The sleeping bags were now stretched out on top of the seat and our boxes of stuff were on the floor. I hopped in and sank onto the now cozy cushioned bench seat. He smiled and handed me my stack of comic books. Meanwhile, Mom carried my sister — clutching the oatmeal teddy bear she always slept with — and slipped her in between the two sleeping bags. She was asleep before we pulled away from the motor court.

The Texas panhandle let us go gradually. For the first hour the land looked the same — flat, brown, the highway a straight crease in the pale morning. We passed a sign that said we were 30 miles from the New Mexico border. Soon after, the car began to slow and pull off to the right and stopped in front of large white sign. Mom asked if I recognized any of the words on the sign.

I could sound out the large curving WELCOME, but then right under it I saw and called out, “Adrian! Wait, Adrian?” They both laughed. Adrian College is where they met and married. It was also the town where I was born. So, yes, I recognized the word. Adrian, Texas, shared the name with the one in Michigan, but that was where any similarity ended.

Fewer than 300 people lived in this flat, brown town. Dad guessed the only reason it existed was because it was the midpoint of Route 66. In 1928, just two years after the commissioning of the road, The MidPoint Diner was built between a motel and a filling station. A little micro-economy based on the Mother Road traffic and the notoriety of its midpoint status.

We had breakfast at the café, which was in its heyday and oblivious to its future as the basis for Flo’s V-8 Café diner in the Pixar movie Cars. As we ate, Dad explained that there were at least two other Texas towns between Adrian and Amarillo that claimed to be the Midpoint: Bushland and Vega. It was hard to pinpoint, he said, because the given length of the highway changed a few times due to re-routing in the early years. Adrian must have done the best job promoting itself.

Back in the car, the road began to climb almost imperceptibly, and the light changed. By the time we crossed into New Mexico the sky was enormous in a way it hadn’t been before, a deep winter blue that seemed to begin directly above the car and extend without interruption to the horizon in every direction. Even Patty seemed to be feeling better after eating and putting the Texas panhandle behind us.

We were on the high desert now. The elevation at the New Mexico line was already higher than anything in Michigan. By the time we reached Albuquerque we’d be driving at a mile above sea level.

New Mexico announced itself in other ways too. The roadside began to change — trading posts appeared, low adobe buildings with hand-lettered signs offering turquoise jewelry, blankets, pottery. The colors of the landscape shifted from the flat browns of Texas toward something more complex: red rock, ochre, the pale sage green of desert scrub. The light had a different quality, thinner and cleaner, casting hard shadows even at mid-morning.

Somewhere on the eastern edge of New Mexico, my mother found a radio station.

She’d been trying to lock in a signal since we left Amarillo — a few bars of something, then static, then silence, the signal dropping away as we moved through the thinly populated land. Then she found it: a strong, clear signal out of Albuquerque. KOB, 770 on the dial, running 50,000 watts across the high desert. The music filled the car and we all began to move subtly to the beat. The oatmeal teddy bear on my sister’s lap, its hands enclosed by Patty’s, clapped rhythmically. Dad hummed and Mom swayed slightly. I kept reading one of the comics, but was tapping my knee. After several songs, Mom suddenly leaned forward and turned up the volume.

She had recognized the song before a full measure had played — the close harmonies, the irresistible swing of it. The Andrews Sisters. And the song they were singing was about the road we were driving.

If you ever plan to motor west, travel my way, take the highway that’s best...

My mother turned it up further. She knew every word.

It winds from Chicago to L.A, more than two thousand miles all the way
Get your kicks on Route 66
Now you go through St. Louis, Joplin, Missouri
And Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty

When it ended my father let a moment pass, then said, almost casually, that Nat King Cole’s version was better.

My mother turned to look at him.

What followed was not an argument, exactly. But it was the most animated I had heard her on the entire trip. The Andrews Sisters had phrasing. They had energy. Nat King Cole, she allowed, had a beautiful voice — nobody was saying he didn’t have a beautiful voice — but the song was about traveling across the country and the Andrews Sisters made you feel it. She was mid-sentence, making another forceful point, when she trailed off. She noticed him watching her with a dimpled smile and a twinkle in his eye. He may have lost the argument, but he got exactly the reaction he was going for.

In the back seat, I looked over to Patty with wide eyes. She tried to match my expression and we both started giggling.

The signal held strong for hours, all the way across the high plateau toward Albuquerque. I don’t know what else we heard that day — other standards, other voices from that era my parents had grown up in. But I know my mother hummed for a while after the station finally faded, somewhere west of the city. She had loved that music since she was a teenager. She would love it for the rest of her life. A big band show called The Swingin’ Years started in 1956 out of LA’s KFI-AM 640. Twenty years later it was the longest running radio music show ever and syndicated in hundreds of other stations around the country. For several hours most every weekend, she listened to it faithfully.

Albuquerque sat in the Rio Grande valley, framed by the Sandia Mountains to the east — a range that turned a deep, improbable pink at sunset, giving them their name. In 1953 it was a city of about 100,000, growing fast on defense money and the postwar boom, with a cultural texture entirely unlike anything we had passed through: Spanish colonial architecture, Native American markets, an older and more layered history than Chicago or St. Louis or Oklahoma City. Route 66 ran down Central Avenue, through the heart of it.

We didn’t need to search for a motel. We just stopped when we saw a VACANCY sign on a place that looked nice. That was the great thing about Route 66.

Before breakfast, I had managed to get the Southwest U.S. road map out of the car while Dad was packing up. I set it in front of my mother at the diner and told her I wanted to find the cities from that song we heard on the radio the previous day. She opened it and drew a circle around Amarillo and another one around Albuquerque, explaining Amarillo was the last city from the song that we had been through and that Albuquerque is where we had just spent the night. I tried to watch carefully as she folded the map back up.

You’ll see Amarillo
Gallup, New Mexico
Flagstaff, Arizona
Don’t forget Winona
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino

We would sing the song together during the day when I needed reminding which cities I needed to find next.

West of Albuquerque the land changed again. The road climbed out of the valley and into a landscape of dramatic mesas and volcanic formations, the highway cutting through terrain that looked, to my five-year-old eyes, like the surface of another planet. This was the western edge of the Colorado Plateau — ancient, vast, the geology exposed in the canyon walls and roadcuts like pages of a book laid open.

In the next two days of driving through New Mexico and Arizona, I would be looking out the window at “Indian country,” where more than two dozen federally recognized tribes lived on reservations occupying about 20% of the area of the two states. A 5-year-old in 1953 — raised on westerns and schooled with textbooks written from a Euro-American perspective — had no way of knowing the true history and current plight of our Native American population.

The road that Euro-American commerce had built across the Southwest was running, for hundreds of miles, through sovereign nations whose presence predated the United States by centuries. This was not a single “Indian culture” but a mosaic of peoples with different languages, histories, and traditions. Yet, the trading posts and roadside imagery visible along Route 66 collapsed all of that into a single Hollywood stereotype.

There was, for example, the Jack Rabbit Trading Post. It was founded in 1949 and became famous for countless billboards and signs that populated the Mother Road between Missouri and Joseph City, Arizona. They were painted on barns, fences, outbuildings, and water towers with the words HERE IT IS. The same words, over and over, with a silhouette of a jackrabbit leaping. My father called them out each time. I started trying to call them out before he could.

By the time we reached the actual trading post — a low building with a giant jackrabbit statue out front — I couldn’t wait to spend some of my money. When we got back in the car after walking through the store and using the restrooms, I had bought a pack of gum for a nickel and was wondering what was so special about this place.

The Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert lacked the promotion but were, in fact, special.

We had stopped for lunch about 30 miles before the Jack Rabbit Trading Post, turning off the highway to find the Rainbow Forest Lodge. Serving as Visitor Center, Museum, and Curio Shop for the Petrified Forest National Monument — not elevated to full park status until 1962 — it had been built by the Roosevelt Administration’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s. Inside we chatted with the Ranger, who said there were a couple of picnic tables out back.

As was their custom as far back as their first year of marriage and as recent as several times on Route 66, my parents had picked up groceries for lunch shortly before arriving at the Lodge. My memory of this quirky tradition began on this trip but was reinforced many times over the next decade or more. We would find a grocery with a deli counter and ask for an assortment of sliced cold cuts to fulfill everyone’s choices, such as bologna and several pre-sliced, gelatin-bound loaves: olive loaf (containing pimento-stuffed olives), pickle loaf, pimento loaf, and pepper loaf. Liverwurst was popular with the adults. A couple types of sliced cheese. A loaf of white sandwich bread. Because the “sandwiches” were dry — i.e. slice of bread, slice of cold cut, slice of cheese, fold and eat — a quart of cold milk was the final requirement in order to swallow. Paper cups, newly available in the early ‘50s, could have been on hand but I recall numerous occasions when we simply passed the quart of milk around.

Having a picnic table would have been our equivalent of dining out. More common was either Mom passing out the sandwiches as she made them in the moving car or simply standing outside the car and eating. Once we graduated to a station wagon, the tailgate served as buffet table.

We would have noticed a short loop trail near the picnic tables, the Giant Logs Trail. On a 10-15 minute walk we would have seen some of the largest and most colorful petrified logs in the whole Petrified Forest. Their origin was an ancient log jam in a Late Triassic river. We stopped at a plaque that explained that they had turned entirely to crystal two hundred million years before, the wood replaced molecule by molecule with silica until each log was stone, the grain still visible, the colors extraordinary — red, purple, yellow, gray — scattered across the desert floor as far as you could see.

That’s when Mom noticed different layers of color. Studying the map the Ranger had given her she pointed where to look to see the Painted Desert in the distance.

The Ranger came out as we returned to the car. He was smiling, but he told us that the park was losing tons of petrified rock every year since the monument was established in 1906. He was looking right at me when he said he just wanted us to know and make sure we hadn’t put any souvenirs in our pockets.

Arizona was the longest state on Route 66 — nearly four hundred miles of it. The landscape through which the road passed was among the most dramatic on the entire route: the Painted Desert giving way to the pine forests around Flagstaff, then the long descent from the Colorado Plateau through the Black Mountains to the Mojave. But today, our goal was just to make Flagstaff.

It was getting late in the afternoon by the time we left the Jack Rabbit Trading Post. Patty was getting squirmy on Mom’s lap, a sign she was getting tired. Afraid it was too late for a nap, Mom asked me to play with her to keep her awake. I thought of a game I had learned on the playground at school. Rock Paper Scissors. It proved to be a good choice because it took some time for her to understand and then remember what beats what. She was apparently a believer in raw, brute power, because she chose Rock like ten-fifteen times in a row. Finally, she chose Paper to my Rock and her face lit up.

Mom called for us look out the front window. Patty crawled over the seat back to Mom’s lap and I took my place on the hump. We were about halfway between Winslow and Flagstaff. I was thinking I could put a check next to the circle I had drawn around Flagstaff on the map once we got there. Then I noticed the sunset over snowy mountains. We probably didn’t know the mountains were the San Francisco Peaks, or that Humphrey’s Peak was the highest point in Arizona at 12,633 feet.

Flagstaff may have come as a surprise, too. At 7,000 feet, it was the highest point on Route 66, and the ponderosa pines that surrounded it looked nothing like the desert we’d been driving through for two days. In December the snow here was real — not the glazed-road snow of Chicago but deep mountain snow, the trees weighted with it, the air thin and cold. At the motel my father checked the road conditions and the weather we should expect in the morning while we were getting ready for bed.

The descent from Flagstaff toward Kingman was once Route 66’s most notorious stretch — the Oatman Highway, a series of switchbacks through the Black Mountains that had terrified drivers for decades. But in 1953 a newer route through the mountains had just opened, bypassing the worst of it. We almost certainly took the new road. Even so, the descent was dramatic — the highway dropping thousands of feet, the desert floor opening below, and then suddenly the Mojave: flat, vast, and warm.

Warm.

After a week of December cold, the temperature change was physical. Windows went down. My mother said something about the air.

The Mojave in December is not hot — daytime temperatures in the fifties, nights still cold — but after Chicago and the panhandle and the mountain pass, it felt like another season entirely. The light was different too: sharper, more direct, the sky a deeper blue than anything we’d seen since leaving Michigan.

With mostly desert to see out the car windows, I turned my attention to the road map I’d been using to check off the song’s cities. I nearly gave up the whole enterprise in Arizona because the cities in the song and on the map just weren’t making much sense. I couldn’t find Winona anywhere on the map. When we stopped for gas, Dad asked for an Arizona map and mentioned we couldn’t find Winona on our map. The man chuckled and explained that Winona was in the song because it rhymes with Arizona. It’s just a part of Flagstaff. “That’s why the song says, “…and don’t forget Winona.”

OK, I thought, Kingman should be next. I hadn’t found that on our Southwest U.S. map either, but now we had an Arizona map. I found its tiny dot and circled it. Later, Dad slowed down and asked if I wanted to see Kingman. I looked up and he was pointing at the city sign as we approached. He read it out loud, “Welcome to Kingman—Population 3,342.”

“Is that a lot?” I asked. Three traffic lights later we were out of Kingman.

One nice thing about driving in the desert was we made pretty good time. Fewer and smaller cities. Straightaways without much traffic meant our speed was often higher than average. And we loved, really loved, the DIPS. Sometimes Dad would give us a heads up by reading the sign, “DIP AHEAD”. Then we’d anticipate the sensation and laugh when we hit it. Sometimes there would be no warning. We’d go “Whoa!” and THEN he would call out “Dip!” Loved the dips.

Barstow was the last significant stop before the final stretch of Route 66. With a population of just under 7,000 it had a strong economic base in 1953, which rested on the Santa Fe Railroad, the Marine Corps Logistics Base, and a steady flow of cross-country travelers. The Harvey House (1911-1971) served train and road passengers on fine china, staffed by the famously professional Harvey Girls. Fortunately, there were several other suitable options for the family of a teacher/principal between jobs and homes.

I imagine our choosing to celebrate our first night in California with dinner at Rosita’s Restaurant and finding lodging at La Casa Court (“The Home of Cleanliness”) at 1101 West Main Street. According to LegendsOfAmerica.com, Barstow was the only city on Route 66 — the Main Street of America — to retain “Main Street” as its actual street name.

Over dinner, my parents discussed our options for the next day, December 24, Christmas Eve. We could drive over the San Bernardino Mountains to my grandparents’ house in Palm Springs or stay on Route 66 and go via the city of San Bernardino itself and then backtrack slightly to Palm Springs. Either choice involved about 3 hours of driving. Since they knew an area in San Bernardino called Muscoy might have available housing in the new year, we would drive through it to see how it might suit us.

As we drove the 71 miles from Barstow to San Bernardino, my parents talked about seeing the family already here and where and when we would have our own home. Patty had been increasingly interested in coloring a Disney coloring book bought along the way. I looked out the window but I was forming mental images of my grandparents and especially my Uncle Ron.

We had left Michigan before Christmas vacation had begun in hopes of arriving in time for Ron’s birthday on Christmas day. He would be 14 tomorrow, closer to my age than my father’s, his older brother. I thought of him more like a big brother than an uncle. And he was a really good big brother.

My thoughts were interrupted by my father’s voice. “You did bring your swimming suit, didn’t you?” It was what he said several times on the drive to remind me what might be waiting for us at the end. A drive from the snow of Michigan and Illinois to my grandparents and a swim on Christmas day. Very cool, I probably thought. But I expected that.

I had had no idea how cool the drive itself would be.

My father had already been out. He came back in stamping his feet, dropped a newspaper on the table, and opened a bag from the grocery a block away: bananas, apples, a package of sweet rolls, a pint of milk. He’d had his thermos refilled at the counter. While we ate, he spread the December 16 Chicago Tribune on the table and showed us the front page.

Two inches of snow on the ground. Another inch overnight. Sub-freezing temperatures were glazing the roads. The Chicago Motor Club was urging extreme caution. The article mentioned twenty-six sand-and-salt trucks working through the night to clear the city streets. My father had already talked with the store owner, who told him schools were closed and the roads into the city were quiet — not much traffic going in.

That was enough for him.

He’d been driving in snow since he was sixteen. For a couple of years he’d run a milk route, finishing his deliveries about the time most people’s alarm clocks went off — in winter, on whatever roads the night had left behind, a truck loaded with cases of milk. My mother didn’t try to talk him out of it.

We bundled into the DeSoto and crept out of the gravel lot, tires crunching through the white. The landscapes on either side of the road were bare and bleak — stripped fields, leafless trees, the occasional barn — everything pulled flat and gray by the cold. I watched it through the window as we crossed into Illinois.

Then Chicago. The city rose out of the flat land, steel and stone and smoke, and for a few minutes we caught glimpses of Lake Michigan to our east before we were in among the tall buildings, the car slowing, the streets still lightly traveled out of respect for the frozen roads.

My mother pointed. “That’s the Art Institute of Chicago.”

It filled the block, stone lions flanking the wide front stairs. My father found a place to pull over and pointed across Michigan Avenue to a highway shield on a signpost — a white shield with a black border and the number 66.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s where Route 66 begins. And it’s going to take us all the way to California.”

He had told us about it the night before, drawn it on a napkin at the diner. Now it was real. The starting line.

Route 66 had been real for a long time before we found it that December morning.

The road was designated on November 11, 1926, assembled from a patchwork of existing local and state highways rather than built from scratch — which is why it threaded through the centers of towns and cities rather than bypassing them. From Chicago it ran southwest through Illinois and Missouri, dipped into the southeast corner of Kansas, crossed Oklahoma diagonally, cut across the Texas panhandle, and then turned west through New Mexico and Arizona to Los Angeles. By 1938 it was the first highway in the country to be completely paved, 2,448 miles of it, end to end.

But the road’s story — what made it mean something — was told by the people who had traveled it before us.

In the 1930s it was the Dust Bowl road. Drought and economic collapse sent thousands of families from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas west along Route 66 toward California, looking for anything better. John Steinbeck watched them go and wrote The Grapes of Wrath, giving the road its most lasting name: the Mother Road. The Joads traveled it in desperation, with everything they owned lashed to a truck, heading toward a California that turned out to be something other than what they’d been promised.

We were traveling it in optimism. We weren’t escaping anything. We were seeking something — a vibrant economy, a climate that would suit us better, family already waiting on the other end. The country was in the beginning of a massive 1950–70 migration that largely accounted for California nearly doubling in population, from 10.6 million to 19.9 million.

As Dad eased the car into traffic and we began our first mile on US 66, I assumed my favorite viewing spot. When I was little, I would stand on the front edge of the back seat and lean forward against the front seat. Now I could stand on the hump in the floor and watch the road ahead. Patty was still settled in Mom’s lap. Next to them on the seat were a few road maps, ready when needed. We were — and would always be — Triple-A members. But good road maps were always available at bigger service stations, too. My mother was an experienced navigator and always gave my father plenty of notice when the next turn was coming. Since we were going to be staying on this road like, forever, I hoped I would have lots of time to use the maps myself to follow our route. I loved driving through towns and cities that had been just dots on paper. What I didn’t love was trying to get the maps folded again.

My father had been thinking about the Mother Road — also known as the Will Rogers Highway and the Main Street of America. Once we were out of the city, heading southwest through the flat Illinois winter, he talked about it — the way he always talked, less like conversation and more like teaching. In a good way. He told us how the Road had started as Indian trails, then wagon roads, then a series of local highways that got stitched together and numbered 66. How it had been the military supply line during the war. How after the war, everybody who had a car and somewhere to go seemed to end up on it.

Now, we were part of that.

From Chicago, Route 66 ran southwest through Joliet, then on through Pontiac, Bloomington, Atlanta, Lincoln, and Springfield — small Illinois cities strung along the road like beads, each with its filling stations and diners and motor courts arranged for the convenience of people passing through.

South of Joliet, somewhere along the flat middle of Illinois, I opened my piggy bank.

I’d been saving it for months. The piggy bank was the kind with a cork in the bottom, and I’d been promised that if I filled it without opening it, the money would be mine to spend on souvenirs along the way. Now I pried out the cork and poured the coins onto the sleeping bag nest I’d made on the floor of the back seat — pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, even a couple of half-dollars, the full weight of months of accumulation.

I sorted them into piles. Found the oldest ones: buffalo nickels among the Jeffersons, Mercury dimes among the Roosevelts. My dad gave me problems to solve from the front seat. If something costs thirty-seven cents, how many ways can you make change? If you have a quarter and two dimes, what can you buy at a diner? I worked through them slowly, the arithmetic mixing with the rhythm of the road, deciding how to budget so I’d have something left for Palm Springs.

Time passed that way, which was the whole point.

Springfield was Lincoln country. The road ran past the state capitol, past the neighborhood where Lincoln had lived, past the sites that drew tourists even in December. My father did stop here — he wouldn’t have driven past Lincoln’s house without marking it — though my clearest memory of Springfield is the motor court that night: the smell of the room, chenille spreads on the two beds, the radiator clicking against the cold outside. We’d covered nearly 300 miles since Gary. Day one on Route 66, done.

Next morning, the Mississippi came up on us without warning — or it felt that way to a five-year-old who had never seen a river more than a hundred feet wide.

The old Chain of Rocks Bridge was the Route 66 crossing into Missouri, a steel-truss span built in 1929 with a peculiar 22-degree bend at its middle, so the road jogged sideways over the water before straightening again on the other side. I don’t remember the jog. I just remember — because it was Mom who said it — that the mile-long bridge was green because it was painted that color to be less visible from the air during WWII. As I stared out the window at the Mississippi River I may have been thinking it seemed too vast to be a mere river. And my mother may have been reading my mind when she said it was also known as the Father of Waters.

Then my father — true to form — couldn’t help asking if I knew how to spell Mississippi. Mom gave him a look as he crowed, “M-I-crooked letter-crooked letter-I- crooked letter-crooked letter-I-humpback-humpback-I.” She just shook her head. But, after a few reminders I’m sure, I remembered it the rest of my life.

Then we were in Missouri, with St. Louis ahead of us.

The city sat at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, the gateway from east to west for a century and a half, with the famous Arch still a decade away. Lewis and Clark had set off from here, the Oregon Trail had started here, and half the westward migrations in American history had crossed the Mississippi at this bend. We were just the latest. We spent night two somewhere in the city, in a motor court on the western edge. Before I fell asleep, I thought about what my mother had called the river and that we had crossed the Father of Waters on the Mother Road.

In the morning the road climbed into the Ozarks.

Missouri changed the feel of the trip. Illinois had been flat and familiar — not so different from Michigan or Indiana. Missouri was something else. The road wound up into forested hills, limestone bluffs rising on either side, the skeleton trees of winter silhouetted against the steely blue sky. That sky seemed bigger. The road seemed older.

My father spotted the barn signs west of St. Louis.

They’d been appearing for miles: painted on the roofs and sides of barns and outbuildings in white letters, the same two words over and over — MERAMEC CAVERNS. The caves had been open as a tourist attraction since 1935, opened by a man named Lester Dill who understood that Route 66 travelers would stop for almost anything if it was promoted aggressively enough. The barn-roof advertisements ran for hundreds of miles in both directions. I had been reading them aloud since Illinois.

We stopped.

The caverns were cool and enormous — a constant 60 degrees year-round, which felt warm after the December air outside. The tour guide told us the caves had been a hideout for Jesse James, though he hedged on the details. Stalactites and stalagmites rose and hung in formations that had been growing for four hundred million years. The World Book Cvolume had caves in it; I had studied the pictures. The real thing was better.

My mother bought a postcard at the gift shop. She had us write our names on it that night at the motel, then took it to the office front desk to be mailed to my grandparents in Palm Springs.

We are on our way. We signed it Pat and Mike, the way our grandfather liked to refer to us. Like the Hepburn-Tracy movie.

That was night three — the Ozarks somewhere west of Meramec, Springfield Missouri still a short drive ahead in the morning.

The fourth day brought us down off the Ozark plateau and through Springfield, Missouri. This is the Mother Road’s self-proclaimed birthplace, though the good people of Tulsa do the same self-proclaiming. Then the land began to unwind. Kansas came and went in thirteen miles, just enough of a corner to say we’d been there, and then the long diagonal drop into Oklahoma.

We crossed into Oklahoma on a frigid morning, the sky white and the land opening up around us.

Missouri had been hilly and wooded, folded in on itself. Oklahoma was the opposite — flat, wide, the horizon pushed back to where it seemed to blur into sky. The fields went on until they stopped making sense as fields and became something more abstract, something about distance itself.

With less to see out the windows, it was the perfect place to try to read as many Burma Shave signs as we could. Sets of six signs, spaced 100 feet apart on straight stretches of highway, proliferated across 45 states. By December, 1953, there were nearly 7,000 sets. Oklahoma and Texas had a disproportionately large share of them and lots of straightaways on Route 66. I doubt we were aware of it, but we wouldn’t be seeing these signs once we crossed the Texas-New Mexico border. New Mexico and Arizona prohibited them along their roads. But they were otherwise a fixture since 1926. Farmers voluntarily repaired them, radio comedians satirized them, and college students decorated dorm rooms with them.

Unlike today’s freeways, people didn’t speed along The Mother Road. We probably averaged 40 mph on our trip. That, combined with long sightlines in flat, open, rural Oklahoma and Texas, made the signs easy to spot and read. And they were a great antidote to a 5-year old’s boredom. Even Patty delighted at the sing-song rhymes as my parents and I read them together. She would join in when we all shouted the final sign’s “Burma Shave!”

After one “Burma Shave!” when the giggling had died down, my father got quiet for a while, which was unusual. Then he told us about the Dust Bowl.

In the 1930s, he explained, the rains had stopped across this whole region — Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, the panhandle. The topsoil had dried up and blown away in storms that turned the sky black at noon. Families had lost everything — farms, savings, any reason to stay — and loaded what was left onto trucks and cars and driven west. Route 66, through these same fields we were looking at, had been jammed with them. Some of those families were heading to the same part of California we were heading to now.

I looked out the window at the flat brown land and tried to picture it.

By the time we were driving through, Oklahoma had recovered — the fields were planted again, the towns were functioning, the cafés along Route 66 were full of truckers and travelers. But the memory of those years was fresh in the people who had lived through them, and the landscape still held the hard look of a place that had seen hard times.

That same year, 1953, Oklahoma had opened the Turner Turnpike between Tulsa and Oklahoma City — 88 miles of divided, high-speed highway that bypassed every town Route 66 ran through. It was called progress. It was also the first sign of what was coming for the old road, though nobody was ready to read it that way yet.

We came into Oklahoma City in the late afternoon, the road wide and busy through the city center. We spent night four there — a motor court on the western edge of town, the kind of place where you pulled up directly in front of your door and the office had a rack of postcards and a Coke machine in the lobby. The rooms smelled of cigarette smoke and cleaning fluid and the accumulated passage of everyone who had come through before.

In the morning we turned west. The land flattened further and the sky took over. The Texas panhandle announced itself before we crossed the state line.

The land had been wide in Oklahoma. In Texas it became something else — immense, indifferent, a landscape that made the car feel very small. The road ran straight west toward a horizon that never got any closer, the December sky pale above the brown and yellow grass, nothing taller than a fence post for miles in any direction.

There wasn’t much to interest us outside and Patty and I began to spend more time entertaining each other. Down on our padded floor, I let her pour the coins out of the piggy bank. Most were still unspent. She sorted the coins into piles. I taught her their names and she called out, “Penny, penny, dime, quart, nickel,” as she dropped each one back in the pig through the slot. After another dump of coins and a reminder that the big ones were called quarters, not quarts — I had pocketed the half-dollars early on for safe keeping — Patty got about halfway through the pile, gave a few big yawns, curled up on her side and slept.

The Texas panhandle along Route 66 had been Dust Bowl country, too — some of the most devastated land in the region during the 1930s, the topsoil stripped by drought and wind and carried away in the black blizzards that gave the era its name. By 1953 it was cattle and oil country, trying to be prosperous again, with Amarillo as its capital.

Amarillo was the only major city on the Texas stretch of Route 66, and by 1953 there were sixty-eight Route 66 lodgings operating in the city — motor courts, tourist cabins, roadside hotels — a full ecosystem built to receive travelers and send them on their way. We stopped for the night somewhere in or near Amarillo in one of those sixty-eight lodgings. It would most likely have been windy ever since we crossed into Texas, a flat relentless push from the northwest that could rock the car and make the motel sign creak all night.

School teachers — and research — will tell you wind is associated with restlessness, irritability, inattention, and increased anxiety. Or perhaps we were just experiencing a cumulative weariness after several days on the road. Either way, we were more tired than hungry. Plus, Patty was coming down with a cold. So, rather than going to the diner up the road, we made our dinner with what leftover lunches and snacks were in the car. Mom was reading us a bedtime story, but Patty was asleep after just a few pages. We all soon followed her example.

Finally, the classroom door opened and my mother walked in, hair and wool overcoat speckled white with fresh snow. I jumped out of my seat and ran past other desks to the back of the class and into the cloakroom. I plopped onto the low bench and pulled my bulky rubber galoshes from the boot tray underneath. My shoed feet slipped easily into them as they were sized to last two seasons, but my trembling fingers had trouble hooking and closing the three metal buckles on each boot.

My winter coat, snow pants, and a small duffel bag hung on a double hook with my name taped above. As I put on the coat I looked from my feet to the winter pants and shrugged. There would be no playing in the snow today, so I reached for the duffel and stuffed them in. My wool hat wasn’t hanging there. It was once again bunched in a coat pocket, wet and smelly. Before leaving, I turned and looked around the cloakroom, my wool mittens flopping against my hands, the connecting string running the length of each sleeve and across my back.

To this day, I remember the cloakroom far better than the classroom. It was—it seemed— at least half as big as the classroom itself. I’d swear we spent more time in it, too. Unbundling in the morning, bundling for recess, unbundling after recess, and bundling to go home. Twenty-some bodies at once. Times 4. The nearly overpowering smell of wet wool, rubber, chalk dust, lacquered oak, and sweaty kids. It was where we would go at snack time to collect our small bottle of milk, straw to punch through the paper seal, and graham cracker to take back to our desks. Cookie if we were lucky. It was also where we were sentenced to a time out as the need arose. I would never see a room like this again.

I joined my mom in saying good-bye to my teacher, who prompted the class to wave good-bye to me. We walked through the drafty hallway and out the front door. The snow had stopped and the streets were quiet in Monroe, Michigan on a weekday morning, and the crunch of our feet on the unshoveled sidewalks seemed loud. We passed the yard where just a few weeks ago we had played in a huge pile of red and yellow leaves.

I took it all in. We were leaving. We were moving to Southern California.

Read the AI Field Note for this vignette

When we turned into our street, I could see my father at the back of our car—a 1949 DeSoto— the trunk lid up, shifting things around inside. Patty, my 2 1/2 year old sister, appeared in the side window, then disappeared. My mother went straight to my father. How much more did he have? He gestured at the few things still on the driveway. She nodded and went inside.

I went in too, to collect my things. My cardboard box would be full — DC comics (Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, and my favorite, Superman), various Disney comics, and some picture books I could read to Patty during the long miles ahead. The box was made particularly heavy by the World Book A volume. There was a clipboard and a pad of paper, pencils, and crayons. And my piggy bank, the kind with a cork in the bottom, at least half full of coins I’d been dropping in for months. The plan was for this to be my spending money. My job was to count it and decide how to budget for souvenirs along the way, leaving enough for our final stop: Palm Springs, where my grandparents lived now.

I carried everything out and got settled in the back seat, putting my box next to Patty’s. She had filled hers, with a little help from Mom, with a doll, stuffed animals, a few toys, and her own clipboard, pad of paper, and crayons. She would be behind Mom and I behind Dad. He had laid out two sleeping bags, one on top of the other with a small hump in the middle, to be a second space for each of us on the long drive. They were wool-lined canvas, the kind his Scout troop used. They smelled like campfire and damp and something indefinably his.

My mother came out with the food — sandwiches that wouldn’t need refrigeration, wrapped and packed for the road, along with a couple of bags of snacks, napkins, cups, plates, and utensils. She and my father worked the trunk together, fitting in the last odds and ends. Additional clothes for the days on the road. Jackets for rest stops. The small things that she wished she’d brought along last year when we made our first drive to California to visit his family who had recently moved to Southern California.

At some point before my parents locked the door and got in the car, a couple of the neighbor women appeared on the sidewalk in their wool coats to say goodbye. Most farewells had taken place over the previous couple weeks—it was remarkable how many connections had been made in just over four years of living in Monroe. They chatted briefly and hugged each other. These were neighbors who knew and cared about each other.

The coffee thermos was already on the front seat, freshly refilled by my mother. My father had emptied it once already while getting the car packed.

When everything was in, he closed the trunk with both hands and we got underway. My mother settled in front with Patty. I knelt on the back seat as we backed out of the driveway, watching the house recede as we pulled away — the front door, the porch, the yard. We drove past my school on the way out of town. The playground was full of bundled-up kids throwing snowballs, oblivious to the DeSoto rolling past. I watched them through the window until the school was gone.

Then there was just the road.

US 24 south out of Monroe was a familiar route — we’d often taken the 30-40 minute drive to Toledo, Ohio, to visit Aunt Willene and Uncle Jim before they moved west. But today we weren’t stopping. Today we turned west at Toledo and kept going on US 20 — a 2-lane strip of asphalt that did its best to pass through a couple dozen small towns along the agricultural northern edges of Ohio and Indiana. There wouldn’t have been a lot of traffic, but it was mid-December and it could be icy.

My mother passed back half-sandwiches not long after we left, no stopping required. Patty ate hers in small bites, dropping pieces, and was asleep before we reached the Ohio line, her stuffed animal tucked under one arm, a blanket half under her and half over, her small body curved against the seat. The car got quieter.

I read comics for a while — Superman, Donald Duck, working through the stack slowly because I knew they had to last. When I tired of those I pulled out the World Book A volume, thick and familiar. My father had carried it in his sales kit, but he often pulled it out for us to use together. From the front seat he’d call back a topic — “Airplane” — and I’d have to find it, work through the guide words at the top of each page until the pictures appeared. Color photographs of propellers and cockpits and wing configurations. I’d study them, read the captions, and report back. Then he’d give me another.

We stopped once later in the afternoon, somewhere in Indiana — a gas station with a lunch counter inside, warm and smelling of coffee and griddle grease. We ate quickly, used the restrooms, got back in the car. The December sky had gone flat and gray. My father checked the road ahead and said something to my mother I didn’t catch.

When Patty woke we played 20 questions. She sat on my mother’s lap and Mom would whisper suggestions in her ear while I guessed. She didn’t entirely grasp the rules, but she understood that we were playing something, and that was enough. She got better as the miles went on. By the time we crossed into Illinois the light was nearly gone and she was dozing again.

The road got busier as we came up on Chicago — more trucks, more lights, the smell of something industrial in the cold air. Gary, Indiana, my father said. We were close.

He found a motor court set back from the road, a single story of identical doors arranged in an L around a gravel lot, a neon sign throwing red light across the DeSoto’s hood. VACANCY. He went in to get the key while we waited in the car, the engine ticking as it cooled.

The room smelled of cigarette smoke and cleaning fluid and the faint ghost of a hundred previous travelers. Two double beds with chenille spreads, a nightstand between them, a radio, an ashtray with the motel’s name on it. A small tiled bathroom. My mother got Patty settled, then pulled out the remaining sandwiches and apple slices while my father brought in what we needed for the night — not everything, just enough. He made two trips and locked the car.

Mom had spread towels on top of one of the beds and laid out the sandwiches in their waxed paper packets and some apple slices — a picnic of sorts.

After we ate, Dad said he had a treat for us before bedtime. He hoisted a giggling Patty over his head and onto his shoulders and we walked next door to the diner. The motel manager had told him it had the best pie in the state.

Two pieces of berry pie for four to share, small cartons of milk for the kids, and steaming cups of coffee for the adults. I knew last year’s trip had been long, but I still had to ask, “How much farther until we get there?”

My dad almost choked on his coffee and my mom laughed.

He set the cup down and asked, “Do you know what highway we’re getting on tomorrow?”

He waited but I didn’t answer. Finally, I shrugged and shook my head.

“It’s Route 66. And here’s the thing — it starts right here. Well, not this diner. But Chicago. Tomorrow morning we drive into Chicago and we find the starting line. Like a race.”

He smoothed out a clean paper napkin and drew a short line between two dots.

“See this? This is how far we drove today, from Monroe to the motel.”

He made a bigger dot right next to the little one.

“This is Chicago. And…”

He drew a long squiggly line diagonally to the lower left corner of the napkin, where he made another big dot.

“And way over here? That’s Palm Springs, where Grandma and Grandpa live now. And this road right here in the middle — that’s Route 66. Two thousand, three hundred miles.”

“You mean we’re going to be on one road the whole trip?” It seemed impossible. I looked at my mother for confirmation.

“And we drove the whole way on it last year, too?” Mom smiled and nodded. “Why didn’t you tell me?!”

Dad started to say something, but she put her hand on his and said, “I don’t know. Maybe we were saving it for this year. You can help us read city names on the highway signs and we can keep track of how far along we are by the cities we check off when we go through them.”

Dad nodded. “Actually, we’ll take another road at the very end to get to Palm Springs. Otherwise, yeah, the whole way. You know, Route 66 is pretty famous already. There’s even a song about it. We’ll learn a lot about the road, and cities and states, and you can tell your children about it someday — that you actually drove the famous Route 66 when you were just five years old.”

None of us at the table that night could appreciate the irony in my father’s words. We couldn’t know that for at least the next sixteen years none of us would live more than a stone’s throw from the Mother Road.

Read the AI Field Note for this vignette

Just a generation earlier, in 1918, nearly every American baby had been born at home, most with the help of a midwife. Only about five percent arrived in hospitals, usually because of the mother’s wealth or complications with her labor. By 1948 the picture had reversed: nine out of ten births now took place in hospitals like Bixby.

So it was that the nervous young couple was reassured by the familiar visage of the columned porch and home-like entrance. They opened the door and were met with the faint, mingled scents of disinfectant and coffee from the staff kitchen.

At the front desk, a nurse in a starched white uniform took the mother’s name and folded her admission card into a ledger book. There were no insurance forms to complete; most families paid directly, sometimes on installments. The mother was led to a narrow labor room. Meanwhile her husband was led down the hallway to a wooden chair where he sat nervously watching the clock and hoping the baby would come before his summer job began at eight. Three hours later he jotted down the hospital’s phone number before leaving for the roofing crew, planning to climb down every hour or so to call for news.

Read the AI Field Note for this vignette: My Early Days With AI, Part 2

When the time came, the family physician appeared in his white coat. He and a nurse worked in the small delivery room, its bright light and enameled table the most modern space in the building. After the baby’s first cry, the doctor noted the details—time, weight, sex—then passed them to the ward clerk. Later she filled in the official birth registration form in the neat, slanted strokes of the Palmer Method cursive that had dominated American classrooms for half a century. The form went by mail to the county registrar, where in due time an embossed certificate would make it official.

From those documents we know:

• The child, a boy, was named Michael David Massengill, born at 10:38 a.m. on Wednesday, September 1, 1948, weighing six pounds, twelve ounces.

• His father, Claude Massengill Jr., age 24, was a student at Adrian College. (The boy escaped being dubbed Claude III.)

• His mother, Leonora Alice Wolfe, age 20, born in Detroit, had left college when she married and now listed her occupation as “Domestic.”

Back on the ward, Alice rested in a small room. Michael was kept in the nursery, visible through a glass window. Nurses wheeled the infants out in bassinets a few times each day, lining them up like dolls for their mothers to see and hold. Visiting hours were short and strictly observed: fathers and relatives arrived in the evenings, dressed in their Sunday best, peering proudly at the window.

Meals came on metal-domed trays—plain, but hot and filling. Nurses, brisk but kindly, tended both mother and baby. Meanwhile, the ward clerk bundled the week’s birth records, and in a side office the hospital bookkeeper tallied the charges:

• Five days in hospital @ $7.00 per day

• Delivery room @ $12.00

• Drugs and dressings @ $1.63

• Nursery @ $8.00

Claude paid $50 in cash the first day, leaving a balance of $6.63 upon discharge. The doctor’s own bill, handwritten on letterhead or perhaps even a prescription pad, would arrive later. In all, the hospital stay cost $56.63—about $759 in today’s dollars, or roughly two weeks’ wages for a young laborer.

On the day of discharge, Alice was wheeled out and helped into the car, the infant in her arms wrapped in a soft blanket. There were no car seats then. They drove the short distance home with only a receipt and their memories.

No one took pictures during my first five days. In 1948, that was perfectly normal: cameras were clunky, film was precious, and hospitals discouraged them. Instead of snapshots, my early existence was documented on printed forms and typed bills. The record of my entry into the world began not in photographs, but in paperwork—a quiet testament to a different kind of memory.

Left to Right: Kodak Reflex II (Twin Lens Reflex) – A higher-end but still accessible model in 1948; Kodak Vigilante Junior Six-20 Folding Camera – Elegant Art Deco style; Early Polaroid Land Camera (circa 1948) – “Instant” photographs in about a minute, finally eliminating the wait for film development. A game-changer, but not yet commonplace.

Weeks later the embossed birth certificate would arrive in the mail, a permanent record of an ordinary birth to an ordinary couple. Alice, whose marriage and motherhood were a much-traveled off-ramp from the route to college degree and career, would settle into her role and routine. As the birth record attested, she would spend her life as a “domestic”– a wife, a mother, a homemaker. Claude, recently a 20-year-old soldier and currently a college student compliments of Uncle Sam and his GI Bill, would soon be a teacher and a coach and eventually a school principal.

To his parents, Michael, the first of four children, may have seemed extraordinary. Yet he was in fact merely one of 76 million babies that would be born in the U.S. between 1946 and 1964. And it is also a fact that the story of his life has been an ordinary one, possibly of interest to a few people. At least family. Maybe.

But what if remembering the ordinary lives Americans lived throughout the past century was important—especially now, when those in power try to erase our national memory? They destroy records, outlaw the teaching of inconvenient truths, ban books, tear down institutions. My first days were recorded in documents, in writing. I keep them because sometimes you need to assert the facts. Nearing the end of my life, I’m stunned to realize how much of our national story could vanish, unless those who lived it and remember it tell the stories that can preserve it.

My life began on an ordinary September day in 1948. If there is anything extraordinary about my story, it is not me–it is the times in which I lived.

Read the AI Field Note for this vignette: My Early Days With AI, Part 2

The 1920s were not kind to the Cumberland Gap. Middlesboro was a coal town, and even families like my grandparents, who weren’t miners, felt the industry’s grip. My grandfather, Claude Sr., born in Claiborne County, Tennessee, in 1898, didn’t work underground, but his neighbors did, and the strikes and mine closures meant whole towns could rise or fall in a season. My grandmother, Mossie Rebecca Rowlette, born the same year across the state line in Virginia, kept the household together through those uncertain years.

In 1930, with three children under eight, they joined the tide of Appalachian families heading north. The Depression had deepened, coal markets had collapsed, and jobs in Kentucky were scarce. Monroe, Michigan, promised steadier work — not riches, but survival. Families like theirs often packed what they could into a borrowed truck or boarded a train with suitcases, leaving behind farms and kin who had been in the same valleys for a hundred years. Migration was not just a choice but a lifeline.

In Monroe, my grandfather found work at a lumber yard. It was modest labor — wages in those years averaged twelve to twenty dollars a week, barely enough to cover food and rent for a family of five. To make ends meet, Claude and Mossie managed apartment houses, sometimes living in small rooms within the buildings themselves. It was a common arrangement: landlords offered discounted rent or a small stipend to resident managers willing to handle repairs, rent collection, and tenants’ complaints. My grandmother’s labor in those apartments was as vital to the family’s survival as the paycheck from the lumber yard, though it was rarely recorded in ledgers.

By 1938, their situation had improved. My grandfather had been promoted to yard foreman, a job that carried both steadier wages and a measure of respect. That same year, their son Ron was born, and for the first time they could afford to buy a small house of their own. It was a fragile kind of security, but security nonetheless — a place they owned, not just borrowed.

That purchase was not accidental. Just a few years earlier, in 1934, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had created the Federal Housing Administration. Before the FHA, most mortgages required a 50 percent down payment and repayment in five to ten years — terms that working families could never meet. The FHA transformed homeownership by offering insured loans with lower down payments and longer repayment schedules. Families like mine, who had worked their way from the hills of Kentucky to the industrial edges of Michigan, suddenly found the possibility of owning not just a home but, by the late 1940s, even an apartment building.

It was a ladder built for them, rickety but real. Without the New Deal’s scaffolding — FHA loans, Social Security, the first federal safety nets — the leap from tenant rooms to ownership would likely have remained out of reach. My grandparents climbed that ladder step by step, until by the end of the decade they owned both a larger house and an apartment building of their own.

What strikes me, looking back, is how their story was both ordinary and remarkable. Ordinary, because thousands of families made the same journey from Appalachia to the Midwest, pulled by the same economic forces and pushed by the same scarcity. Remarkable, because each family carried its own burdens and hopes, and because in those lean years, survival was itself a kind of triumph.

If you are interested in the role AI played in this vignette: My Early Days with AI: The Honeymoon Period Part 1

I’ve considered reviving my blog and writing a personal history for my family—for at least one particular period of my life—for some time. But the two dominant stories of 2025 have finally convinced me the time to start is now: the first year of Trump 2.0, and the ubiquitous emergence of AI.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and disoriented when every week brings a dozen head-spinning announcements, pronouncements, and dire events courtesy of the government. At the root of many, if not most, is the blatant intention to erase and rewrite our national history and constitution—both literally (removing plaques honoring contributions by people of color; forced deportations; even the White House East Wing) and metaphorically.

I see the Memoir Project as a contribution to the widespread effort to preserve our memories and records of the America that spent 250 years striving to live up to its founding documents.

As for AI, I unexpectedly became interested in it after listening to a podcast, “What Could Go Wrong?”, this past summer. Scott Z. Burns, the screenwriter of “Contagion,” describes how he and director Steven Soderbergh discussed making a sequel to the 2011 film. They decided to use AI chatbots to come up with ideas for a sequel and to develop the plot, treatment, and even a pitch to virtual movie executives. (I’ll discuss this in more detail in my AI Log.)

Including AI as a resource for this project gives me a testing ground to learn about the technology—something I enjoy. My first few research and writing trials were exciting, both in terms of the results and the time saved.

On the other hand, I’ve already found plenty of downsides to this new partner. Fine, I thought. I can get the memoir done, and at the same time, keep notes and publish a concurrent log to report on the good and bad, the authentic and the inauthentic. I hope you’ll find this interesting—and maybe even fun—to follow.