Route 66 is celebrating 100 years as the country's most famous highway and as a fixture of American pop culture, NPR reported, in a road-trip history that runs from Chicago to Santa Monica and from Dust Bowl migration to a jazz standard almost everyone can hum.
The highway was created in 1926 and runs more than 2,000 miles through eight states. NPR described its everyday charm as the open road through plains, prairies, canyons and deserts, past big cities, cow towns and ghost towns, with stops at roadside motels, retro diners and kitschy tourist traps. Three years after it opened, the Depression arrived, followed by the Dust Bowl.
"The Dust Bowl drove thousands of families away from their farms in the Midwest and southwest states," Jim Ross, who has written nine books about Route 66 and lives on an original section of the highway, told NPR. "Most of them headed for California, because that's where the jobs were, or so they thought." Dorothea Lange photographed displaced families for the Farm Security Administration along those routes, images that helped fix the highway in the national memory as a road of hardship as well as adventure.
The soundtrack arrived later. In 1946, aspiring songwriter and jazz pianist Bobby Troup wrote "Route 66" during a drive to California. Nat King Cole recorded the famous version; his daughter Natalie later recorded it too, NPR noted, and so did Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, among many others. The lyric is a geography lesson set to a swing beat: "It winds from Chicago to L.A. / More than 2,000 miles all the way / Get your kicks on Route 66."
By midcentury the road was no longer just a migrant path. It became a vacation corridor and then, as the Interstate system bypassed it, a nostalgia object: neon motels, painted cars, and a song that outlived the official highway designation. NPR's feature treats that pop-culture afterlife as the point of the centennial, not a footnote. The physical road is fragmented now, but the idea of Route 66 is intact enough to support a hundredth-birthday road trip, complete with the Cole recording on the stereo.
California's end of the highway, at Santa Monica, gives the anniversary a local hook for Bay Area and Los Angeles listeners who know the destination better than the Oklahoma or Arizona stretches. The larger story, as Ross and NPR tell it, is that a numbered road became a national myth because people used it in hard times, photographed it, and then wrote a song catchy enough to keep the myth in circulation for a century.
Anyone planning a commemorative drive will still find motels and diners that trade on that history. They will also be traveling a road that, from the beginning, was about people trying to get west — first for work, later for kicks.