CBS Sunday Morning found the article’s author driving Route 66 this past spring in a rented Volkswagen Jetta, not a vintage convertible, as the highway reaches 100 years old. The choice fits the road’s current reality: the romance is intact, but the Texas Panhandle still shows the damage left by bypasses and time.
The 2,400-mile route crosses eight states, including 178 miles in Texas, and its mythology has been built in layers. John Steinbeck called it the “Mother Road” in The Grapes of Wrath in 1939; Bobby Troup later wrote “Get Your Kicks On” Route 66 during the postwar years; and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, published in 1957, widened the highway’s pull for a later generation.
Texola and South Grand Avenue
The drive starts in Texola, a place with about fifty or so residents just east of the Oklahoma border, and the small scale is part of the point. Texola was once informally known as Beerola when nearby Texas counties were dry, and its one-room jail predates Route 66. In Shamrock, a small, run-down 1930 Magnolia gas station on South Grand Avenue sits on the National Register of Historic Places, one more marker that the old road survives more as evidence than as infrastructure.
The route still passes former filling stations, abandoned motor courts, highway hotels, roadside attractions, and the remains of roadside attractions in various states of disrepair. Tourists have covered the Texas state-line sign with stickers, which tells you the road still draws traffic, but not enough to erase the silence around the bypassed stretches.
John Steinbeck and the rebound
The contradiction is the story’s engine: Route 66 is celebrated as the Main Street of America and the Mother Road, yet the Texas Panhandle section is dotted with dilapidated relics and small towns bypassed by Interstate 40. Route 66 was removed from service as an officially designated highway in 1985, and the newer multilane system shifted long-distance traffic away from the older corridor.
Michael Wallis’s Route 66: The Mother Road helped spark a spiritual rebound in the 1990s, and Pixar Animation Studios’ Cars in 2006 drew on that revival. That history explains why the centennial matters now: the highway no longer functions as a single working artery, but it still operates as a cultural route, one that preserves the look of decline as much as the language of freedom.
Route 66’s 100th year leaves one practical question hanging over the road: what specific centennial events or preservation efforts, if any, are taking place along it this year? For readers headed into the Texas Panhandle, the answer on the ground is already visible in the relics, the bypassed towns, and the worn stations that remain standing.
