A year to remember: 1926 Mother Road completed
This year is the 75th anniversary of U.S. Route 66, created as a federal highway the autumn of 1926. It was called America’s Main Street from the very beginning — 2,248 miles Chicago through Williams to Southern California’s Pacific shore — even though paving wouldn’t be complete across Arizona until 1938.
Cowboys still rode horseback to Williams from nearby ranches for a shave, haircut and bath in 1926. There were gas stations, garages and the first motels called motor cabins or courts. A new Ford Model T car sold for $290 and buses carried Grand Canyon visitors from the South Rim on tours of Navajo Country.
Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett flew over the North Pole and the Army Air Corps was established. Robert Goddard of Massachusetts launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket to begin a new age of intercontinental ballistic missiles, astronauts and space exploration.
America’s Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel. Gene Tunney beat Jack Dempsey for the heavyweight boxing title. Red Grange, Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones and Bill Tilden were football, baseball, golfing and tennis heroes. Permanent waves were in fashion. People here saw the Santa Fe Railroad’s new all-Pullman passenger train called the Chief on its first run from Chicago.
By 1926 Americans owned more automobiles than bathtubs and telephones, and they were traveling longer distances than ever before regardless of dirt road driving conditions.
Motorists this far west were advised to carry tire chains for traction in boggy places, extra gasoline, water and oil, a shovel, tow rope and tool kit, tire patches to repair flats, and a board to keep the jack from sinking into mud or sand. Many brought camping gear so they could spend the night beside the road when darkness caught them between towns far from accommodations.
Automobiles required 90 percent of all petroleum products, 80 percent of the rubber, 20 percent of the steel, and 75 percent of the plate glass made in the United States. Three-fourths of new and used cars were purchased on credit, mostly Chevrolets and Fords.
Small signs advertising a shaving cream were appearing along highways: DOES YOUR HUS-BAND/MISBEHAVE/GRUNT AND GRUMBLE/RANT AND RAVE/SHOOT THE BRUTE SOME BURMA-SHAVE.
Movies were silent and Williams residents watched performances by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Janet Gaynor, John Gilbert, Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, William S. Hart and Tom Mix. Popular songs recorded on phonograph discs included “Runnin’ Wild,” “Baby Face,” “The Sheik of Araby,” “Gimmie a Little Kiss,” “There’s Yes, Yes in Your Eyes,” and “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
The Grand Canyon Railway was taking sightseers north from Williams. Resort hotels, dude ranches and towns were promoting Arizona as a vacation destination. The Williams Commercial Club had printed a ‘tourist leaflet’ with a map of the area in 1924. The club was replaced by a chamber of commerce 12 months later and the state highway department began publishing Arizona Highways magazine to encourage construction of better roads.
National prohibition forbidding the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating beverages was six years old when Route 66 began. Moonshiners and bootleggers were getting rich selling to people eager to help them break the law. There were organized crime lords like Chicago’s Al Capone who had his gangster rivals murdered so he could corner the illegal booze trade.
Big cities far from Williams and conservative rural America were centers of a rebellion against what the younger generation, especially college students, called the restraints of Puritanism, its conventions, decorum and stuffiness.
Boys at Yale and Princeton wore raccoon coats and carried flasks of gin and whiskey. Girls called flappers wore skirts up to the knees, silk and rayon underwear, and rolled stockings. They used lipstick, cut their hair short, drank cocktails, smoked cigarettes, and danced the Charleston and Black Bottom.
They mocked respectability, scorned hypocrisy, thought of themselves as the lost generation and flaming youth, and talked openly about sex with a candor which seems mild today but came close to what their scandalized elders called debauchery during the Roaring Twenties and Route 66’s infancy.
As in the campus humor magazines: “Do you consider my legs long? Yes, whenever possible.” “She doesn’t drink, she doesn’t pet, and she hasn’t been to college yet.”
Edna St. Vincent Millay summed it up for them when she wrote “My candle burns at both ends, it will not last the night. But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends, it gives a lovely light.”
Part of it was an act, the fun of defying authority and shocking the old folks. Part, though, was very real – a growing determination among women to have the same social freedom men had, good or bad.
During those years of jazz and speak-easies, banana nut sundaes, flagpole sitting and marathon dancing new words and phrases were added to the vocabulary: “Oh, you kid! The cat’s meow. That’s swell! Drugstore cowboy. Belly laugh, blind date, bull session, copacetic, fall guy, goofy, gyp, houch (for bootleg liquor), scram, lousy, necking and petting, sex appeal, ritzy, spiffy, and whoopee (meaning boisterous fun).”
(Jim Harvey is a Williams historian who contributes a monthly column on our town’s early days.)
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