Road tripping

Hip to the Trip: A Cultural History of Route 66

by Peter Dedek
2007, University of New Mexico Press
169 pp. Paper. $19.95.

How could any scholar take seriously the subject of Route 66's popular culture revival? Those of us in Illinois literally see the revival, if we do at all, in Department of Transportation signs strung along a road to either direct traffic or private signs to advertise certain businesses and two annual events, a road rally across the state and a festival in Springfield. A few recently developed museums have sprung up in accompaniment but many people judge that these seem more to celebrate rather than cerebrally plumb a romanticized past.

Route 66's very popularity raises the questions of how and why it got that way and Peter Dedek, an assistant professor in the Department of Family and Consumer Services at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, has, in this book, ably taken on the challenge of answering those questions. General readers will learn a great deal and likely be swept pleasantly along in Dedek's engaging style.

Dedek shares no illusions behind a nostalgic haze about the romance of the "open road" fulfilled along historic Route 66. Because he did not live beside or even near the road, he started his work on the book as a thoughtful "outsider," knowing minimally that it had something to do with the West and was very popular in the 1950s. His gradual learning as opposed to a faith steeped in the emersion of an "insider" enables him to achieve, to the reader's advantage, the serviceable balance between appreciation and analysis. He concludes in his introduction that Route 66 is worthy of study because it "provides a unique vantage point from which to better understand American popular culture from the 1920s to the present." His book's purpose is more than a history of how and why Route 66 became so popular—the first scholarly effort to do so, it deserves mention—" but to create a comprehensive portrait of the cultural meaning of the highway that explores what Route 66 was, what it is today, and what it may become in the future."

Six chapters in 131 pages (not including footnotes and bibliography) hurry the reader through the journey, often reducing to the sufficient minimum subjects of vast development in the literature or deserving future elaboration. Chapter 1 rightly attributes the railroads' and the movies' popular culture stereotyping to preconditioning Route 66's image. The physical antecedents of Route 66's alignment also were in place as much as a half century before the stereotyping. For example, Lieutenant Edward Beall's survey in 1857 for a "national road" across the Southwest resulted in the western portion of Route 66. Dedek delineates how American culture transformed Native American and Mexican American motifs along the corridor and, in a comparatively gentle nudge of the conquering culture, points out that crafts rendered suitable to the marketplace made profit for Native Americans at their cost of "irreversibly" changed lives. In chapter 2, Dedek's admission to a "short history" of Route 66 yields a crisp chronicle of its emergence from the good roads movement of the early-twentieth century and five subsequent periods: 1927-1934, tourist and general traffic route; 1934-1940, "road of flight," which Oakies and emigrants from surrounding areas followed west; 1940-1945, military uses by convoys, POW camps, and war games; 1945-1955, gradual replacement of a highway in decline; and 1956-1985, the end and federal decommissioning.

Dedek comprehends the contemporary and speculates on the route's future in his book's last half. Chapter 3 is an explanation of how the Interstate's efficiency literally bypassed the old highway aIthough nostalgic yearnings in the 1970s-1980s metaphorically lifted it above the modern highway's reputation. Tom Teague, Illinoisans will nod approval, is acknowledged to have been a key inspirer of the Route 66 revival (and a former executive director of the ISHS). In chapter 4, Dedek gently critiques the nostalgic advocates of Route 66, pointing out that the "open road" mystique attributed to the past goes without recognition of many past realities. The ambiance of isolation, for example, the revivalists find in the past Route 66, in fact, is a present consequence of its decline as a busy commercial strip. He deftly explains that the revivalists' motives have taken root in the present condition attributed to a postmodern ethos about which—in this viewer's words —the revivalists are too little aware. Dedek, instead, writes about their love of the postmodern in architecture as materialized in Route 66 relics valued "because they live in the postmodern era." His patience with his readers as well manifests itself in Chapter 5 wherein he elaborates the many federal programs for "saving the mystic ruins" (Chapter title) and makes his own recommendations including work within the communities along Route 66. He believes Route 66's standing for the preeminent American road will influence other highway preservation projects and he ties back in his last chapter with the optimistic proviso that "If preserved and protected, Route 66 will function as a dynamic spectacle for generations to come."

History does not exist until someone begins to think about the past, describes what it was like, and tries to explain the present as an evolution from the past. Dedek understands that history is a cultural construct. His manner of deconstructing Route 66's

28 |ILLINOIS HERITAGE

emergence in popular culture is cast very tellingly in the catchy title Hip to the Trip. He lucidly explains how it is that "Route 66 is the most famous road in the United States and possibly the world."

Light on theoretical underpinnings, absent some important scholarly and popular literature on Route 66, not dedicated to fault |Route 66 tourists for their frivolous efforts in finding the "real America" (to quote a German tourist) on the route, but respectful of what it has meant, Dedek's populist approach departs in these ways from much academic historical scholarship. He does so too in discussing the route's probable future—for prediction is not germane to the historian's craft—and in his brief synthesis of some aspects of the past. Do not look here, for example, for a history of the Route 66 organizations that helped fuel the revival since 1984. His, however, is not a light book but his answers are lightly written. Dedek avoids trying for a definitive treatment. He does buy a little too much into the popular portrayal of Route 66 as a "linear community that is truly "of the people, by the people, for the people."

Commercialism is a stronger ingredient than he shows since he does not cover the role of business people's and states' publicity agencies and he looks too little at the minorities unmindful of the celebration. Still, Dedek has taken a useful, readable, and very attractive step onto ground scholars have seldom trod—one important manifestation of the love affair with the automobile in which Americans are not alone.

—Keith A. Sculle

Longtime Society member and frequent contributor Keith A. Sculle is the Head of Research and Education for the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency.

Heroes and survivors

On the Wings of Heroes

by Richard Peck
New York: Dial Books, 2007.
Cloth, $16.99.

Growing up in Decatur during the 1940s, Richard Peck dreamed of that "magic place," New York City. Now, as an award-winning author living in New York, he finds the magic for his young adult novels in the places, characters, and history of the Midwest. For the setting of The Teacher's Funeral (2004) and Here Lies the Librarian (2006), for example, he chose rural Indiana in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

In his newest book, On the Wings of Heroes (2007), Peck returns to World War II, to a Chicago suburb where Davy Bowman, a Cub Scout, is fighting on the home front. Peck allows Davy to tell his story in his own engaging voice. Readers will cheer him on as he learns to ride a bike, fret with him about the bullies in his classroom, and laugh with him at his father's practical jokes on Halloween vandals. The world Davy inhabits, however, is the 1940s, where radios—not televisions or computer games—provide entertainment and where telegrams—not email or cell phones—deliver urgent news.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the war increasingly dominates Davy's world. At school, the geography lesson focuses on the Pacific Islands. New students, whose fathers come to town for wartime work, crowd the class-room; many of them are "eight-to-five orphans" whose mothers work as well. Davy himself becomes one of these "orphans" when his grandparents move in and his mother takes a job at the local blood bank. Meanwhile, Davy's best friend, Scooter Tomlinson, moves away when the navy assigns Mr. Tomlinson to a post in California.

After school, Davy collects old paper and scrap metal for the war effort. Thanks to food rations, he finds less meat on the dinner table; sweet desserts become a rarity. If there's a blackout drill in the evening, he patrols the neighborhood with his father. If not, his family listens to the news on the radio and imagines his older brother, Bill, flying air raids over Germany.

In the course of his escapades, Davy meets the survivors of previous wars: the neighbor mourning a son killed in World War I, the retired men reminiscing about Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, the 97-year-old still expecting her brother to return from the Civil War. Davy's war heroes, the "heroes" of the title, are his brother, a B-17 pilot and his father, a wounded WWI veteran. They are heroes, Davy implies, not because they carried out great feats of bravery but because they answered the call to serve for the sake of children in the future. By this definition, whether Davy realizes it or not, he too is a hero.

Avoiding militant patriotism on the one hand and reproachful pacificism on the other, Peck observes that war has been a continuous part of the American experience. Every generation has its war. During an interview printed in Publisher's Weekly in July 2003, Peck revealed his desire "to erase the boundaries between age groups." With On the Wings of Heroes, he achieves that goal. The story of Davy Bowman will appeal to grandparents, parents, and young persons alike.

—Melody Herr

Melody Herr is a historian and a writer living in DeKalb.

ILLINOIS HERITAGE| 29