Tonight's picture was taken in August of 2007. This was one of the many bicycle adventures Peter took Mattie on when we were staying on the Island of Coronado in California. They journeyed to the Hotel Del Coronado. You can see the famous pink roofed Victorian Lady Hotel in the background of this photo!
Quote of the day: If the wind will not serve, take to the oars. ~ Latin Proverb
I went with my parents today to a very special exhibit at the Autry National Center of the American West. It was entitled: Route 66, The Road and the Romance! I always thought I lived on Route 66! After all right outside my complex in Washington, DC is an on ramp for Route 66! Forget it!!! It isn't the same nostalgic Route!!! I got a real lesson today about this famous Route and the MOTHER ROAD in American History! Route 66 went from Chicago to Los Angeles! Parts of it still exist today! However, this route has had quite a vibrant and important past. Then it fell into disrepair, and is now slowly getting revitalized! It came on the radar scope of many of us in the popular media in 2006, when Pizar produced the movie Cars. Cars highlighted Route 66 and how this Route got by-passed by the Interstate! The main reason I know this movie so well is I saw it numerous times with Mattie! It was one of his favorites. Peter can quote lines from the movie, he saw it that many times with Mattie. Mattie owned every toy car from the movie too! In fact, within the exhibit today, which was sponsored by Disney/Pizar, there was a whole display case dedicated to the movie. It brought back SO MANY MEMORIES! I attached the particular scene from the movie with the James Taylor song that describes the changing of the times so well! How people no longer traveled on the mother road, and in many ways though the creation of interstates were necessary it changed how we traveled. Traveling became about getting to one's destination faster, not about the process and the journey.
James Taylor's Our Town from the Movie Cars:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiPQ75hov8Q
I was not allowed to photograph anything in the exhibit today, so I went on line and found a wonderful review of the exhibit through the Los Angeles Times! Therefore, I am SO THANKFUL to be able to share with you the following photos and thoughts below!
LA Times (Deborah Vankin, Autry Museum's Route 66' exhibit drives influence of the road home, June 20, 2014)
The postcard image is ingrained in our collective
consciousness: An empty road cuts through the Mojave Desert, its inky black
path stretching forward, seemingly to infinity. A lonely white signpost flanks
the asphalt — "Route 66."
Perhaps more than any other road in America, Route 66 is
layered with history and brimming with nostalgia, a post-World War II symbol of
possibility and progress that has infiltrated contemporary pop culture as an
emblem of the freedoms of the open road. But America's Main Street, which winds
its way from Chicago to Los Angeles, also has a dark side. It was, in its
earlier days, a corridor of racism and segregation and the focal point of
political contention, such as in the mid-1950's when the interstate highway
system emerged.
A new show at the Autry National Center of the American West
travels those 2,400 miles of open road to tell the story of America on the go
in the 20th century. "Route 66: The Road and the Romance" is not just
for travel buffs and Americana enthusiasts, however. The exhibit of more than
250 historical artifacts — vintage gas pumps, neon motel signs, John
Steinbeck's original handwritten manuscript of "The Grapes of Wrath"
— is particularly issues-driven, aiming to contextualize the American history
that unfolded along Route 66 since its inception in 1926.
"We use the highway as a way to examine some much
larger issues of 20th century America — class, race, politics," says
Jeffrey Richardson, the museum's curator of Western history, popular culture
and firearms, who curated the exhibit with project advisor Jim Farber.
"Nostalgia is a very small part of the exhibition; it's not a travelogue
by any means."
The exhibit, which runs through Jan. 4, is divided into four
chronological sections, starting with early transcontinental transportation,
the invention of automobiles and the creation of Route 66. The second section
looks at the route during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, an era when
Steinbeck called the road, which had become a migration path West, "the
mother road, the road of flight." Section 3 explores postwar car culture,
and it ends with the decline and ultimate revitalization of Route 66.
There's no shortage of memorabilia crowding museums and
tourist outposts in the eight states the road cuts through, including the
California Route 66 Museum in Victorville and the Smithsonian's permanent
"On the Road" exhibition. But the Autry exhibit, Richardson says, is
unique in its scope as it includes rare artifacts and considers the route from
a national perspective. The historical anecdotes, carefully juxtaposed, create
dualities that give the show depth.
Songwriter Bobby Troup, for example, who was white, may have
gotten his kicks on Route 66 when he penned those idyllic song lyrics in 1946 —
and museum visitors can sample the song and the whimsy it conjures, at
listening stations. But Nat King Cole's trio of performers, who recorded it,
would likely have had a very different experience traveling the route, which at
the time was studded with "sundown towns" that were unsafe for
African Americans after dark.
There are six Ed Ruscha photographs on view from the L.A.
artist's "Twenty six Gasoline Stations" series — all stark,
black-and-white portraits of gleaming service stations along Route 66. On
display with the artworks are photographs of the same locations, taken 30 years
later by New York artist Jeff Brouws. In every one of the later images, the gas
station has been abandoned. "We use these images to talk about the impact of the
interstate highway system in 1956," Richardson says, "and the
bypassing of so many communities and the impact that had."
"Route 66: The Road and the Romance" was six years
in the making. The Autry made a wish list, says Richardson, of the single best
objects it hoped to procure to illustrate individual points, then it set about
chasing down those items from private collectors, universities, libraries and
other museums. The Autry managed to scratch off nearly every item on the list.
Of the 250-plus artifacts in the show, more than 200 are on loan. Among them:
the oldest-known Route 66 map, Dorothea Lange's Depression-era photo
"Migrant Mother," a cream-colored 1960's Chevrolet Corvette and.......
Jack
Kerouac's 120-foot "On the Road" scroll, which visitors can flip
through via iPad.
"We went just about anywhere we could to find the most
important artifacts to tell this story," Richardson says. A social media
campaign had two Autry employees driving Route 66 from L.A. to Chicago, taking
pictures and interviewing people along the way and gathering materials so
visitors can plan their own road trips.
It is the individual, hard-to-come-by objects, however — the
literal and fictitious detritus of the road, such as the early Jackson Pollock
painting, "Going West," storyboards and sketches from the animated
Pixar film "Cars," and a chunk of Route 66 asphalt — that Richardson
feels will stick with visitors.
The Dust Bowl, also known as the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the US
and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought
and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent wind erosion. The drought came in three waves, 1934, 1936, and 1939–40, but some regions of the High Plains experienced drought conditions for as many as eight years. Extensive deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains during the previous decade had displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that normally trapped soil and moisture even during periods of drought and high winds. Rapid mechanization of farm implements, especially small gasoline tractors and widespread use of the combine harvester, significantly impacted decisions to convert arid grassland (much of which received no more than 10 inches of precipitation per year) to cultivated cropland.
During the drought of the 1930s, the unanchored soil turned to dust that the prevailing winds blew away in clouds that sometimes blackened the sky. These choking billows of dust – named "black blizzards" or "black rollers" – reached such East Coast cities as New York City and Washington, D.C. and often reduced visibility to 3.3 ft or less.
The drought and erosion of the Dust Bowl affected 100,000,000 acres that centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and touched adjacent sections of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas.
The Dust Bowl forced tens of thousands of families to abandon their farms. Many of these families, who were often known as "Okies" because so many of them came from Oklahoma, migrated to California and other states to find that the Great Depression had rendered economic conditions there little better than those they had left. Author John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men about such people.
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