, they started traveling, and the Stuckey’s stores were a big hit. Those stores were a big part of their success, so Stuckey was able to expand his industry and expand his candy manufacturing, and sometimes people would buy an interest in a store back then.”
A Roadside Empire
By the early ‘50s, a double-page magazine ad listed 16 locations, mostly in Georgia and Florida, but also in Tennessee, South Carolina, and Virginia.
Profits were expected to go up further from a deal struck in 1950 with Texaco, who was to be their exclusive gasoline supplier. A new corporate headquarters and candy factory opened in 1953 in Eastman. Those first 16 locations seemed to multiply like rabbits throughout the decade of the 1950s, making the Stuckey’s roadside stop synonymous with clean restrooms, tasty candy, a good variety of snacks and souvenirs, gasoline, and anything else a motorist could possibly need. The iconic teal-blue peaked roof attracted the traveler’s attention and the Texaco flag waved them in, where they were assured of a clean, safe, and fun break from the road. For those who didn’t travel or who lived in a rural area nowhere near a brick-and-mortar Stuckey’s, catalogs offered candy, treats, and souvenirs by mail order. “People were somewhat ‘country,’ even the Northerners, you were just not as educated and not as traveled [until after World War II], especially in the South,” Yawn added. “Now, I’m proud of the South, my granddaddy was a state legislator. [But] they came from that time and date, all common people, and Stuckey captured that. Stuckey went to the University of Georgia and he was a well-traveled guy.”
The story is told that Sylvester cleverly began to calculate how far apart Stuckey’s locations should be by driving the highways himself and taking note of how long a cup of coffee
would last or how soon a restroom might be needed. He was said to favor locating a Stuckey’s store on the east side of the highway so it would be on the motorists’ right-hand side as they headed back home from Florida.
By its 1960s peak, Stuckey’s had simply become an integral part of the classic American road trip, including along the new interstate highways. Sometimes, that’s all there was at an interstate exit — just that highly recognizable teal-blue roof signifying the consistency that was Stuckey’s. There were 368 stores in more than 30 states, radiating outward from the Eastman, Georgia, home base. Billboards in yellow and red along the highways advertised the nearest Stuckey’s location and often a current special, like “two eggs, toast and jelly, for 99 cents.”
Support businesses kept the roadside empire running smoothly. Stuckey’s candy plant in Eastman still produced the famous sweet treats. They owned a trucking company to ensure that products were delivered promptly to the stores. And their own sign company produced the 4,000 yellow-andred billboards that dotted America’s highways.
In 1964, Stuckey’s made a merger decision that seemed to make sense at the time — to add capacity and capital — but would carry fatal consequences just 13 years later. The
Pet Milk Company, in its growth from producer of canned evaporated milk to multi-brand food products conglomerate, purchased and merged with Stuckey’s. Sylvester, however, then 55 years old, kept a hand in running the company and served on the company’s Board of Directors.
Decline of an Icon
1977 was a sad year for Stuckey’s, the company, and Stuckeys, the family. On January 6, at the age of 67, Sylvester Stuckey died. Later that year, the Chicago conglomerate known as Illinois Central Industries (ICI) purchased Pet Milk Company. Although ICI grew out of the Illinois Central Railroad in 1962, it had been created as a holding company to diversify at a time when the railroads’ investment returns were not good. Their diversifications included real estate, industrial products, financial services, and consumer products, including Pet Milk Company, with its ownership of Stuckey’s. ICI, as owner of Pet Milk Company and its subsidiaries, began to close Stuckey’s stores across the country, and in the late 1970s, the legendary roadside stop began its decline, leaving just a handful of stores open.
Sylvester Stuckey visiting his store.
Billy Stuckey’s Revival
But entrepreneur W.S. “Sylvester” Stuckey had left behind a namesake who also became a force to be reckoned with. Williamson Sylvester Jr., known as “Billy,” held a Bachelor of Business Administration completed in 1956 and an undergraduate law degree achieved in 1959, both from the University of Georgia. Billy had been a five-time Democratic U.S. Representative from the Peach State from 1967 to 1977. And, whether or not he knew it at the time, he had the perfect vehicle for turning Stuckey’s around — once he got the company back, that is. Billy had built up a massive business opening Dairy Queens along the American interstates. His Interstate Brands Dairy Queen company owned hundreds of the popular red-roofed soft-serve shops across the 48 contiguous continental states. Billy astutely realized that — and deftly took advantage of — interstate highway travel had become, by the early 1980s, a vital fact of life. Meanwhile, back at ICI, the company that owned Stuckey’s was in litigation. “My dad was running multiple businesses; he was a serial entrepreneur. His main business was not Stuckey’s,” explained Billy’s daughter, Stephanie. “Then, he bought back [Stuckey’s] from the company [that owned it] that was facing litigation from franchisees for the way the company was being managed. My dad was able to negotiate that if the company were to be given back to the Stuckey family, they would drop the lawsuit, so the benefit was from my dad getting [Stuckey’s] back for basically nothing, and [ICI] was getting this huge litigation mess off of their hands.” So, in 1984, Stuckey’s was back in the hands of, well, the Stuckeys, and the iconic roadside chain began its turnaround under Billy’s experienced leadership. Launching the Stuckey’s Express concept put “a store within a store,” a move which
soon expanded to 165+ franchises in 17 states. “Nowadays, there’s a TA or Subway or Wendy’s, there’s whatever, [along the highway]. That wasn’t the case in the 1980s, so he [Billy] was really a pioneer in co-branding, just like my grandfather was with the original roadside retail,” Stephanie added. “So, I had a lot to learn from them. Really, my father figured out how to pivot and change the business model to make Stuckey’s work, given where the company was when he acquired it.”
But the Great Recession in 2007-2009 took away discretionary income from many families across the country, and travel services and attractions suffered from it. The candy plant in Eastman, operated by a third-party contractor, closed, and outside vendors began to produce Stuckey’s brand candies. At that point, Stuckey’s was just a decade away from another generational hand-off. “When my dad got it, he made Stuckey’s work by incorporating it into what he was doing [Interstate Brands Dairy Queens]. [But] when I got it, at that point, the co-branding had fallen apart. To be honest, a lot of the stores had de-branded or closed, and you think, they don’t look so good anymore, so the store model isn’t working for us like it did 30 years ago.”
The Third Generation’s Turn
W.S. “Billy” Stuckey Jr. retired in 2019, and his daughter Ethel (named for grandmother Ethel Stuckey) “Stephanie” Stuckey was up at bat if she wanted to be. And she wanted to be. “[When] I became the CEO, nobody else wanted to do it. I would have happily stayed, I mean, I had a career working with the sustainability of buildings. It was interesting work and I was getting paid a nice salary. I had a life,” Stephanie said. She also had a Bachelor of Arts and a law degree from the University of Georgia, had worked as a trial lawyer, had been politically active since her teens, and had — savvy in the ways of political campaigns by then — won her own successful bid for the Georgia State House of Representatives. For a decade, she had worked on environmental issues as director of sustainability services for Southface Institute, an Atlanta-based organization, but the appeal of saving the iconic family business (again) won out.
and [we] rented all this space. It had been like that for decades and just losing money, and nobody knew what to do with it. I said, ‘I’ll buy it,’ so that’s how it happened. I bought out my dad’s partners and then I bought out my dad in June of 2020. I bought out his shares because he’s retired and I said, ‘Just let me run the company, Dad, just relax,’ because he was freaking out over all that had to be done. ‘You don’t have to do any of this.’”
Since Stephanie took over as CEO, Stuckey’s has acquired Front Porch Pecans, Atwell Pecans, The Orchards Gourmet, and Thames corporations, which added distribution, candy making, pecan processing, and fundraising expertise and opportunities to the company. With the Front Porch Pecans merger, Stuckey’s also acquired manager and Georgia pecan grower R.G. Lamar, who became the new company president. She has also published a book, UnStuck: Rebirth of an American Icon And what would grandfather Sylvester have to say now? “I wish I knew. I was 12 when he died, and I think about him all the time. I spent my first three-to-four months on the job reading through articles written about him to get an understanding of how he ran the company. I tried to be true to his spirit of entrepreneurship. I like to say that Stuckey’s is an 80-year-old startup. I really do think like a startup, because that’s what we are doing, we are reimagining the company. In many ways, I’m going back to how we were when we started in 1937, the roadside stand when we were selling pecans. We’re back to selling pecans, we’re back to shelling pecans, we’re back to making our own candy. I’m doing some of the things he did, but what I’m running now is not the same company that he sold in 1964. I think he would also get a real kick out of knowing that I bought this candy plant in Wrens, Georgia, right across from an old Stuckey’s store, and the plant I bought was run by a man named Atwell of Atwell Pecans. My grandfather did business with Mr. Atwell, so I think he would like it.”
through collectors’ memorabilia plus various company archives to write and publish a book in 2017 entitled simply Stuckey’s. In an era of road trip revival, when the past is honored and kitsch is cool, Stuckey’s fits right into the mix.
A Plaque Marks the Site
The first Stuckey’s gift shop building still stands on U.S. Highway 23 — Oak Street — right across the road from the tidy-looking mom-and-pop Eastman Motel. It’s currently empty, time-worn, and vintage-shabby, although the original candy plant and other buildings behind it have housed warehouse space and local businesses. Out in front stands an impressive plaque commemorating Mr. and Mrs. W. S. Stuckey and their establishment of the legendary Stuckey’s. One could look at this old building with its faded blue roof and easily see it as symbolic of the Stuckey’s decline during the late 20th Century.
“My dad sold his Dairy Queens over a decade ago to Warren Buffett and then he and his business partners at Stuckey’s all kind of shut down shop and left Stuckey’s with a skeleton crew. That’s how I got involved. They hadn’t had any leadership for over a decade and my dad’s former business partners were looking to sell their shares. I said, ‘Well, if I’m going to buy the company, I’m going to run it,’ because nobody was. It was literally on autopilot with two employees and a skeleton crew — five employees in the warehouse and three sales reps,
The Rebound
Grandfather Sylvester would most definitely like it. There are now 65 franchised locations, and a distribution center in Stuckey’s hometown of Eastman, Georgia. A pecan processing and candy plant produces their own Stuckey’s branded products. An online business picks up where the mail-order catalogs once left off, and about 200 retailers sell Stuckey’s pecan snacks and candies. A branding refresh this year will make things look new again with the traditional 1940s logos. And the new logo says it all — “We make road trips fun.” There’s a lot to like.
The word about Stuckey’s return to roadside glory is getting around. Business journals and major newspapers have published feature stories. Tim Hollis, author of numerous books about Southeastern U.S. media and attractions, combed
But the thing is, it’s also a significant reminder of the amazing success that Sylvester Stuckey built during the MidCentury from such modest beginnings. Just think of all those family station wagons up and down America’s highways that pulled up to an iconic Stuckey’s roadside location, to get gas, select souvenirs and sweets, and maybe have breakfast or a sandwich. The familiar teal roof and the Texaco flag flying out front signaled the first and the best in terms of travel services. But now, in many locations across the U.S., the modern tourist can once again stop at a travel store and find Stuckey’s products. An iconic Pecan Log Roll, just like Ethel used to make. Maybe a rubber alligator or the Red Drinking Bird for Aunt Betty. Certainly, a bag of Georgia pecans for snacking during the next leg of the trip. And, just like the Stuckey’s mail-order catalog of yesteryear, fans can now order goodies online. You can still get your own piece of America’s national treasure — Stuckey’s. It’s there waiting for you, where the romance of the road and the needs of everyday life collide in the classic American road trip.
Stephanie Stuckey in Marietta, OK.
The display inside of a traditional store.
GILLIOZ THEATRE
Beginning in 1926, tourists traveling on Route 66 were met with an explosion of one-of-a-kind diversions and attractions designed to give passersthrough a sense of each of the enchanting little communities that give the Mother Road its magical reputation. It was amid this boom of movie houses and concert halls, in Springfield, Missouri, the birthplace of Route 66, that M.E. Gillioz’s eponymous theatre came to be.
“Gillioz desperately wanted to be on Route 66,” said Executive Director of the Theatre, Geoff Steele. “If you look at the announcement of Route 66 and took a map of [the road] and put lights everywhere a theatre opened between 1926 and 1935, it would look like a string of Christmas lights. It just really captured the imagination.”
Bridge architect Maurice Earnest “M.E.” Gillioz of Monett, Missouri, was one of many people struck by the ingenious aura cast by Route 66. By 1925, Gillioz’s brilliantly sturdy bridges and roads connected much of southwestern Missouri, and he was interested in exploring different kinds of architecture. A group of prominent Springfield businessmen had been planning to build a vaudeville theatre and movie house downtown since 1924, but the project only picked up steam when Gillioz took over around August 1925. The steeland-concrete, bridge-like building Gillioz designed was like nothing else in the skyline. And he was adamant it be built along Route 66.
audience came into play. After dusk, the farmers and people from Springfield proper would go out for the evening.”
The Gillioz operated from sunup to sundown for almost sixty years. During World War II, the theatre hosted songfests to boost public morale. Gillioz passed away in 1962, but his theatre continued to be a place where visitors could join the community for a few hours and forget about their troubles.
In the early 1970s, the interstate bypass and urban sprawl combined to draw people away from the historic theatre.
Businesses in downtown Springfield shuttered their windows and the Gillioz followed suit in 1980. “The thing that saved [the theatre] was that it was really overbuilt,” Steele said.
“Gillioz built the theatre out of what he knew, which was steel and concrete and plaster over it. Other than the doors, the banisters, the armrests, there was virtually no wood. If it had been made of wood during those 26 years that it was empty, there would have been nothing to save.”
“That street in Springfield was already fully developed, so M.E. bought the piece of land closest to it,” Steele said. “He signed a hundred-year lease with a laundromat one block removed to get the address that was on Route 66. Our lobby is seven feet wide and eighty feet deep and extremely narrow because it used to be a laundromat.”
The unusual, eye-catching building drew the gaze of tourists on the Mother Road, who crowded in to watch the daily matinees. Gillioz quickly realized that the theatre, which hosted vaudeville acts and screened silent films before transitioning to talkies in the early 1930s, had two audiences. In 1926, Fords did not have air conditioning and people needed a place to stop in the heat of the day.
“Our theatre started showing things at eleven o’clock in the morning and eleven o’clock at night,” Steele said. “People traveled in the cool of the morning and stopped for lunch and they would move on in the evening hours. Then our second
Gillioz’s unique architectural style saved the building, but it also attracted a significant vagrant population. Pigeons dipped through the collapsed ceiling and squatters scrapped Gillioz’s organ for parts.
Attorney and downtown enthusiast Sam Freeman was the sole protector of the abandoned theatre.
“There are stories of Sam chasing some of that vagrant population down the street that had stolen some of those organ pipes,” Steele remembered.
In 2006, Freeman was increasingly concerned that the historic institution would be torn down. He went to local oilman Jim D. Morris, who owned the front and back door of the laundromat-turnedtheatre, which Gillioz had leased. When Freeman asked Morris to buy the Gillioz, Morris asked, “Why would I want to buy an old theatre?” “Sam’s response was, ‘Because if you don’t do it, it’s going to be destroyed.’ Jim’s on record saying, ‘At that point, it became a heart issue and not a business issue.’”
Shortly after that meeting, Morris bought the theatre and reopened it as a non-profit on October 13, 2006. Today, the old marquee lights up with an array of international artists and movie festivals. While the eleven-to-eleven schedule is a thing of the past, travelers on Route 66 are still inevitably drawn to the majestic Gillioz, a living testament to the fact that where the Mother Road’s two lanes cut through the American landscape, art inevitably springs forth.
Remnants of the Past RANCH HOUSE CAFE
When a road stretches as far back into America’s past as Route 66, it’s inevitable that some of its iconic places and people become lost to time. A faded sign or ramshackle building may be all that stands between a fond memory and the vacuum of history. But on the outskirts of the charming little town of Tucumcari, New Mexico, one such treasure rises out of the earth; a rusted neon sign sits atop the prongs of a metal cactus. The striking sign, once painted cheery greens and reds, declares in faded lettering: Ranch House Cafe—Mexican Food. An old blue Chevy truck, its bed crafted into a whimsical shed-like structure with ornate scrap metal and weathered wood, has found its final resting place at the base of the sign. The decaying truck glints in the desert sun like a ghost of the automobiles that once happily crowded into the parking lot.
Fortunately, while many things are lost on America’s Main Street, woven in mystery by the passage of time, few are truly forgotten, thanks to the passion and dedication of individuals up and down the old highway. Tucumcari is home to many such saviors. Looking at Tucumcari today, it’s a quiet town on the High Plains of eastern New Mexico and occupied by some 5,000 people. There are several iconic motels such as the Roadrunner, Blue Swallow, and Safari, and even though the town has lost a great deal over the years, the bones of the old road are still plentiful, attracting visitors from across America and the world. And the Ranch House Cafe sign, equal parts beautiful and dilapidated, standing in front of the eatery’s empty ‘50s-modern structure, pulls people in perhaps more than any other.
“It’s my absolute favorite building in town,” said Connie Loveland, Director of Tucumcari MainStreet.
“At some point, I’m sure [the sign] had neon on it, I’m guessing where it says, ‘Mexican Food.’ Some of the older people here in town I’ve visited with said that they originally didn’t serve Mexican food. It was more of a sandwiches and burgers kind of cafe, breakfast and lunch. I talked to an older gentleman here in town and he was telling me that their slogan, when they opened out on Route 66, was, ‘Good food always, always good food.’”
In the 1940s, Tucumcari was the largest stop between Amarillo, Texas, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, on old Route 66.
Desert stretched out hot and harsh in either direction, but Tucumcari was a magic oasis swimming in neon light. And it was in this oasis that Pearl and Dugan “Duge” Barnett built the original Ranch House Cafe in 1952, right along the Mother Road.
The Ranch House was one of the first roadside cafes to offer drive-up-style curb service. Visitors lured off Route 66 by the blinking neon sign could enjoy the greasy, all-American fare from the comfort of their cars. And via the railroad, people poured into the train station downtown and made a beeline for the stylish little diner. Tucumcari residents who were children during the busy years remember it as a local staple.
Travelers on the Mother Road frequented the mom-andpop shop until the early 1980s, when the Interstate bypassed Tucumcari and tourism trickled to a near-halt. By then, owners Duge and Pearl Barnett had both passed away and the eatery was shut. Since that time, the Ranch House Cafe has remained vacant, with the exception of one mysterious resident on the parking lot that has fascinated many photographers: the abandoned Chevy truck with its intriguing piecemeal house on the back.
“The truck was built and owned by a guy named Walter Carlton,” said Loveland. “I don’t know how he ended up in town, but he did artwork and built furniture and different things for people to make money. He used to live in that truck. In 2010, he fell on hard times, so he sold it to Ruth Daniels, who owned a Route 66 curio shop across the street called Things. She had it parked outside in front of her business as a kitschy attraction.”
Things were torn down in 2014 to make room for a parking lot for Mesalands Community College, but Daniels kept the truck. The following year, she bought the land on which the Ranch House Cafe sign stood and parked the eye-catching Chevy right underneath it. The restaurant stands empty as it has since the 1980s, but the building, truck, and sign remain, thanks to Daniels. At sunset, the light glints off the metal and glass of the truck and glows on the rusted signposts to create a haunting, beautiful sight. In preserving the property, Daniels inadvertently created a love letter to a time gone by, a striking image at the intersection of the past and the town’s present.
66.
Photograph by David J. Schwartz
“HOST OF THE HIGHWAYS”
THE RISE, DEMISE, AND RETURN
By Rich Ratay
Golden Arches. Green mermaids.
Freckled schoolgirls with pig tails. Our modern highways are lined with memorable icons beckoning motorists to pull over for a quick bite or refreshment. But long before any of them, road-weary families on their way to distant destinations looked for another familiar fixture along America’s arteries — the bright orange roof of Howard Johnson’s.
Not long ago, those distinctive roofs were hard to miss — not just because of their unmistakable color, but because they could be seen just about everywhere. At the chain’s peak during the 1970s, more than 1,000 Howard Johnson’s Restaurants and 500 Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodges awaited travelers across North America.
However, like fake wood-paneled station wagons, the success wouldn’t last. While tired travelers can still check in to a more modest number of Howard Johnson hotels, the chain’s once-beloved restaurants and their signature orange roofs have vanished from the landscape. Still, the memories remain. Fond recollections of smartlyappointed orange-and-teal dining rooms with sparkling soda fountains, platters of crispy clam strips and creamy mac ‘n’ cheese, and of course, freezer cases filled with 28 tantalizing flavors of ice cream — all conceived by the man with the vision to create the first great chain of the American highways.
Building an Ice Cream Empire
Many entrepreneurs built empires from very little. Howard Deering Johnson started with considerably less. Born in the Boston neighborhood of Dorcester in 1897, Johnson attended school only through the eighth grade before dropping out to help his father run the family’s thriving business, importing, and selling cigars. In the early 1920s, however, the company ran into trouble. The elder Johnson made a large advance payment for a shipment of Cuban cigars that arrived in port spoiled. The seller denied responsibility. When his father suddenly died not long afterward, Johnson found himself at the head of a floundering company, and $30,000 in debt. Left with the responsibility of supporting his mother and three sisters, Johnson considered his options. Though dealt a bad hand, the young businessman still had much going for him.
“Despite only having an elementary school education, Johnson had the acumen of a business school graduate,” says Anthony Sammarco, Boston-area historian, and author of the book A History of Howard Johnson’s: How a Massachusetts Soda Fountain Became an American Icon . “He was smart and charismatic, a real presence in the room. He was also what today we’d call a ‘lifelong learner.’”
One lesson Johnson learned was that the cigar trade wasn’t for him. He liquidated his father’s company and tried his hand at another.
In 1925, he purchased a small drug store in Quincy, Massachusetts.
Johnson quickly found that there was little he could do to entice more customers to buy the medicines and sundries for sale in the front of his store. But business was often brisk at the small soda fountain in the back. He realized that his ticket to success might be to offer truly exceptional ice cream — like the kind sold by a local pushcart vendor, an elderly German immigrant.
Learning the man planned to retire, Johnson offered the vendor $300 for his recipe.
To Johnson’s delight, the man accepted. The secret to the ice cream’s rich deliciousness, Johnson learned, was doubling the usual amount of butterfat and using only allnatural ingredients.
But for Johnson that wasn’t enough. Toiling away in his basement with a hand-cranked machine, he perfected a vast assortment of distinctive flavors: coconut, macaroon, fruit salad, chocolate pudding, and more. Ultimately, Johnson emerged from his cellar with 28 tasty flavors, a number he believed represented “every flavor in the world.”
Young Howard Johnson had taken his first big step toward becoming THE Howard Johnson.
A Crash and a Jumpstart
Johnson’s decision to go all in on ice cream proved to be a scoop. Soon, the line of customers at his soda fountain stretched out the door. Sensing opportunity, Johnson opened stands at area beaches to sell his ice cream along with hot dogs and soft drinks. Within three years, he was selling 14,000 cones a day and grossing $240,000 a year.
The success of the stands emboldened Johnson to take his next step. In 1929, Johnson opened his first fullfledged sit-down restaurant. In addition to hamburgers, the restaurant’s menu featured “frankforts” (as Johnson called his hot dogs), macaroni and cheese, chicken potpies, and other dishes that today we might call “comfort food.” Johnson also included one more off-beat offering — “clam strips,” a New England favorite. It would become his signature dish.
From the beginning, Johnson was a stickler about the quality and presentation of the food. As with his ice cream, he insisted meals were prepared fresh using only natural ingredients. “Howard Johnson’s offered good food at sensible prices,” says Sammarco. “But it wasn’t just the price, it was the quality. The meals were attractive on the plate and delicious.”
Word of Howard Johnson’s Restaurant spread fast, and the restaurant was a sensation. But just as Johnson laid plans to expand, he was dealt another major setback. The stock market crashed, initiating the Great Depression. Cash for financing dried up instantly. Rather than allowing the crisis to stunt his ambitions, Johnson was inspired to conceive perhaps his greatest idea — franchising.
While Johnson didn’t have the necessary funds to open another restaurant, a longtime family friend, Reginald Sprague, did. Johnson and Sprague reached an agreement. The wealthy Sprague would put up the capital to finance a new restaurant to be run by his son. Johnson would provide the food and supplies and, most importantly, allow the restaurant to use his increasingly famous name and logo —
for a considerable fee, of course. Howard Johnson had created America’s first franchise agreement.
Located at the busy intersection of Route 28 and Route 6A in the popular tourist destination of Cape Cod, the new Howard Johnson’s became as successful as the original. Soon other eager investors were clamoring to reach similar agreements with him.
By 1935, the chain had grown to 25 locations.
Rise of an Icon
Johnson never made much money working for his father. But the experience of driving around America’s Northeast delivering cigars provided valuable insights that he would apply later. First, he learned how hard it was for travelers to find restaurants that could be relied upon to serve good food at inexpensive prices. The observation would strongly influence where his restaurants would be located.
“Johnson told prospective franchisees that if they couldn’t be on a major road or busy intersection, they shouldn’t bother,” says Sammarco.
Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge, Chicago, Illinois.
Acting on his own advice, Johnson partnered with the Esso and Gulf Oil Companies in the early 1930s to purchase the exclusive rights to build restaurants in service plazas along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Ohio Turnpike, and New Jersey Turnpike.
Johnson’s sales experience also taught him the value of differentiation and branding. He designed the exteriors of his restaurants to resemble inviting colonial-style homes with dormers and central cupolas with clocks. Each cupola was topped with a weathervane conceived by artist John Alcott featuring Simple Simon and the Pieman from the popular nursery rhyme. The design would become the Howard Johnson’s logomark. Most importantly, Johnson demanded that the shingled roofs of his buildings were painted a vibrant orange, which he deemed “the best shade for attracting a motorist’s attention.”
Howard B. Johnson, the founder’s son and eventual head of the Howard Johnson Company would later say, “The orange roof saves us a lot of advertising bills. The orange roof is symbolic. People know exactly what they can count on when they see it.”
Travelers noticed the restaurants, all right. They also stopped. By 1940, more than 100 Howard Johnson’s lined the highways of the East Coast from Maine to Florida. But like a decade earlier, just as the chain was stepping on the gas, it would encounter another roadblock. America’s entrance into World War II hit Howard Johnson’s like a bombshell. Leisure travel nearly ceased overnight. Gas and food became rationed. Diners stopped eating out. By 1944, all but 12 Howard Johnson’s Restaurants had closed.
Johnson kept his company alive — barely — by providing food to military installations, defense plants, and schools near his remaining restaurants.
Also like a decade earlier, when the war was over, the adversity Johnson experienced helped him rebuild his company even stronger.
All Highways Lead to Howard Johnson’s
By the war’s end, Americans were eager to put hard times in the rear view. Blessed with a booming economy, paid vacations, and a bounty of shiny new steel-bodied station wagons, excited families hit the highways to explore the many attractions and boundless beauty of their great nation. Howard Johnson made it his mission to help them on their way.
In making a fresh start, Johnson believed his chain should have a fresh look. He hired Miami architect Rufus Nims to provide it. Nims’ style was sleek and modernist. He replaced the staid dormers and traditional clapboard siding of the original restaurants with sparkling floor-to-ceiling glass windows and chic white stucco walls. He transformed the colonial-style cupolas into teal space age pyramids set on low roofs of beaming orange porcelain. But the Simple Simon weathervanes remained, as did Howard Johnson’s appeal to travelers. By 1954, the chain boasted more than four hundred locations along America’s highways.
Still, Johnson wasn’t satisfied. While on his own trip to Florida, he stopped at his restaurant in Savannah, Georgia. During his meal, Johnson observed several families walk from the restaurant to retire to their rooms at the motel next door. He immediately realized his next step.
In 1954, Johnson opened the first Howard Johnson Motor Lodge — right where the idea had occurred to him, in Savannah. Like Kemmons Wilson’s Holiday Inns, launched a year earlier, Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodges offered travelers — especially budget conscious families — spacious, clean guestrooms boasting full bathrooms, air conditioning, televisions, and other amenities. Soon, Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodges became nearly as common along the nation’s highways as the chain’s restaurants.
When construction of America’s Interstate System began two years later, in 1956, Howard Johnson’s was poised to explode. Unlike with the turnpikes, the legislation creating the Interstate highways specifically prohibited service plazas. Instead, Johnson shrewdly purchased land near exit ramps on which to build his restaurants and motor lodges.
“Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the success of Howard Johnson’s was directly attached to the construction of the Interstates,” says Rich Kummerlowe, who runs “Under the Orange Roof,” a website dedicated to the history and legacy of Howard Johnson’s. “The chain appealed to people primarily because of standardization. You knew what you were going to get from Howard Johnson’s wherever you traveled.”
To ensure such consistency, Howard Johnson innovated a commissary system in which meals were created in central locations, then flash-frozen and distributed to restaurants for final preparation. In 1960, Johnson famously hired acclaimed chefs Pierre Franey and Jacques Pépin from New York’s ritzy Le Pavillon restaurant to oversee his kitchens. The duo introduced new menu items like chicken croquettes, while prepping and cooking vast quantities of food each day.
Throughout the 1960s, the growth of Howard Johnson’s was nothing short of meteoric. In 1961, when the company went public, the chain already included 605 restaurants and 88 motor lodges. Soon, the company was opening a new restaurant every nine days. By 1965, sales at Howard Johnson’s Restaurants exceeded those of McDonald’s, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken combined.
The orange roofs of Howard Johnson’s became a familiar sight across the country. During the period, the company opened several notable properties in Los Angeles and along Route 66. The Howard Johnson’s in Springfield, Missouri, was considered the crown jewel of its region. Now known as the Oasis Hotel & Convention Center, the property remains a popular hot spot for aficionados of the Mother Road.
“Howard Johnson’s became part of the fabric of American life just like baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet,” says Kummerlowe. “Everyone went to Howard Johnson’s.”
That is, until they didn’t.
The Orange Begins to Fade
In 1968, Howard Deering Johnson retired from the company he founded. A decade earlier, he’d already turned the reins over to his son, Howard Brennan Johnson. Despite overseeing a period of tremendous growth, the younger Johnson encountered major headwinds as he guided his father’s company into the 1970s.
The OPEC Oil Embargo of 1974 led to gas shortages and recession at a time when the company depended on road travel for 85% of its revenue. The company also faced intensifying competition from economy motel chains, and multiple fast-food players offering speedy drive-thru service.
But the company’s greatest challenge may simply have been changing perceptions. A new generation saw Howard Johnson’s as the place where their parents went, with many joking that the chain offered “fast food served slow.”
After attempts to diversify and modernize failed, Howard B. Johnson sold the company to the British-based Imperial Group in 1980. Similarly unable to reverse the chain’s fortunes, Imperial sold the motor lodges to Marriott who in turn passed them on to Wyndham Worldwide.
Left essentially orphaned in the series of transactions, Howard Johnson’s Restaurant franchisees tried to soldier on. As the years passed, however, one location after another shuttered. Today, just one original Howard Johnson’s Restaurant remains open, in Lake George, New York.
Everything Old is New Again
While little more than memories remain of Howard Johnson’s once omnipresent restaurants, travelers can still
make their way to a hotel that bears the famous founder’s name. Now owned by Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, Howard Johnson Hotels (the ‘s’ was officially dropped from the name in the 1980s) boasts more than 300 locations around the world, including properties in China, Saudi Arabia, and even Cambodia.
In 2012, the chain received an unexpected boost when it was featured on the HBO series Mad Men . In the episode, 1960’s ad executive Don Draper and his wife Megan head off to Howard Johnson’s flagship property in Plattsburgh, New York, on a “fact-finding boondoggle” as research for a pitch. Draper comes away impressed. Apparently, so did many viewers.
Hoping to capitalize on the renewed interest, Howard Johnson Hotels and its individual hotel owners recently embarked on a $40 million effort to update and redesign guest rooms in the classic mid-century modern style.
“The new look and feel seeks to celebrate our storied past, while looking to the future with modern amenities, playful design, and a re-imagined aesthetic that is distinctly Howard Johnson,” explains Clement Bence, Brand Vice President, Howard Johnson by Wyndham. “It’s fun, memorable and makes people smile.”
Somewhere, Howard D. Johnson is no doubt among them.
Howard Johnson’s restaurant entrance with its trademark weather vane.
Photograph courtesy of CZmarlin.
Howard Deering Johnson.
WALDMIRE’S BUS
The Mother Road contains multitudes of wacky artifacts and historical sites that weave through Illinois to California, but perhaps what is just as important are the loyal “66-ers” that travel the road each year. On Route 66, there is perhaps no bigger roadie-legend than artist and free-spirited Bob Waldmire. For a time, Waldmire was best recognized for his iconic ’72 Volkswagen microbus that he bought in 1985, which served as the inspiration for the hippievan character “Fillmore” in the 2006 animated Pixar movie, Cars. Waldmire, however, was always looking for the next adventure, and something much bigger — a home-on-wheels, as a matter of fact — was at the forefront of his mind.
In December of 1987, Waldmire stumbled upon a 1966 Chevrolet school bus while driving through New Mexico and promptly sent a letter home to friends and family in Illinois.
“Along the way in Grants, New Mexico, I spotted and quickly fell in love with the vintage, rust-free, 1966 Chevy School Bus, which I have in mind to convert into a homestudio road-show mobile-environmental resource. I hope that is rather self-explanatory,” the letter said. Self-explanatory, yes. But, a home-studio road-show? What did that even mean? Well, a total reinvention ensued of the ‘66 school bus into a fully functional living space with a wooden second story. Modern day van-lifers’ creations pale in comparison to Bob’s great two-story Road Yacht, now laid to rest in the parking lot of the Route 66 Hall of Fame and Museum in Pontiac, Illinois.
“[An eccentric friend of] Bob’s showed up at our farm home in Rochester, in a school bus that he had converted to his homestudio-everything,” said Buz Waldmire, Bob’s older brother. “That’s where Bob first got the idea of getting a school bus and turning it into that… he was outgrowing his VW van.”
Once back in Illinois, Bob had many hands to help him with his big conversion. “Creating that bus was kind of an adventure,” said Buz. “It was like a bunch of kids building a treehouse.”
In the early days of the bus, Waldmire’s mother had helped with the interior design, but over time the look changed as he continued his travels and artistry, collecting mementos
along the way. “Every part of the bus reflects Bob,” said Buz. “I mean, the solar shower … his self-composting toilet — which is one of the few technological things in the bus — his hand-made shelves, his dozens and dozens of reference books, containing information from birds, habitat, animals, mushrooms, human anatomy, diseases, insects. He researched everything he drew or thought about.” While down-sizing considerably from a modern home, he kept the most important parts of his identity and essential modern appliances within the home Road Yacht.
The bus sustained several cross-country road trips as Waldmire split his time between Hackberry, Arizona, and the Springfield, Illinois, area. He was undeniably a man on the move, and his carriage was the bus. For many local Route 66-ers, it became an enjoyable pastime, looking out for when Bob Waldmire may pass through town on his yacht.
“I’ve had a lot of travelers, visitors, who say, ‘It must’ve been great to live the kind of life he lived!’” said Buz.
“Because he went where he wanted, when he wanted. I mean, that’s kind of a dream that a lot of people think about.” However, towards the end of his life, Bob parked his bus on his family’s farm and lived where he had started his project so many years earlier.
66.
After the beloved and well-respected artist died of cancer in 2009, the Road Yacht—still filled with everything Bob had used while living inside it—took its last trip to Pontiac, Illinois, where it remained parked for thirteen years as tourists from around the world came to get an inside look at the life of the Route 66 legend. In the summer of 2025, the bus was temporarily relocated to make room for an upcoming Centennial Plaza project, scheduled for completion in time for the Route 66 Centennial in 2026. Visitors to the museum are invited to learn more about Waldmire and his evolution as an artist in the Bob Waldmire Experience on the second floor of the museum building. Though Bob Waldmire has long since passed, the unencumbered, carefree way he lived his life continues to inspire people from around the world—and there may be no better symbol of this than his much-loved Road Yacht. Bob would have liked that.
by David J. Schwartz
The ODELL STATION
Humble Illinois village Odell is perhaps better known for its past than its present. From the abandoned Mobil gas station dating back to the 1950s, to the now-filled subway tunnel that traveled under a very busy Route 66 from the late ‘30s to early ‘40s, a great deal speaks of the settlement’s long life. But none is more recognizable or in as pristine a condition as the Standard Oil Gas Station that appears like an apparition from the quiet winding road. This is the Odell Station.
When U.S. Route 66 was six years into its lifespan, in 1932, a contractor named Patrick Henry O’Donnell saw an opportunity to set his family for life from the constant influx of traffic. He purchased a spot of land along the Odell street and, with the blessing of Standard Oil Company of Ohio, began constructing the Station. O’Donnell even adopted the company’s architectural style for its 1916 stations: a domestic “house with a canopy” look that struck a chord with most customers.
Within the year, the building was completed and leased to O’Donnell’s oldest son, Patrick Joseph O’Donnell, starting the family business. However, the O’Donnells were not alone in their prospects, and by the ‘40s at least nine other gas stations had popped up along Odell’s stretch of Route 66. Patrick Joseph failed to compete with them and instead leased the Station to multiple tenants throughout the years. Finally, a gentleman who ran a Phillips 66 gas station just north of Standard Oil was coerced into taking over the dying Station, on his condition that he could add bays to the structure.
years later when the original Patrick O’Donnell passed away. He faithfully worked both aspects of the Station until 1967, when he decided to remove the gas tanks and focus only on auto repairs.
Throughout the next two decades, Close continued to service vehicles in the Station, though he failed to keep up with the building’s maintenance. By the time Weiss and the soon-to-be Illinois Preservation Committee entered the picture in 1996, the facility was ready to be toppled.
“So the six of us got together and said, ‘Well, this is a good project,’ so we went to the mayor at the time and talked to him,” Weiss recalled. “People didn’t understand tourism [at the time], they didn’t understand why we would [restore it], and it was so deteriorated, everybody said, ‘You’re crazy! It’s falling down! Tear it down, burn it down!’ And we were so naïve that we did it anyhow.”
While the community at large didn’t support the Committee at first, one man, Ed Seal, who would go on to become the next mayor of Odell, saw the value in their work. He loaned them the money they needed to purchase the Station from the Close family in 1999, and from there they turned the property over to the village. It was no small boon that earlier, in 1997, the Committee managed to add the Odell Station to the National Register of Historic Places.
“[The previous owner] put [the bays] together himself with anything he could find, and nothing matches,” explained John Weiss, the Illinois Preservation Committee Chairman. “The doors don’t match, the windows don’t match, the ceiling tiles don’t match. You’ve got scraps of this and that, but he put bays in there and nobody else did. This gave [the new owner] the opportunity to do auto repairs, and that’s why [the Station] still exists and the other ones all faded away.”
Indeed, with the construction of a bypass in 1944, much traffic was directed away from the busy strip. The Odell Station outlived the other stations by the niche of its body shop. But the facility would change hands again in 1952, this time to those of Robert Close, the owner of the café next door. Close went on to purchase the property outright two
The Committee held fundraisers and poker runs to pay off their loan to Seal, increasing the Station’s publicity. Before long, sponsors such as Hampton Inn jumped on the bandwagon to help pay for the project in return for some publicity of their own.
“You’ve seen the roadside attraction signs that go up and down the road?” asked Weiss. “Well, they started because of the Odell Station.”
With its growing army of volunteers, the Committee restored the Station to such a state that it won the National Historic Route 66 Federation Cyrus Avery Award in 2002.
Now, kept up in its white paint, blue roof, and swinging Standard Oil sign, the Odell Station welcomes travelers from across the world. Souvenirs and audio recordings are available to visitors, and the store also holds a car show once a year. While its gas-supplying days are long over, the innocuous business has grown into an icon reflecting the times of the open road, and against all odds, will remain so for decades to come.
Step Back in Time, Fall in Love Again.
Stroll hand-in-hand down Galena’s Historic Main Street, where unique shops, inviting patios, and vibrant energy create unforgettable moments. In Galena Country, history meets fresh experiences in a way that’s forever original—making your escape to the Driftless Region truly one of a kind.
visitgalena.org
Photograph by Efren Lopez/Route66Images.
A CONVERSATION WITH
Diane Lane
By Brennen Matthews
Photographs courtesy of Brian Bowen Smith
From the very beginning, Diane Lane’s life seemed scripted for the stage and screen. Born into a family of fascinating contrasts, her mother a singer and Playboy centerfold, her father an acting coach and cab driver, and her grandmother a Pentecostal preacher, Lane grew up surrounded by stories and characters. By the age of seven, she was already performing in New York City’s legendary La MaMa Theater, navigating a world most children only glimpse through books or film. And she never looked back.
That early immersion in performance set the stage for a remarkable career. From her breakthrough role in A Little Romance to unforgettable performances in The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, and The Perfect Storm , to The Cotton Club, Trumbo, Inside Out , and Unfaithful , Lane has captivated audiences with a rare combination of vulnerability and strength. Over a career spanning five decades, she has earned acclaim, including an Academy award and Golden Globe nomination and recognition from critics and peers alike for her extraordinary emotional resonance.
In this conversation, Lane reflects on a childhood split between constant travel, early professional demands, and complex family dynamics, revealing how those experiences shaped not only the actor she would become but the woman she is today. From behind-the-scenes stories on The Outsiders set to the quiet wordless eloquence she brings to The Perfect Storm and the transformative journey of Under the Tuscan Sun , Lane shares candid insights into her craft, life, and resilience. This is a conversation about the threads that weave a life into something extraordinary.
Your family background almost reads like a novel. You come from quite an interesting stock.
Yeah, and those are just the characters that I’m most familiar with personally. I mean, genetically, who knows how many people we’re all made up from, right? I mean, when you say stock, I think of epigenetics, and 11 generations is a big gene pool. So, who knows to what I owe my resilience or willingness to keep at something and find what it still has to teach me. You know, doing one thing for a long period of time is unusual in some ways, but not in others.
Besides coming from such an interesting family background, you were also on stage at just six or seven in Medea at La MaMa in New York City. What was it like jumping into that world at such a young age?
I got my first… I suppose you’d call it a job! Although at six it doesn’t feel that way. (Laughs) I turned seven before the show opened, so technically I was a 7-year-old when the curtain went up, but it takes so much time to prepare a play for presentation. I say about theater, you can’t have a miracle without a crisis, and I think theater is kind of for adrenaline junkies. Like, “Let’s put on a show, people will come, and we better have our act together.” Literally.
So true.
I mean, you’ve got to be of a shared goal mindset, and I loved that sense of community that I got from being a member of the La MaMa Theater Company in the early ‘70s. It was amazing, to be there, [to be] the child in their cast, whatever play they were doing.
Did your parents steer you toward performing, or was it something that grew naturally out of your environment?
It was sort of in the ethers. I don’t know how to put it in a better way. It was still lingering in my father and mother’s life, even though they weren’t married any longer, and I was a child of divorce from the get-go… but both of them still had a connection to showbiz, as it was referred to then. The joke was — and it turned out to not be a joke in the least, it was very tangibly true — it was better than daycare, or whatever after-school programs there might have been in public school in 1972. So, I gained a purpose, I gained an identity through being a responsible party in these productions of these plays. I had to stay in school and do my homework. And the people in the play, I was sort of envious of the adults, because they didn’t have homework, they didn’t have to go to school at eight in the morning, you know… so I was just this very tired little kid, in a lot of ways. But it did give me muscles, my brain, it gave me a sense of stamina that I didn’t even realize I was developing.
You definitely had such an unusual childhood, but that was a lot to juggle at any age, especially as a young child.
Well, I was very keen on attending to the wounds of both of my parents. I was the need for them to stay in communication with one another. I think they would have happily avoided staying in touch, but they had this rest-oftheir-life job to do, which was to share a daughter, so I kind of felt like the apologetic bridge between them. I would go back and forth, and it was very awkward as far as the triangulation that would occur, and, you know, the cliche, “I would never ask you to choose which parent you want to live with, but who do you want to live with?” And I thought, “Wow! What an epic fail of role play of adult and child.” And so, in that way, it definitely tinkered with my understanding of what goes into [a] relationship. I mean, we’re all the walking wounded from our childhoods, it’s just about filling in the blanks of the details of what that is.
You were constantly traveling, performing, and spending time with adults. Did it ever feel like you were living in a completely different world from other kids your age?
I don’t really understand people that had these… summer for them was a verb, and to me, I just looked at people that had siblings or could go to the Christmas parties or whatnot. I mean, we had an extra show to do, you know? So, there was always doing the tours in Europe in the summer, and being away from both of my parents, all through most of what we call Europe and some of other parts of the world. I remember seeing the ruins of Baalbek and Persepolis in my schoolbook, in the classroom, with everyone studying about world history in our rather simplistic schoolbooks. And I wanted to jump up and down and say, “This is where I was this summer!” But I couldn’t, because I knew that it would make me a freak to the kids. So, I learned how to sort of…
how would I phrase it? I mean, do you know your audience, or do you curtail yourself from your own sense of joy about things, because it makes other people uncomfortable? I should say it makes other fourth graders uncomfortable. (Laughs)
Most kids are figuring out who they are on the playground, and you were figuring it out on stage and on the road. Do you feel like it changed the way you see yourself — and maybe even the kind of actor you became?
You know, a trade is a lifelong sort of identity, when I think about people who are in various fields of endeavor. I find it interesting that in my line of work, I’m representative of whatever limitations I may have. I am a gender, I am a race, I’m an age, I’m a citizen of a certain zip code, you know. I do love, I don’t know if it’s anonymity, but it’s not having crafted, intentionally, anyway, too much of a [specific] persona.
My father was of a different school of thought on what being an actor is. He did believe in crafting a persona, and to me, that was such an oxymoron. Is it another mask you’re supposed to present? As the “artist” or performer, or storyteller, or piece of clay that morphs into whatever role play is required to tell a story? The anonymity of the person that’s behind the proverbial mask is, I think, somewhat essential and a gift to both the recipient and the giver of a story. That’s the difference between being a celebrity and being a craftsperson, I think. It’s kind of a tightrope walk. I remember a small town I lived in for a while in Georgia, and there was a little company there that made signs, and their sign said, “A business with no sign is a sign of no business,” meaning, you have to promote or whatever. So, interfacing with a level of curiosity about who’s behind the proverbial mask is… the older I get, the more mysterious in some ways I realize life is.
You were 17 when you landed The Outsiders , working with Francis Ford Coppola and acting alongside a group of young actors — Tom Cruise, Matt Dillion, Emilio Estevez, Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio, Rob Lowe — who all went on to become huge stars. How did that role come to you, and what was it like stepping into that world as the only female lead?
Well, I had been hitting the pavement, showing up at random auditions, just because it was something to do after school. I was a latchkey kid. So, I’d find out about roles and show up at auditions or readings. It could be an orange juice commercial, it could be a play Rodgers and Hammerstein were auditioning for, it could be… well, it was only Rodgers then, but everything in between. I was comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Did you have an agent or were these cattle calls?
No, no, no, no. Back then, you’d hear about stuff, because there was so little of it going around.
I mean, when the Time Magazine article was written [1979], it was because it was such a weird phenomenon to be having so many young people in cinema at that point in time. They were like, “Look at this strange phenomenon of all these very young girls who are the focus of these films,” so it was very anomalous.
I had met Fred Roos because somebody had said, “You need to come to visit the Zoetrope lot, [Francis Ford Coppola’s film production company] and see how they do things.” And I must have been, I don’t know, 16 years old or something? So, when, maybe a year later, they were casting these movies, I basically got a call. By then I had already done, I don’t know, four movies or something, so maybe I had an agent. So, they knew that I could do it. And they knew that it wasn’t a risk that I couldn’t handle, what was going to be asked of me. You know what I’m saying? I had been tested, in a way, in terms of capacity, and being a team player, and having a bit of a reputation, like, “Is she crazy, or is she gonna show up on time?” They never know with actors, right? That’s why they don’t let you drive yourself to work, because they’re afraid you might not make it. They treat you like children all of your life, if you let them. (Laughs)
But, anyway, all kidding aside, I had met Francis on the set of One from the Heart [1981]. He always had a very opendoor policy about people coming through. So, just that one meeting, I think, Fred remembered me and said, “You know, we could just go to Diane and offer it to her.” I think that’s what happened, because I never read for it.
That’s amazing! The experience for the guys was a bit different.
Oh, their stories are legend. There was so much competition among them… who was gonna get which part, and all of that. No, I practically had an epidural.
Surrounded by all these guys, were you intimidated at all, or did you feel like you could hold your own from the start?
It was a strange hybrid of both. You know, there was only one of me. So, I didn’t feel like I had a bunch of siblings to be rivaling with in terms of attention, which I guess is something that you either want or don’t want, but it depends on your mood that day. You know, it felt like all of them and just me, meaning I needed to sort of keep my head down and not provoke anything that I didn’t want to provoke. Of any kind of attention, you know? I was a little bit of an introvert, I think. But I would show up to the, probably illegal, keg parties that were happening there in Tulsa, with all of these girls from Oral Roberts University. Those girls were all over. When they heard about these boys being in town, there would be a keg party, and I didn’t exist. It was all of them, and I just thought, “Wow, it’s like a smorgasbord and a feeding frenzy. I’m gonna go home, back to my hotel room, I can’t handle all this hormonal energy.” It was a lot. It was fascinating to be an observer of that, actually, and to see how the young men either stayed in character or were refining their characters, or breaking out, or forging friendships and buddy systems, and taking teams and, you know, staying in their “Soc” versus “Greaser” role, which was asked of us to maintain as much as we could.
Do you remember any behind-the-scenes moments that capture what that experience was like?
You know, there’s the epic story of Rob and Emilio, and I don’t know who all was behind it, but they somehow seduced the keys away from the housekeeping girls, and they got
into all of our rooms, and they short-sheeted the beds, and put honey all over the toilet seat, and put Vaseline on the doorknobs, and wrote “Helter-Skelter” on my mirror with lipstick, and I was in shock. You know, I heard that at one point they were going to leave a fully loaded toilet behind, and I’m glad they didn’t do that.
That’s wild!
But it’s so fun, because I never got to participate — I didn’t get to go to summer camp, you know? I didn’t get to do a lot of things that a lot of kids did, so in some ways, I got to have it in Tulsa that summer.
Patrick [Swayze] was older than most of the cast. How did he fit into the group?
I think he was already married with Lisa by then. He was the upstanding, yet slightly enabling, older brother. He took on the would-be uncle role, and, you know, he took to that really well. And it was just adorable, and it was fun, because the bridge between, or I should say, the membrane between, our roles and our role play with each other was very thin and elastic. We never knew when we were in and out of character, it was hard to know.
On the set of The Outsiders with Francis Ford Coppola, did you feel that same kind of intense push that Martin Sheen talks about from Apocalypse Now , or was it a different vibe on your set?
It was a very different film, and I was dealing with a — can I say post-apocalyptic? (Laughs) — Francis. I could deal with it. It was a post-Apocalypse Now Francis. You know, so I think he had achieved what he set out to do. And I don’t think he felt the need to go to 11 on the dial with his own psyche to that extent again. I think, as a leader, he was so under the gun, and thank God for Eleanor Coppola, who filmed and made that amazing documentary on the experience that Francis was having, and therefore everyone around Francis.
So, in a word, no, I don’t think that he needed the same amount of… he was very anti-miasma.
When you finally saw The Outsiders , all put together, with the score and Ponyboy’s narration, what was it like watching the whole film for the first time?
Well, I don’t know, I mean, when you’re 17, you just want to be 35. You just want to be a grown-up all the way, and I couldn’t experience the full message of the film, because I hadn’t lived enough to understand the loss of innocence and what a treasure innocence is. In terms of, it perishes as you become aware of it. It’s ephemeral. It’s like a dream. If you talk about it, you can’t keep it. It’s a strange phenomenon, but you hold it close to your chest, and it’s very rare for a poem or a shared experience to speak to so many people, but when you look back at your youth, and you say, “Wow, we were innocent, we had something worth protecting about our innate nature… Before the world got a hold of us and made us respond to it, because there was no alternative.” And that becomes character-defining in a different way, right? But knowing your essential inner nature and your innocent self is
a beautiful thing to value, and the circumspectness of Susan (S.E.) Hinton was extraordinary… The fact that she had to change or de-genderize her name so that no one would know a teenage girl wrote the book, so that it would be taken seriously as a piece of submitted writing. I found that very touching.
One of the films I really love you in is The Perfect Storm . There are scenes where we feel everything just by watching your face and your body language. That’s such a rare gift. When you’re in a moment like that, where the silence speaks louder than words, what’s happening internally for you as an actor?
Well, first of all, you’ve complimented me several times in what you just said, so I wanted to say thank you, and may I live up to that !
This one was just very grounded in global news. And of course, the catchphrase, meaning the title of the film, became timeless, you know? I don’t even know what you call that, when it becomes a coined phrase forever forward from that point. But that was Sebastian Junger’s book. I couldn’t put it down. I read it in one sitting, just like what happened with Lonesome Dove . I mean, some of this writing, you just hope to get it to the screen in any way that can live up to the original source material. So, bringing those visuals to life with Wolfgang Petersen was… I mean, he was the perfect man for the job. One of the things I loved about Wolfgang, God rest his soul, is that he was one of those directors that I would just stand near in order to get to the silent center of the emotional space. Not everybody has that energetic field where they are a grounding force for their actors. But that was one of his gifts, and I don’t think it’s a skill. I think it’s a talent.
So, like an orchestra leader, through his energy, he guides others, and we were holding space for all these dead souls. There’s something about responding to a human outcry that has really transpired in history, or on the earth, or in living memory. And when you respond to it by saying, “We hear you, we feel you, we want you to know, we want you to feel seen, we want you to feel heard,” it takes on a proportion that becomes sacred territory. Because you have a duty to perform, to respect the dead, and their loved ones, and the loss, and the love. So, it just became important work. And among the people who did remain at that point, the matriarch of the family was still alive. And the woman who I was playing was somebody who I had hung out with. I wish I had emulated her personal style more, because she was such a specific type of, you know, she strikes you visually. But we went in a different direction, and that’s fine. But it was nice to be in a blockbuster. It never happened to me before, you know, where they’re bragging about the numbers. It was a lovely experience, because I cared, and it was a human story, and it just checked a lot of boxes in the zeitgeist, as entertainment wants to do. Yeah, so I give Wolfgang the credit for that, in terms of grounding us all in the point of the story.
What was the vibe on the set? I’ve heard that George [Clooney] can be quite the prankster. Any funny or unexpected moments come to mind?
They would play basketball a lot around the trailer. I’ve told this story — I hope I’m not telling tales out of school; I don’t
think he’d mind — but I remember at one point, George found some dirt on the set, or on the ground or something, and he rubbed his hands in it, and he just rubbed it on his face, and he was like, “I’m ready. Let’s do this. That’s my makeup. Let’s go.” (Laughs) Like, I love this guy! I want to be this guy! Why can’t I do that as an actor? Well, they won’t let me. Because I’m a, you know, whatever, the “pretty girl syndrome.” But, you know, I had a little envy in terms of just a different pool of options that are afforded to you traditionally in terms of gender and how you can comport yourself. But it was fun to behold.
Were you emotional when you finally saw the picture on the Big Screen?
Oh, yes, especially when I got to see all the scenes that I wasn’t in! I mean, I wasn’t in that film very much. I was the lucky one who got to sit at the bar and cry, you know? I mean, compared to getting ear infections and sinus infections and throwing up between takes — like the guys — because they were in that tank recreating the storm in the belly of the beast… I’m sure that water was really not kosher to have going in every orifice of your body for 12 hours a day. After the second month, I wouldn’t want to go anywhere near that water. (Laughs)
Under the Tuscan Sun (2003) was such a huge film for you, and it earned you another Golden Globe nomination. There’s a quiet symbolism in watching Frances sort of fix up the crumbling villa piece by piece while she’s rebuilding her own life…
That was the construct. I mean, the overlaying of one story onto another. Don’t forget, it came from a book, which was about fixing up a villa and a cooking recipe list of, you know, ribollita and all these things that you can make. That was a huge bestseller as a book, but there was no plot there for a film. The genius of Audrey Wells was that she took her broken heart’s true story and overlaid it onto this book and grounded it in a human-heart victory story, a triumph story of healing after a dream has died. Dreams die harder than pretty much anything.
That’s part of what makes Under the Tuscan Sun so moving, that whole idea of rebuilding yourself and discovering new dreams along the way. At this stage in your life, do you find yourself relating to that idea on a personal level?
I think there are many stages to life, and as a woman, I’m very comfortable with the cyclic nature of the learning curve and the humility of what’s involved in being alive. And there are, as they say, peaks and valleys and plateaus and setbacks and being there for one another. It really is about friendships, and about the solace of, you know, trusted, intimate friends, and that is beyond price, in terms of value. Audrey was a dear friend of mine, and her loss is gonna be felt my whole life, because it’s rare to forge a friendship through working in a film, because the nature of a film can be pretty… compartmentalized. But she wasn’t that type of person. She was the opposite. She was more of a, “Let’s incorporate it, let’s use it, let’s dance with it.” And she gave such a richness to the story that was not part of the book,
so I was just happy that it turned out as well as it did, and it remains a staple for a lot of people. I’ve seen it emulated a lot as a prototype type of film, which is a very high compliment. It just warms my heart that I got to be in a film like that.
Motherhood is such a powerful part of life. My son just started university — he’s 17, so I guess it’s the start of the empty nest stage, watching him need me less, and look for independence more. Do you remember going through that with Eleanor? How did you handle it, and what was it like for you?
Well, you cannot rehearse for the empty nest. It’s not possible to rehearse it. If I could have, I would have, and protected my heart better, but it was impossible. So, you realize that you are part of humanity, and that you just have so much more compassion for your own parents, and the strength, and the different ways that things were done compared to when you were the age of your child, whether they’re two, or whether they’re 12, or whether they’re 22. So, you get to revisit your own childhood, and you get another chance to do it differently, to do it better, hopefully. Or to do it with more patience or do it with more circumspect. And then, of course, things conspire, and it’s imperfect. You know, no matter what, parents are going to make their children’s therapists rich. I feel for you, because it is the thinnest time. The loss
can make you feel bereft. It needs to be acknowledged. I think there should be a support group, I really do. (Laughs)
Did you always picture yourself having just one, or was that just how life worked out?
Well, life conspired. I think we tend to replicate our experience. I was an only child. I know people that were in larger families, and they create larger families. It is what it is. My dad, I remember him saying, “Don’t have more, let her have what you had. All that attention.” And I thought, “Wow, Dad, I didn’t know that you were so aware of how greedy I was happy to be.” And I looked around at my friends that had siblings when I was growing up, and I just saw them being tortured, and misunderstood. When I say tortured, I mean emotionally, they were insatiable in terms of the comparisons and the rivalries and all of that. If one [sibling] was good at something, that meant you had to pick something else, because your sibling was already good at that, so what, are we gonna compete playing the same instrument? You gotta go do your own thing, you know? I didn’t have any of that. I looked around, and I felt very spared. But now, I have sisters that are chosen. You know, the family of choice, right?
Yeah, it’s a beautiful thing.
You’ve lived through so many stages — marriage, divorce, motherhood. And in your work, you’ve also had to bring those kinds of real-life experiences into your characters, like in Nights in Rodanthe . Looking back now, what lessons has life taught you about love and resilience?
Oh, gosh, I think I’ve forgotten them. (Laughs) No, I’m saying, I have calmed. The great calming has arrived, and I’m so grateful. My mother said, “The eyes go in the nick of time.” And, you know, everything becomes an impressionist painting, and the edges soften, and the needs and the demands are really more about offering to myself what I need so that I can have my cup be full enough so that I bring something to offer.
To someone else…
Yes, that is a responsibility that is hard to know or learn in your 20s, even your 30s, because there’s so much asked, especially of women. You know, you have this very limited window of time that is considered your procreative years, versus men who, as we’ve documented very well, you know — some of them become fathers in their 80s, or whatever. So, I’m just saying, to go back [to the question], I would say, taking care of myself. When I thought ahead about meeting with you today, I was thinking… I joke when I’m with other people sometimes, because they’ll say, “Oh, I was accosted in a friendly way by a person who appreciated some work that I had done.” This was at a dinner recently, and somebody was telling me their story, a fellow actor, and I said, “Oh yeah, I’ve signed whatever you want me to sign,” meaning, if they get me confused with another actress, I’ll just sign her name. I’m not offended, and some people will say, “Are you Diane Lane?” And I’ll say, “No, I’m her older sister,” because that’s what I feel I’ve become. I’ve become my own older sister. I take care of the part of me that needs to stay gold, you know?
You started your career as a young beautiful leading lady, and that kind of attention has followed you over the years. But as you’ve grown and taken on different roles, have you noticed a change in how people see you — or in how you see yourself?
Well, I remember working with Gena Rowlands. Years ago, we did a Hallmark Hall of Fame [Grace & Glorie]. It was such an honor to work with her, because she knew my dad, and I was like, “Dad, you should come up and visit, we’re up in Danbury, Connecticut.” And he’s like, “Oh no, I don’t want her to see me like this, are you kidding? I’m fat, I’m bald, I’m old. I don’t want her to remember me like this.” And I said, “Dad, what are you talking about? She’s not looking like how you remember her either, you know?” I thought it was adorable that he was… you know, nobody is immune to the fact that they’ve been every age, every age that you have been continues to live within us. And that’s a beautiful gift. That’s the trade-off of having more in the rearview mirror than you do down the road. You know, she would sign these headshots at the wrap for the crew that were saying, you know, “Ms. Rowlands, I loved you so much! At the end of the show, would you please sign a headshot for me?” She said, “Of course I will!” And her headshots were from her Gloria days, because that’s what people want to remember. And that’s fine and fair, and she got it, and she had no qualms about it, no apology, no awkwardness. Give them what they want. The fact that Gena and my dad used to date… it was adorable to me. I wish that I could have sat in a room with the two of them, and been a fly on the wall for them to share what you’re describing as far as the kind of grace that comes with allowing all the stages that you have been. I don’t remember who I’m quoting, but there’s some great quote about how “God gave us a memory so we could have roses in winter.”
That’s a great quote.
It’s a goodie, and when you see a couple who remember each other from their youth and can be in each other’s company, it keeps something alive. And the wonderful gift of being in the public eye is that you’re allowed to carry that with you. You’re not just the person who looks the way you do now, people remember that you used to be all these other things, too. So, it kind of prepares them to be forgiving and humble with themselves.
I was looking over your projects and it reminded me of when I worked with Edward Norton. I asked him if he had a favorite project he had done, and he laughed and said there were so many that he’d actually forgotten many of them. With such a large and diverse body of work yourself, do you ever feel the same way?
That’s interesting. I have an analogy for that, or a lived experience which has become an allegory for this question coming into my life at this age. In A Little Romance , there was a scene with a very wonderful actor who… I didn’t know who he was, because he was of an age and of a generation so far from a 13-year-old girl, which was the point, and she was sort of trapped in this adult cocktail party having to do with the showbiz world. And at one point, he says, “Ward Bond, Ward Bond. Did I ever make a picture with Ward Bond?” And
it was so surreal, but it was a snapshot and almost a sarcastic commentary about the very thing that you’re describing, where it’s possible for a person to let go of their past in order to stay present. I mean, life demands that of us, whether for our mental health, probably, or for just staying current in the zeitgeist that we swim in. It’s sort of a requirement to let go, and let the pieces fall where they may, and people have their darlings, and people have their orphans.
But it’s like your children, I imagine. If you had hundreds of children, would you have a favorite? That would be almost sacrilegious or something. So, I think they all speak to a kaleidoscope of experience, and effort, and a learning curve, and [they] certainly require an amount of forgiveness for lessons needing to be learned, and there’s no other way in life except to keep learning and growing. And if you have an opportunity to continue, what a blessing, you know?
You’ve built such a varied career, and it feels like you’re very thoughtful about the projects you take on. Your new film, Anniversary , really stands out — it’s political, timely, and thought-provoking. What was it about this story that made you want to be part of it?
Well, I was a fan of Jan Komasa’s oeuvre. He has an audacity, and he has a skilled kind of perspective that he frames his stories in, and I find I can’t turn away, and I find them unforgettable. And I wanted to be in a film like that. I love the fact that he’s not American, he’s from Poland, and I love the Europeans’ experience of America. The experiment of democracy. The audacious arm wrestling that is ceaseless, it seems, for power in this country. And you know, taking
the temperature of wherever we’re at, in terms of when we filmed it, it’s only even more prescient and timely. I’m kind of amazed at the screenplay that Lori Gambino wrote. What can I say? I mean, I just love his eye, and I think it was exciting to be in something that is a surprise.
Given how political Anniversary is, were you at all concerned that the audience might project their own partisan lens onto it — or did you feel the story rose above that divide?
It’s very rubbery. It’s pliable, it’s pliant, it’s not as brittle as you would think, in terms of identifying who is the agent of change within the story. I mean, there have been perspectives that are every bit as American on both sides of the coin. It’s still the coin. You know, you may be looking at heads or tails, but it’s still the coin, whatever the great “change” is. What’s happening right now is very, I think, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em. I watch the main players in the arena right now of red versus blue, going back to Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em. So, I find it fascinating, and I think it’s one of those films where you could say, “Well, it depends on who you ask. Who’s the agent of change?” A lot of people felt that they were being oppressed and dictated to by the agenda of the other side. And that’s all that matters. So, we’re not sitting here telling you which is, to put in your words, a political party. That was not the point of getting people into the theaters. It’s to have a conversation
Joplin’s Legacy with BONNIE AND CLYDE
The 1930s represent an eventful period for enthusiasts of the Mother Road, encapsulating both the early years of Route 66 and the birth of many popular roadside attractions. This era also marked the rise and fall of gangster-duo Bonnie and Clyde, whose various criminal escapades across the Midwest often fell alongside the Mother Road. The significance of these two pillars of American history and pop culture interestingly intersect in the city of Joplin, Missouri, in the form of a small garage apartment; a hideout if you will. Despite its innocuous appearance, the infamous Bonnie and Clyde refuge has a tumultuous history that continues to draw curious travelers and followers of American true crime into the suburban streets of Joplin.
Located at 34th Street and Oak Ridge Drive, the building that became known as the Bonnie and Clyde Hideout was built in 1927, just one year after the establishment of Route 66. Constructed from stone in Craftsman style, the apartment carries a modest appearance with little indication of its historical significance — unless of course you spot the bullet hole above the door. The apartment’s association with the infamous Barrow Gang dates back to April 1933, when they inhabited it for 13 days. During their stay, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, along with Clyde’s brother Buck, Buck’s wife Blanche, and their sidekick and driver W.D. Jones, hid out in the apartment over the garage while they stole more weapons and another car. Their late-night activities and a stray shot from the gun Clyde was cleaning raised suspicions from neighbors, who tipped off the police.
not garner national attention at the time. “It was in the paper mostly because of the fact that two of our constables were killed,” said Patrick Tuttle, director of Joplin’s Convention and Visitors Bureau. “It was only covered for two days and then dropped off. So, it wasn’t really well-known until [after] Bonnie and Clyde were killed.”
Tuttle holds a personal connection to the Hideout, which was owned by his father for 38 years in the decades following the shootout. During this period, the original 1930s decor of the apartment was removed. “My dad avoided it being put on a historical register during that time because he didn’t want it to be dictated. He had to take care of his house,” said Tuttle. It was, however, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.
In 2008, the hideout underwent a restoration when the property was sold to a pastor named Phillip McClendon. McClendon planned to convert the property into a bedand-breakfast, in hopes of maintaining public interest in the historic spot; he redecorated the interior of the apartment with restored 1930s furniture, hoping to evoke images of how it may have appeared during Bonnie and Clyde’s stay. But when a destructive tornado struck Joplin in 2011, the city was left with a serious shortage of housing. Plans to turn the apartment into a bed-and-breakfast were then paused, and McClendon began renting the apartment out on a longterm basis to tornado refugees. Ever since, the property has functioned as a private residence.
Assuming the presence of bootleggers, officers arrived at the address on April 13, 1933. To their surprise, they were confronted by the Barrow Gang in a shocking shootout that left a county constable and a police detective dead. Bonnie, Clyde, and the other gang members hightailed it out of the garage, abandoning possessions that are now regarded as historical artifacts — most notably, a camera containing now-infamous photographs of Bonnie jokingly holding Clyde at gunpoint. Joplin’s local newspaper printed these photos in the days following the shootout, but the hideout itself did
This small, suburban refuge carries melancholic and intriguing historical significance for both locals and strangers, as thousands of Route 66 tourists make a pitstop in Joplin each year to glimpse the small apartment that once housed two of America’s most notorious criminals. “We try not to glorify the shootout itself,” said Tuttle, “But it’s a piece of Americana, the antiquity of the property, and people from all over the world have it on their list of places to see. It’s a part of our notoriety and an important piece of history.” Along with other attractions, the Bonnie and Clyde Hideout exemplifies the role that true crime has played in American history and highlights the desire to see such locations as part of the Route 66 experience.
LITTLE HOUSE
To the Prairies and Beyond
By Olivia McClure
Laura Ingalls Wilder once wrote: “I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.”
For Wilder, life in a pioneer family in the late 19 th Century was, truthfully, seldom simple or sweet. Born during the Reconstruction era, Wilder was thrown into a world recovering from a terrible war, with the added unpredictability of traversing untamed, often dangerous wilderness in a cramped, covered wagon.
For young readers, Wilder’s tales of harsh South Dakota winters, exploring the wild with Jack the bulldog, and the soothing, airy sound of Pa’s fiddle kindled their tender imaginations. Since the first book of the Little House series, Little House in the Big Woods, was published in 1932, Wilder’s books have made a profound impression on the minds of countless children who have found solace
Previous spread: The Ingalls family, pictured left to right: “Ma” Caroline Quiner Ingalls, Carrie Celestia Ingalls, Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder, "Pa" Charles Phillip Ingalls, Grace Pearl Ingalls and Mary Amelia Ingalls. 1891.
Charles Ingalls. 1894.
in the simplicity and authenticity of Wilder’s life story, as it is told through the innocent, yet keen perspective of her much younger self. Michelle McClellan, Professor of History at the University of Michigan, was one of the millions of people who fell in love with the Little House series as a child.
“I got the yellow boxed set as a Christmas gift from my parents when I was in elementary school,” McClellan said.
“I loved them immediately, I think for a few main reasons. Laura is such a lively, multifaceted heroine, so that attracted me quite a bit. I also already liked history yet had not encountered many stories about girls or families in the past, so the Little House books drew me in for that reason.”
Through her semi-autobiographical book series, Wilder reveals the truth about life on the frontier, sharing harrowing stories about catastrophic blizzards and a grasshopper plague that destroyed their wheat crop. And yet, optimism and humor pulsate throughout Wilder’s series, revealing the author’s uniquely beautiful perspective on life. In the sixth book of the Little House series, The Long Winter, Wilder writes: “Laura felt a warmth inside her. It was very small, but it was strong. It was steady, like a tiny light in the dark, and it burned very low, but no winds could make it flicker because it would not give up.” For Wilder, every terrible truth had a silver lining, which was found in the warm embrace of family and a glowing fireplace.
A Pioneer Girl’s Childhood
On February 7, 1867, Wilder was born to Charles and Caroline Ingalls in a log cabin outside of Pepin County, Wisconsin. She had three sisters, Carrie, Mary and Grace, and a younger brother, Charles, who died when he was just nine months old.
Charles Ingalls, referred to as “Pa” throughout Wilder’s books, set out to provide for his family by any means possible. It was this determination that led Charles to take his family across the Midwest in search of a better life and a stable career. In 1874, Wilder and her family left behind their log cabin in Wisconsin and traveled to southeastern Kansas, or “Indian Territory.” While household duties kept the entire family occupied day after day, their chores were interrupted by intermittent catastrophes. For instance, the following spring, the entire family fell ill with malaria. But regardless of the daily hardships Wilder and her family faced, she maintained a keen interest in the everchanging landscape in which she constantly found herself.
Nancy Koupal, Director and Editor-in-Chief of the Pioneer Girl Project, said that Wilder’s love for the natural world characterizes all of her writings.
“She was at home in nature. She truly loved the natural environment in which she lived. She had true affection for wildlife and flora and foliage. So, that stands out to me because it’s palpable in all of her writing.”
Family Matters
For those who read the Little House series, one of the aspects of Wilder’s life that stands out the most is the tightknit bond of her family, which enabled them to endure constant setbacks. In Koupal’s opinion, it’s this prototypical family image conveyed in Wilder’s books, which captivates readers of all ages.
“I think it’s that universal family that everybody wishes they had grown up in. They’re very supportive of each other. They make this unit against the world almost, and I think she captured something that almost every child wishes they had, and almost every adult.”
Wilder maintained a strong relationship with her parents until their deaths, which ultimately proved to be the motivation behind her Little House series.
“When she got the news that her father, Charles Ingalls, was on his death bed in 1902, she dropped everything and went to De Smet, for the first time in years, to be by his side,” said Caroline Fraser, author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning biography, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. “And although she didn’t travel to see her mother before she died, in 1924, I think that loss was nonetheless very [melancholic] and meaningful for her. It inspired her to write to her mother’s sister, Martha, to ask about their early lives. Those letters would become the catalyst for her long-cherished dream to write about her childhood.”
Her siblings lived the rest of their lives in South Dakota, where their pioneer adventures had ended. After attending a school for the blind, Mary moved back to De Smet to live with her parents. Following their mother’s death in 1924, Mary moved into Grace’s home in Manchester before making
her final move to live with Carrie in Keystone. Unlike her TV persona, Mary never married Adam Kendall, a teacher at the blind school, nor did she teach. After having suffered a stroke and a battle with pneumonia, Mary died on October 20, 1928 at the age of 63.
Much like her literary sister, Carrie lived a notably exciting life. Carrie had always planned to be a teacher like Laura, but during her teenage years, she became a typesetter for the De Smet Leader. Eventually, Carrie managed various newspapers across the Badlands area of South Dakota for journalism mogul E.L Senn. In 1907, she traveled on her own to Topbar, South Dakota, next to the White River Badlands, and lived out of a tarpaper shack. Carrie settled down in Keystone in 1911 and continued to work in the newspaper business until she married David N. Swanzey the following year and became a stepmother to his two children, Mary and Harold, at the age of 42. Following in his stepmother’s adventurous footsteps, Harold later went on to help carve Mount Rushmore. Carrie died from complications with diabetes on June 2, 1946 at the age of 75.
After working as a schoolteacher in Manchester, Grace married Nathan William Dow in her parents’ De Smet home on October 16, 1901. Later in her life, she worked as a freelance journalist for several newspapers. She shared a similar fate with her sister, Carrie, and died from complications with diabetes on November 10, 1941 at the age of 64.
Almost all the Ingalls sisters were united by a shared penchant for writing, which impacted their lives in different ways. Every member of the Ingalls family, except for Laura, is buried in De Smet Cemetery, where they lay together under the vast, ever-changing South Dakotan sky, in the very place that witnessed the close of their extraordinary pioneer life.
Married Life
In the eighth book in the series, These Happy Golden Years , Wilder reminisces about the beginnings of her relationship with her husband, Almanzo Wilder, who was ten years her senior. While living in De Smet, South Dakota, at age fifteen, Wilder left home for the first time to be a teacher, which she did in order to pay for her sister, Mary, to attend a school for the blind. Since the schoolhouse where Wilder taught was twelve miles away from her family’s home, Almanzo would drive her back
Mary Ingalls. 1880s.
Laura and Almonzo.1892.
at the end of every school week. During these weekly rides, which sometimes consisted of risky drives through dangerous blizzards, the two fell in love.
The couple married in De Smet in 1885 and settled in a home Wilder built on land that he owned. The following year, the couple welcomed the birth of their daughter, Rose Wilder, who would later follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a writer herself under the name Rose Wilder Lane. Like her childhood, the first few years of Wilder’s marriage were marked by profound misfortunes, which are chronicled in the final book of the series, The First Four Years. In 1889, the couple’s son died when he was two weeks old from “convulsions.” Later, after both Laura and Almanzo suffered a terrible bout of diphtheria, Almanzo was left partially paralyzed. Following this setback, the couple’s home tragically burned to the ground.
For the next few years, life was chaotic and unsettled for the young family. After spending a year living at Almanzo’s parents’ home in Spring Valley, Minnesota, they decided to try to start a new life in Westville, Florida, with the hope that the warmer weather would improve Almanzo’s health. Deterred by Florida’s unfamiliar, humid weather and feeling out of place among the locals, the Wilders moved back to De Smet in 1892.
While Laura and Almanzo’s marriage began with many obstacles, it never threatened to break the bond they formed and the love they had for each other.
“It was difficult, at times, because they weathered a lot of hardship and tragedy,” Fraser said. “But it was difficult in the ways in which many long marriages can be difficult. I do think they loved each other very much to the end: They argued and fought and made up again. Almanzo spoke about Laura’s temper almost with admiration, at times.”
The Move to Missouri
In 1894, the Wilders moved to Mansfield, Missouri, located about an hour’s drive from the beautiful city of Springfield, and purchased an undeveloped property outside of town with the money they had saved up. The home they built there, in which Laura and Almanzo would spend the rest of their lives, would eventually serve as the place where Wilder’s Little House series came to fruition.
“Rocky Ridge, the farmhouse that Wilder and her husband built on their land outside Mansfield, was the culmination of Wilder’s lifelong dream of having a rural home in a lovely, wild place,” Fraser said. “But while the farm was indeed in a glorious setting, life there involved virtually unending labor until the Wilders ‘retired’ late in the 1920s. I put that in quotes because retirement for them hardly involved putting their feet up and taking it easy. That’s when Wilder started writing her books.”
During the 1910s, both Laura and her daughter, Rose, embarked upon their writing careers. While Rose began writing for the San Francisco Bulletin , Laura began work as a columnist at the Missouri Ruralist . During her time at the Ruralist , Laura wrote columns, which advocated for the rights of farm women and shared her tips for the grueling farm work that characterized her days at Rocky Ridge Farm.
“When you read Wilder’s farm columns from the Missouri Ruralist , you see how her days unfolded — caring for chicks and hens, cleaning chicken coops, milking, hauling slops to pigs, separating cream, churning butter, gardening, canning, cleaning, ironing, washing dishes, baking, cooking,” Fraser said. “It’s incredible, the work these women did.”
For Rose Wilder, her writing talent sparked a taste for yellow journalism, which is interesting considering she would later work with her mother on the Little House series.
“I was particularly surprised by the revelation that Rose Wilder Lane began her career as a newspaper reporter in Hearst’s San Francisco, and became a kind of notorious yellow journalist – [journalism that presents little or no verified well-researched news] – inventing ‘autobiographies’ of Charlie Chaplin and writing bogus celebrity biographies,” Fraser said. “That’s an astonishing revelation, given that Wilder and Lane eventually end up collaborating, as writer and editor, on another fictionalized autobiography — the Little House books.”
While Rose developed her career on the West Coast, the Wilders settled into their new life in Missouri, continuing their farm work and getting to know their new neighbors. Laura, in particular, fully integrated herself into the local community.
“She became very involved in the community of Mansfield,” Koupal said. “She joined clubs, she advocated for farm women, [and] she worked in various capacities in Mansfield at various times in her life. So yes, I would say she was very invested in that community.”
From the Prairies to a Publisher
Under her daughter’s persuasion, Wilder penned the first of her autobiographical works, Pioneer Girl , around 1930. Wilder’s autobiography remained unpublished until Koupal and others from the Pioneer Girl Project and the South Dakota Historical Society Press published an annotated version of it in 2014.
According to Koupal, Rose and Laura initially believed they would be able to publish the autobiography in magazine installments. When this proved unsuccessful, they determined Laura should compile her memories into children’s novels.
Despite the success of the Little House series, Laura and Rose’s relationship was undoubtedly strained. Fraser described unearthed letters exchanged between the mother
and daughter as “fairly unguarded” and “pretty frank.”
Ultimately, the discord between Laura and Rose that had been growing over the years resulted in estrangement.
“But the relationship between Laura and Rose was strained and was a disappointment to them both,” Fraser said. “In addition to the normal tensions of any motherdaughter relationship, they had the additional burden of their professional collaboration, which existed almost from the time they both became professional writers, in the 1910s. That tension grew particularly intense during the time they were working on the Little House books. On top of that, Lane lived with her parents for significant periods, and these were times when she experienced deep depressions and felt a lot of resentment toward her mother. Ultimately, they ended up living apart.”
Wilder’s Legacy and Its Impact
With an imagination as vibrant and colorful as her memories, Wilder was destined to create a cherished children’s book series. And yet, within the hope and love that permeates her books, there is a tinge of darkness that cannot be ignored.
Located about an hour’s drive from Route 66, the Wilder’s Mansfield farmhouse is open nine months out of the year.
Visitors to Rocky Ridge Farm’s museum can view artifacts from Wilder’s life, including Pa’s fiddle, Laura’s handwritten manuscripts and Rose’s writing desk.
“A visit to the Mansfield home is just like a trip through the novels,” Koupal said. “It’s something everybody should do who has any fondness for [Laura Ingalls] Wilder or her novels or just has any appreciation for that era of American literature.”
Recognizing the success of the Little House book series, Ed Friendly decided to create a television show based on Wilder’s novels during the 1970s. Friendly asked Michael Landon to direct the two-hour pilot movie, which aired on
NBC on March 30, 1974. Landon agreed, under the promise that he be allowed to portray Charles Ingalls in the series. When the entire TV series aired in September of 1974, the Wilder family’s pioneer travels entered the homes of millions of American households. Melissa Gilbert, who portrayed Laura Ingalls Wilder, became the face of the famous author, while Karen Grassle portrayed Caroline Ingalls, Melissa Sue Anderson played Mary and sisters Lindsay and Sidney Greenbush portrayed Carrie.
Unlike Wilder in real life and in the book series, Gilbert’s portrayal of Laura was exceptionally adventurous, traveling to the Pacific Ocean and getting trapped inside in an abandoned cabin during a blizzard. Likewise, Grassle portrays Caroline as a meek wife and mother with an occasional fiery side, which wasn’t true for the actual Caroline or her literary persona. For his part as Charles, Landon remained fairly true to the real person and his literary equal, although he didn’t grow Charles’ beard. Interestingly, Dean Butler’s portrayal of Almanzo Wilder was more accurate in terms of the age difference compared to Wilder’s illustration in the novels, considering he was eight years older than his co-star, Melissa Gilbert. Regardless of the occasional disparities between the televised Ingalls family and their literary and real-life counterparts, the popular TV series made millions of viewers fall in love with Laura and her close-knit family.
Nevertheless, with fame often comes controversy. In 2018, the American Library Association (ALA) stripped the Laura Ingalls Wilder Children’s Literature award of the author’s namesake, due to the presence of derogatory depictions of Native Americans and African Americans in Wilder’s novels. Regardless of the nature of these descriptions, the novels shouldn’t be deprived of their literary value. In McClellan’s opinion, the Little House books should be used to gain a better understanding of past prejudices.
“The books themselves are a historical artifact,” McClellan said. “They describe events that took place during the 1870s
Laura and Almonzo with neighbors. 1929.
Laura and Almanzo’s home in Mansfield, MO.
and 1880s, and they were written during the 1930s and 1940s. So, it’s not surprising that attitudes have changed a great deal. I’m not saying that we should excuse or ignore language and attitudes that are troubling to us today, but I don’t think that means that the books have no value. For one thing, Wilder expresses a diversity of views about American Indians and African Americans in her books, which helps us understand the range of attitudes in any one time period, as well as changes in attitudes over time. For another, I think the challenge for readers, teachers, historians, and literary scholars is to use books like these to prompt important conversations about race and equality in the past and the present — not simply dismiss or ignore them.”
In an article published in the Washington Post, Fraser voiced her disagreement with the ALA’s decision, stating, “Whether we love Wilder or hate her, we should know her.” In her mind, the Little House books allow children to understand the harsh reality of American history. Regardless, Fraser said the ALA’s decision was one that should have been expected.
“I understand the ALA’s decision,” Fraser said. “It was a long time coming, and children’s librarians had been talking about the issue for decades. So, it wasn’t a snap decision, made at the spur of the moment. Children’s librarians voted on it and ultimately felt that their award needed to reflect a wider audience and a more inclusive sensibility.”
Whether readers love or hate Wilder’s books, the author’s influence on American literature cannot be undermined. Undoubtedly, the Little House series defined the frontier experience for readers. Yet, Fraser argues, the romanticized depiction of pioneer life illustrated in the books and in the TV show evade the complications and difficulties of early settlement.
“Since Wilder completed her series in 1943, the Little House books have had a tremendous influence on how generations of schoolchildren viewed homesteading, farming, and American settlement … By the time the television show came along in the 1970s, a whole new generation was primed to receive what became a very sentimentalized and nostalgic view of the Little House: the idea that homesteading and American settlement were a rousing success and reflected American values of independence and self-reliance. But as I argue in Prairie Fires , if you look at the ways that the books, and especially the TV show, fictionalize the Ingalls’ experience, you begin to realize that settlement and homesteading were a far more complicated affair, one that cost everyone involved, from the settlers to the Indians they displaced, dearly.”
The End of a Pioneer Era
Wilder truly lived a complicated, ever-changing life. From her younger years, traversing the undulating prairie lands inside a covered wagon, to her later years as a wife, mother and novelist, Wilder defined the image of the pioneer woman. She embraced change with alacrity, endured the darkest of tragedies and sought happiness through it all. And unlike many authors, she chose to share her story through the eyes of her childhood self, so that children could learn about the landscape, people and places that characterized the American frontier. After suffering two heart attacks, Almanzo died on October 23, 1949 at the age of 92, in their farmhouse in Mansfield. On February 10, 1957, Wilder succumbed to the
diabetic complications that claimed the lives of two of her sisters. She died at the age of 90 in their Mansfield home. Rose Wilder Lane died on October 30, 1968 at the age of 82 in Danbury, Connecticut. All three of them are buried alongside each other in Mansfield Cemetery.
According to Fraser, Wilder’s complex life can be seen as a great play composed of distinct, influential acts. Wilder bore her role as one of America’s greatest authors with ease, leaving behind a literary legacy that speaks for itself.
“As I say in Prairie Fires, her life falls into three acts, like a play: There’s the very dramatic first act of her childhood, when she experiences all the adventures and disasters that she writes about in the Little House books,” Fraser said. “But then there’s a profoundly important and tragic second act — the catastrophes of her early married life, when she and her husband, Almanzo, lose crop after crop to bad weather, go deeply into debt, and fall ill with diphtheria. It’s at that time that her husband is left permanently disabled by a stroke. Then they lose their second child shortly after his birth, and their house burns down. All of these losses set them on a path away from Dakota Territory. That exile from her family, I argue, is the event that ultimately inspires her desire to write her childhood. And finally, there’s her difficult but triumphant third act, as she becomes a writer during the Depression, helping to save their fortunes and memorialize her parents. It’s all a wonderful story, but for me, it’s her extraordinary persistence in that second act of her life — her bravery and tenacity in facing down loss after loss — that truly stands out.”
Wilder once stated: “Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I will remember you all. If you can only remember me with tears, then don’t remember me at all.” In truth, Wilder’s legacy can only be remembered with smiles and laughter, for that is exactly what her books teach — the eternal power of seeking joy in the simple, heartwarming facets of life.
Laura Ingalls Wilder in her later years. 1930.
A Living Legacy
Not too far from Miami, Oklahoma’s elegant Coleman Theatre rests a very special Route 66 landmark; a one of a kind attraction even, that continues to entice people off of the Mother Road with their tasty food and quirky yellow fiberglass bird sitting high up on its perch. Originally opened in 1965, Waylan’s Ku-Ku Burger is the sole survivor of the former 1960’s fast food chain.
Eugene Waylan, the owner and expert burger flipper of the iconic venue, purchased his restaurant back in 1973 from a firecracker salesman who didn’t know how to run the business. “I already had ten years of experience of restaurant [work] before I bought it. The other [Ku-Ku Burger restaurants] were being run by the company, and one by one these individuals couldn’t keep up with it or sold it,” explained Waylan. “There are a lot of buildings that look like the Ku-Ku, but are [actually] other things like car lots... I get a lot of people that come by to eat and say, ‘We used to have a Ku-Ku in our town.’” Now they have all but vanished.
The Ku-Ku Burger chain was created by a man from Oklahoma City whose name is now long forgotten, beginning as a smaller establishment and expanding into a chain with almost 200 locations. It received its oddball name due to the cuckoo clock aesthetic that each restaurant had, complete with a little yellow bird donning a white chef’s hat. But with the changing culture and increasing competition, the brand slowly began to disappear, dying out in 1969, with its remaining locations being operated by independent owners until they too folded.
“I want to be able to tell [customers] that this is the same food that you had 30 years ago. The same hamburger,” noted Waylan. “I’ve had changes since I’ve been here. I have a monthly special, I’ve added buffalo burgers... But everything else is what we had before.”
While Waylan’s exceptional, giant hamburgers can be attributed to part of his restaurant's survival, his success likely comes from the way that he runs his business, centered around the friendly community of Miami and the Mother Road.
“2,500 to 3,000 [tourists visit] a year,” said Waylan. “Actually, some of them don’t come in to eat, they just take a picture of the [sign.]” Along with the kitschy bird statue and green and yellow neon sign, Waylan has done quite a few renovations to the building, starting back in 1977, when he added his name to the neon sign in the same spot where the price of 15 cent hamburgers was once advertised. Along with expanding the drive-thru and adding another bird statue next to the drive-thru sign, Waylan also added two additions: one made of brick in 1977, and one of glass in 1990. Though he initially thought that he had made a mistake with the additions — as it was harder to see the Ku-Ku bird from the road — visitors kept pouring in off of the old highway each year to have one of Waylan’s famous burgers and soak up the Route 66 nostalgia decorating its walls.
Now in his mid 70’s and having operated Waylan’s Ku-Ku Burger for 46 years, the Miami local isn’t looking to slow down any time soon.
Buying his restaurant after the company was defunct, Waylan started his first day on the job by making less than $100 but grew his business to become an iconic Route 66 stop for the welcoming town of Miami (pronounced Miama). Now Waylan’s location is one of a kind.
“Oh yeah, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m not planning on retiring,” he explained. “There’s too many good things going on. I want to be doing something. It’s such a good feeling to be able to talk to these people.”
Swing by Waylan’s Ku-Ku Burger restaurant for a giant hamburger, some good conversation, and a slice of Route 66 history.
WIGWAM MANIA
By Nick Gerlich
Margolies
Photographs by John
Behind every threat lies a golden opportunity for those willing to look beyond the obvious problems. When cars replaced horses and bicycles as the preferred form of transportation early in the 20th Century, it spelled doom for farriers and vendors of two-wheeled conveyance. Suddenly, people could travel great distances in a short period of time.
But shiny new cars also spelled opportunity for others. Gasoline stations, the first of which had sprouted in 1907, quickly popped up across the country, allowing motorists to travel without carrying a jerry can full of fuel. Cafes opened, feeding hungry tourists along the way. But there was one thing missing. People needed a place to sleep, for suddenly a road trip was not limited to just one-day affairs. Fancy hotels had long been the mainstay of the rich in urban centers, generally near a train depot. But with the democratization of travel, the middle and lower classes needed accommodations too. Camping by the side of the road may have served that purpose for a while, but travelers increasingly wanted more.
To this end, the roadside motel was born. There were fits and starts, but it was the effort of Frank A. Redford that ultimately produced one of the most memorable and iconic motel chains in the U.S., one that caught the attention of Pixar and went on to find its place in animated film.
Cone of Inspiration
When Redford built a concrete cone-shaped structure in 1933 to house his Native American artifacts collection, there
were very few motels alongside U.S. highways. He added six similar cones in 1935 to serve as tourist cabins, and his motel enterprise was off to the races. In fact, the very word “motel” had been coined only ten years earlier, and only because of space consideration on a sign.
“The word ‘motel’ originated in California with the ‘World’s First Motel’ in San Luis Obispo, when the Motel Inn was established in 1925. A combination of the words motor and hotel, the motel is a hotel (typically single story) designed for patrons traveling by car,” said Heather David, author of Motel California . “Because motels catered to a car culture, the primary form of advertising was roadside advertising, with eye-catching features such as distinctive architecture, neon signage, and in later years, swimming pools strategically positioned near street view.”
While roadside architecture eventually adopted the vernacular style in each region, there was little done to stand out among the small but growing number of competitors. Redford had a plan though, and he threw down the gauntlet. His conical-shaped cabins were a whimsical nod to Native American abodes, as well as the onset of kitsch as king on the open road. In doing so, he unwittingly left behind a legacy of pure Americana.
That year, those six cabins became the first of seven Wigwam Villages (he preferred “wigwam” over “teepee”).
This first unit was located in Horse Cave, Kentucky on U.S. 31E, one strand of the Dixie Highway. The DH, brain child of Carl G. Fisher, carried an increasing volume of traffic to Florida, and thus provided immediate benefit to Redford’s modest enterprise.
Richard Ratay, author of Don’t Make Me Pull Over! An Informal History of the Family Road Trip, acknowledges that motel architecture was not something that happened from the first day. “Initially, there was no architecture. During the first road travel boom during the 1920s, motorists simply found a pleasant place along a road, pulled over, and either set up tents or just slept in their cars. It was called ‘autocamping.’ Eventually, enterprising businessmen improved on these campsites by building ‘motor courts ,’ which were basically groups of huts built in a horseshoe shape around a fire pit or central common area. These huts offered only basic amenities, perhaps a couple of cots and a stove. The Wigwam Villages built by Frank Redford during the 1930s were really just fancy versions of these motor courts,” he continued. “Redford settled on the Indian theme because he owned a museum/gift shop that sold Native American artifacts and [he] wanted to extend that theme to his new lodging facilities.”
to be an ownership chain, but rather with franchisees. This, too, was an innovation, as by that time, the Alamo Plaza Hotel Courts in Texas was the only chain on the horizon, it being centrally owned.
Never mind that Redford misappropriated the word “wigwam,” because the units were in fact more teepee-like. Teepees (purists will argue “tipi” is more accurate) are portable tent-like dwellings, which Redford’s resemble, whereas wigwams are small cabins with its frame covered in bark or skins. Adding a little more comedy is the fact that wigwams were the domain of eastern tribes, and thus nowhere in Redford’s geographic coverage would a real wigwam have ever been found.
Redford’s indiscretion, though, was not of any concern for tourists. “There sure wasn’t any disconnect for travelers. They weren’t looking for historical accuracy. They were looking for an interesting place to spend a night or two and take a fun memory home with them,” said Ratay.
David argues that motel operators took liberties not to mislead, but rather to fuel travelers’ flight from reality. “Motel theming was always more about fantasy than reality. There was a considerable amount of creative license when it came to these themes. Sure, there are/were plenty of historical and geographical inaccuracies, but I don’t believe that motel owners intentionally misled people,” she said. “The idea was to offer everyday people an opportunity to escape.”
Redford closed Village #1 in 1937 because he felt the state was more likely to develop and maintain nearby U.S. 31W. He thus opened Village #2 a few miles down the road in Cave City. The original operated under new owners and different names until it closed; it was demolished in 1982.
Redford applied for a patent for his design in 1935, and received it in 1936. Each tipi had a diameter of 14 feet, rose 32 feet from the ground, included a small partitioned bathroom area, and featured a somewhat protected entryway mimicking fold-away flaps of a real tipi. The patent was Redford’s green light to increase his operations, which he intended not
Village #2, which is still operating today, has 15 teepees in a semi-circle, with a larger structure in the center that once housed a restaurant. Today, it serves as the office and a gift shop. The Cave City property was owned by Sahudir Mir and his wife from 2005 until it was purchased by Kevin Stone and Megan Smith in November 2020.
The Great Depression no doubt hindered Redford’s ability to grow his business, as it wasn’t until 1940 that two more Wigwam Villages were added. Village #3 was planted in New Orleans on U.S. 61, while Village #5 (it is unknown why they went out of sequence) sprouted in Bessemer, Alabama, on U.S. 11. The New Orleans location only made it to 1954, while Bessemer’s managed to keep afloat until 1964.
World War II interrupted expansion plans once again, dealing an eight-year drought, while the nation committed resources to the war effort. Travel and tourism were down anyway, and Redford had to wait patiently to see his dream unfold. Once things settled down, he continued the trend of focusing on north-south U.S. highway corridors, opening Village #4 in Orlando, Florida, on U.S. 441 in 1948. It had 27 teepees, the largest in the chain.
The post-war boom brought a change of heart to Redford, who then turned west for his final expansion. Village #7 (once
again out of sequence) opened in 1949 in San Bernardino, California, while Village #6 was built in sunny Holbrook, Arizona. Both are along U.S. Route 66, which by then was carrying a heavy volume of travelers on holiday or seeking fame and fortune on the West Coast. The Holbrook and San Bernardino locations join Cave City as the only remaining Villages still in operation. They are also familyowned businesses. The Lewis family has operated the Holbrook site throughout its existence, while the Patel family has owned the San Bernardino location since 2003. Redford had originally built the California location to manage himself. At that point, Redford’s chain grew no more. There had been a few knock-off competitors, like the one in Wharton, Texas, seeking to infringe on his design and theme, but there were other changes afoot, ones that likely dealt more of a punch than copycats. Redford’s Wigwam Villages were, by concept, intended more as novelty than basic functionality. With no more than 19 units per village, the Wigwams were increasingly being outdone in capacity by emerging mom-and-pop motels with sprawling properties that had 30 or more rooms. And, unknown to Redford at the time, the onset of large corporate motel chains like Holiday Inn, Ramada Inn, and Howard Johnson were about to redefine the hospitality industry.
These changes signaled new preferences for larger accommodations, and subsequently, the predictability of the larger chains. Each teepee was about 154 square feet in area, while standard rectangular motel rooms were trending ever larger (they average 325 square feet today). In high-growth areas like New Orleans and Orlando, the land beneath the wigwams became more valuable than the structures on top.
And Then the Decline
Redford’s grand project began to lose its relevance as the 1960s arrived, primarily as a new generation of travelers evolved. What was “kitschy-kool” in the 1930s through 1950s lost its luster as the happy-go-lucky 1950s and 1960s ushered in a completely new era of roadside attractions that were much larger and even quirkier in scope. Themed motels featuring exotic places and the forthcoming space
Wigwam Village #2, Route 31W, Cave City, Kentucky. 1979.
Previous spread: Wigwam Village Motel, Rialto, California. 1977.
age replaced the earlier fascination with the Southwest and Native American culture.
Further complicating matters were the large chain motels, and a growing preference among travelers for predictability. While nowadays there is an emerging interest in seeking out a unique and unexpected experience, at the time, travelers wanted more control over their dining and lodging. There was little doubt in anyone’s mind that a room at a Holiday Inn in Florida was the exact same as one in California, a trend that was felt in the restaurant industry as well. Worse yet, the Wigwams fell into disrepair as prior management lost interest in maintaining their properties. With shiny, new alternatives at the freeway exit as opposed to the old road, it became an easy choice for motorists to shun what was once cool, but had begun looking a little long in the tooth. Adding insult is that some of the wigwams became known as no-tell motels, the deciding blow that turned families away.
It would take the onset of the 21st Century and nostalgiaseeking Baby Boomers to signal a revival in interest of these period-piece survivors.
Making New with Old
Managing properties that are between 70 and 82 years of age has been no small task for the owners of the wigwams. If anything could go wrong, it has done so at least once already, and often at great expense.
When Sahudir Mir and his wife purchased the Cave City property in 2005, it was in a distressed state. “It was in pretty bad shape. The electric lines, the water lines, the furniture were in bad shape. It was really filthy,” Mir recalled. But he and his wife had come to America in search
of opportunity, and like many Indian immigrants, bought a motel. “This is a family business. I got here to America in 2004, and I was looking for something to do.”
At the time, Mir had no idea of the historical significance of the wigwams, nor of what was about to happen when Cars was released in 2006. “When we bought it, it was like any motel. We did not know the value of the motel. But I learned when people came by and told me. They came in asking for an interview. So then I learned that it has a different kind of value to people all over the country and world. Year after year. I had to dig out the history and found it is a landmark of American history.” Luck had landed in his lap.
Over the 15 years the Mirs owned Wigwam Village #2, the couple came to appreciate American pop culture and the nostalgia the property inspires. “Actually, there are many people who come here for this reason, and they come every year. They spent their honeymoon here, and now they bring their grandkids. They talk about it being a unique motel. People bring their kids and sleep in a tipi.”
In November 2020, the Mirs sold Wigwam Village #2 to its current owners, Kevin Stone and Megan Smith, who continue the work of preserving and maintaining this American roadside landmark for future generations.
Samir Patel’s family faced a similar challenge when his parents, Jagdish and Ramila, bought the San Bernardino property in 2003. The neighborhood had gone bad, and the motel had gained a reputation where rooms could be let by the hour. A large sign at the entrance proclaiming, “Do It In A Teepee” did not help matters.
Absentee owners had allowed the property to slide by virtue of leasing it to managers who neither cared nor had authority to make changes. “It really did take a turn for the worse, and because it went through different people who did not have the idea that this was a piece of history, that’s when the whole
hourly stuff started. If my dad [hadn’t] purchased the place, the city of San Bernardino was going to tear it down,” Patel recalled.
The elder Patel set out to saving the wigwams, enlisting the help of his wife, three sons, and daughter. “You name it, we did it. Asphalt. Lawn work. We redid the pool. It was a swamp pretty much. New pumping engine. New carpet, furniture, water heaters, fixtures, sinks, toilets. We painted it, put in a laundry facility with a new washer and dryer, and rewired the whole property underground. Pretty much everything from A to Z, we did. We took over in September 2003, and finished near the end of 2005,” said Patel. But unlike Mir, who had no idea of the historic value or the pop culture add-on about to happen, the elder Patel had long taken it to heart ever since immigrating from India. “They came to San Bernardino and have lived here since 1979. That’s why this place always caught my dad’s eye, because he lived right down the street. This is something we would pass by every day,” Patel continued.
It took a while for Samir and his siblings to understand and embrace the idea of owning a roadside attraction. “My dad’s really into nostalgic stuff. Prior to buying it he used to come here to talk to the person who leased it. ‘One day I’m going to buy this property, and it’s going to be something.’ He was the only one in the family who saw what this could be,” Patel beamed. “He had it in his mind; it was his mentality. Now that I’ve grown up and realized a lot of things, I definitely understand the significance of this property.”
The elder Patels are now up in years. Although they still stop by almost daily to tinker and toil for a few hours, they have ceded the bulk of operations to Samir, the youngest of the four kids. “My parents have not retired, but they want to soon. This business means a lot to him personally, and I don’t see [my dad] walking away. My goal is to be here in
the long run and to manage this property, to keep it in the family. I want to expand on this.”
While the Pixar people did visit the California wigwams, it was the Holbrook location on which they based the movie depiction. Still, the Cars effect has been significant for all of the remaining venues. “It feels great. That Pixar movie really kicked off our reservations, especially with children. After the movie we had people come from the local areas: ‘My kids want to stay in a Cozy Cone.’ In the peak season, we have kids come in every day who want to stay in a Cozy Cone.”
Having now adopted his father’s passion for nostalgia and the historic value of the property, Samir and his parents have committed together to continually maintaining and upgrading their 19 tipis that sit beside Route 66. “We have a lot of other major work that needs to be done. Plumbing is the number one issue right now. We also want to remodel the interior of each unit. We want to future-proof it in a way so that it will last another 70 years.”
With owners like the Patels at the San Bernardino Wigwam and Kevin Stone and Megan Smith at the Cave City location, these roadside relics are well-positioned to continue delighting travelers for generations to come.
The Need for Nostalgia
Today, motels like the wigwams are roadside oddities that have become attractions in their own right. Whereas 60 years ago, they tugged at parents and kids alike for their uniqueness and novelty, it is that same novelty with a nostalgia cherry on top that is issuing the clarion call now. In a sea of generic saccharin rectangular motels surrounding freeway exits, these three relics provide something different.
Wigwam Village Motel and office, Holbrook, Arizona. 1987.
Wigwam Motel, Holbrook, Arizona. Photograph courtesy of Efren Lopez/Route66Images.
“We live in a pretty homogenized world. These days, one motel is pretty much just like any other,” Ratay summarized. “The Wigwam Villages remind us [that] there was once a time in America when lodgers sought to offer travelers something more than a pleasant stay. They wanted to provide a unique experience that might never be forgotten.”
“The golden age of the motel in the U.S. was circa mid1950s to early-1960s. I suspect that a good number of motel patrons today are looking for novelty. I first experienced motels as a child in the 1970s, when motels in the U.S. were on the decline,” David recalled. “For me, sleeping in a ‘wigwam’ was not only new and unusual, it was magic, like stepping back in time. In the 1950s and 1960s, motel owners (and especially those in states with high rates of tourism) were challenged with a highly competitive market. Theming became a marketing differentiator. In the 1960s, for example, there were over fifty motels around the perimeter of Disneyland. The majority of these businesses were privately owned mom and pop enterprises,” she continued. “With this kind of competition, what does one do to stand out from the others? The lands inside the gates of Disneyland extended to the streets of Anaheim with motels like the Princess, Alpine, Jolly Roger, and Space Age Lodge. You might not be able to afford a trip to Hawaii, but you could stay at the Waikiki Motel. You might not ever visit Egypt, but you could ride the ‘true to life camel’ at the Pyramid Motel.”
“Back in what I call the Golden Era of the Family Road Trip — the 1950s through the 1970s — novelty was extremely important. Competition among lodging operators to attract guests was fierce,” Ratay echoes. “There’s a reason well-traveled highways like Route 66 were lined with outlandishly themed motels and blinking neon people attractors — signs shaped like giant rockets, aliens, wagon wheels, buffalo and more. Motel owners would do just about anything to entice travelers to choose their operation over the guy down the road.”
That two of the three remaining Wigwam Villages are along Route 66 have not been lost on motel historians nor travelers. These were the last two Redford developed, and it signaled a shift in geographical focus in the U.S. As far as tourism goes, the West was won a motel at a time, and Redford didn’t want to miss out on the action. Their value today along the Route is significant, their quirkiness a lightbulb for moths motoring along the Mother Road.
“Travelers along Route 66 are looking for memorable experiences and ways to connect with the rich legacy of the Golden Era of the American Road Trip. A night’s stay at a Wigwam Village allows them to get both,” said Ratay. To that end, the Holbrook wigwams, at some point, added neon signage beckoning travelers come hither, going so far as to remove signage inviting people to the museum that still exists today.
Scott Piotrowski, President of the California Historic Route 66 Association , knows the value of the wigwams in his state:
“The Wigwam Motel in San Bernardino is one of the key attractions along Route 66 in California. Along with places like El Garces, Casa del Desierto, three Route 66 museums, and the Aztec Hotel, the highway in California is littered with landmarks worth seeing. What sets the wigwams apart from the rest, however, is [their] photographic appeal.”
Looking Down the Road
“The American motel as a building type both peaked and declined in the 1960s. The motel chain trend began decades ago, as well as the trend to build multi-story properties. However, another trend started in the 1990s, the boutique hotel concept, the roadside motel reimagined. All over the country, old motel properties are being lovingly restored, as people look to escape their everyday lives and check in to the American motel experience,” David explained.
Ratay is a little less certain, but nonetheless upbeat: “Of course, it’s hard to say. I only hope we recognize the value in supporting and preserving these important landmarks of the Golden Era of the American Road Trip, which also include the classic diners, roadside attractions, rest areas and more. They’re magic portals that allow us to step back in time and experience a uniquely quirky, vibrant and exciting period in America’s history. If the reason we travel is to create lasting memories, I can’t think of a better way to do it than to pay these places a visit.”
Time and health were not on Redford’s side, though. While he pictured his San Bernardino property to be a pseudo-retirement, he took ill and had to sell by the late1950s. He died shortly thereafter in 1957, and is buried in Horse Cave, Kentucky, not far from his original motel.
Redford started something uniquely different 86 years ago, when the motel was still a fairly new concept and road travel for leisure was just beginning. He went far out on a limb to create an experience that was different from what the small but growing number of motel operators had offered the traveling public. While those early motorists were still embracing the idea of an affordable overnight room, Redford was quick to stretch the concept into something memorable and unique. He no doubt raised eyebrows as an innovator of roadside kitsch, but soldiered on nonetheless to set himself apart from the rest. It was as if he almost knew that his brainchild would live to see another century, to be iconized in film and to delight travelers for years to come.
Big Chief, Wigwam Village, Rialto. Photograph courtesy of David J. Schwartz – Pics On Route 66.
The U.S. CAMEL CORPS and ROUTE 66
PHinpointing the very start of Route 66 history is tough–some may place it with the construction of federally funded roadways, or with the popularization of the automobile in America. But in actuality, and unbeknownst to many, the history of Route 66 begins much earlier. It begins with a treacherous landscape, dreams of westward mobility, and a very unlikely beast: the camel. That camels were part of the history of Route 66, or even part of American history at all, is a fact that has been, for the most part, lost to the annals of history. The U.S. Camel Corps, as the program was officially known, wasn’t around long, and the short-lived camel experiment didn’t accomplish much–with one exception. The camels were absolutely essential to the expedition that went out to survey the 35th parallel in preparation for the construction of a Westward road along that path–the same path that would one day become Route 66. The year was 1839, and the U.S. had just acquired a large swath of land, which included modern-day California, Arizona, and New Mexico, as well as parts of several other states.
The only problem? These areas had yet to be explored–much less mapped–and mapping and roadbuilding became an urgent task after the discovery of Californian gold in 1848. People were clamoring to get out West, but the land was treacherous and full of unknowns. They desperately needed a wagon road.
U.S. Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, was tasked with finding a path for this road, and after careful consideration, chose the 35th parallel for its relative consistency weather-wise. He put together an expedition to survey the area, but one thing was missing: pack animals that could make it through the dry desert terrain.
they refused to learn English, so to ease the transition, they also brought over several camel drivers who spoke the camels’ native language. When the camels made it to America, the expedition was finally ready to begin.
Naval officer Edward “Ned” Beale was put in charge of the expedition and given a team of over two dozen camels to manage. He was initially unhappy about this–in fact, the Americans hated the camels at first, and they had plenty of reason to.
“They say that they had terrible breath,” said Trimble. “And they were kind of recalcitrant, extremely stubborn, and they were known to be temperamental, extremely temperamental.” The camels would also spit slimy, foul-smelling cud when upset.
But everyone’s attitude changed when they realized what an asset the camels truly were on the difficult desert trip, particularly with the help of the skilled camel drivers, who would sing to the camels to get the animals to do their bidding.
“There were just miles and miles of land without water,” said Marshall Trimble, Arizona State Historian. “It was hostile desert, Northern Arizona. It was a really tough trip, and they were looking for a beast of burden that would be able to do that. Mules were what they usually used, and oxen were too slow; they needed an [animal] that could do a whole lot more. Jefferson Davis had gotten some inside information from a federal soldier that had some knowledge of camels in the Middle East, and he had the idea of camels as a beast of burden to get across this waterless land. And so, the great camel experiment was born.”
The government set aside some cash, and a boat headed to the Middle East to make the purchase. They quickly encountered a problem—the camels weren’t bilingual, and
“These camels were packing 800 pounds–twice what a mule could carry,” said Trimble. “And Beale just loved these camels; he thought they were just wonderful. They could endure arid lands, and during a stretch of 36 hours without water, the horses and mules suffered, but the camels didn’t even falter.”
The camels proved themselves especially important when they came to one of the toughest parts of the journey–the Colorado River. It was deep and wide, and everyone assumed that the camels wouldn’t be able to swim. It was uncertain whether even the mules could make it. As it turned out, the camels could swim, quite well–no camels were lost in the crossing, whereas 10 mules and two horses got swept away in the current. Thanks to the sturdy hump-backed beasts, the surveyors were able to get all of their supplies safely across the river.
The mission was ultimately a success. The 35th parallel was surveyed, and a wagon road was constructed soon after. The Camel Corps was shut down only a couple decades later, but nevertheless, Trimble believes that the Beale expedition ultimately would not have been possible without them–the conditions were just too harsh, the journey too long. So next time you’re driving the Western stretch of Route 66, remember to give thanks to the tall, sturdy beasts who traveled across the world to play a role in the development of what would become America’s most famous highway.
Arizona’s Frontier
When Interstate 40 replaced Route 66 in Arizona, many of the Mother Road’s western communities between Seligman and Kingman were hit hard. Stranded from the straighter route far to the south, service stations, motels, and cafés were left famished for business, preceding their eventual closure. Few places are as symbolic of this hardship as Truxton’s Frontier Motel & Cafe, which fought long and hard to stave off the effects of the bypass and, for a time, was even successful. But that was not to last.
Truxton began as a humble fueling station for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad in 1883. The railroad siding, also called “Truxtun,” references the name Lieutenant Edward Beale gave a nearby spring during his 1857 expedition, after his son. The railroad tracks were moved following a flood in 1904, but the siding remained, and two men— Donald Dilts and Clyde McCune— carried on the Truxton name when they established a community next to the siding in 1951, having heard of plans to build a dam on the Colorado River at the nearby Bridge Canyon. Though the dam never materialized, the prospect built up Truxton practically overnight as people joined the effort to serve and benefit from the Mother Road’s traffic.
was devastating. Even as businesses closed, however, the Barkers continued to run the motel and café, even taking up ownership of other businesses such as a nearby gas station.
In 1987, they helped establish the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona, which did its part to maintain the Frontier’s neon sign when it began showing its age in the early 2000s. Ray passed away in 1990, but Mildred kept the café going until her death in 2012.
Still, interested parties labored to keep the establishment afloat. In November of the following year, Sam Murray, owner of Gilligans Route 66 Tours, purchased the Frontier from relatives of the Barkers, and two months later he hired two Route 66 enthusiasts, Allen and Stacy Greer, to manage it for him.
“[The Frontier] opened in the very early ‘50s,” said travel writer Roger Naylor. “It was Alice Wright who opened it, but it became most famous when it was purchased in 1957 by the Barkers—[Ray] and Mildred—and they’re the ones who really kind of put it on the map, as it was known as just a great café.”
In its heyday, the Frontier Motel & Cafe, which was known in particular for its homemade pies, was an exemplary example of a ‘50s motor court. The motel consisted of nine rooms, all of which are vacant today. A neon marquee sign—made of light blue panels reading “Frontier Motel Restaurant”—still stands in front of the café, whose wall depicts a long-armed chef pointing in the direction of the entrance.
In September of 1978, I-40 bypassed Truxton’s stretch of the Mother Road, and the impact on the community
“I met [the Greers],” said Naylor. “Basically, they just cleaned up one room, kind of an office; they were going to set up a little visitor’s center, and the plan was to reopen the [motel and] the café, and it didn’t seem to really pan out—they were very enthusiastic, really nice people, and I’m not sure exactly what happened—they kind of left without a word [in 2015]. They had a little souvenir shop and sold some snacks, and that was pretty much as far as it got.”
Murray exited his interest in the Frontier in 2016, and no recorded owner has taken his place since. The neon sign has been worn down once again, and the motel, whose upkeep went downhill after Ray’s passing in 1990, is no longer suitable for a stay. The café, unused since 2012, has not fared much better.
“As much as I would like to see it come back, I don’t know, because it is in an isolated spot, which is not [necessarily] a problem for Route 66 icons,” said Naylor. “[Travelers] like these out-of-the-way places, so I think if somebody’s got the energy and money [and is] willing to open it up, it would thrive again. But whether somebody’s going to step up and do that, I don’t know,” said Naylor.
“So, I’m afraid it’s just going to sit abandoned, until that right person comes along. That’s part of the charm of Route 66: so often, the right person does come along.”
Photograph by John Smith.
Missouri’s Rollercoaster Highway
Missouri’s stretch of 66 is blessed with an abundance of nostalgic roadside attractions to enjoy and savor. From vintage motels and diners, to neon signs and museums, the Show Me State has it all. But there are specific sections of the approximately 300-mile segments of the Mother Road where the road itself is the attraction, and these are the spots where the Missouri section of the journey really gets magical.
Imagine coasting down the quiet two-lane ribbon, windows down, the breeze in your hair, and the breathtaking Ozark landscape all around. Suddenly the road dips, your stomach drops, and your heart rises in your mouth as the road ascends, then dips and climbs again. These whoop-de-doo undulations, where the road curves, rises, and falls in dramatic ways, have been aptly nicknamed the “Rollercoaster Road.”
“As a kid, my dad was a great driver. And he was a professional driver,” said John Sellars, Executive Director Emeritus at the History Museum on the Square in Springfield. “He drove trucks and so on when he was younger. And when we would go places, it was nothing for us
to get incredibly carsick. Just because he drove fast. And that car would be up and down, and up and down, and back and forth, and up and down.”
Route 66 covers 2,448 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica in a diagonal path across the central states and into the Southwest. With Missouri’s distinct topography—rolling hills, forested ridges, caves and springs—over the Ozark Highlands in the southern region of the state, the road followed the lay of the land, with twists and turns, ups and downs, curves on curves, in order to link rural communities. This only made for a more exciting experience for those whose cars hit the pavement.
What’s even more intriguing about the path that the road took across the forested Ozarks Highlands was that these were the only significant hills that travelers would navigate east of the Sandia Mountains in New Mexico. With large segments of Mother Road still intact in eleven counties, to drive Missouri 66, especially from just past Cuba to Springfield, as the road crisscrosses the Interstate, is a chance to explore the two-lane ribbon road at its natural best.
