On August 6, fire took the west wing of the Route 66 Inn in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. The rest of the motel stayed open for guests. Six days later, the renovated Skyliner Motel in Stroud, Oklahoma, still running, went on the market for $775,000. Somewhere between those two facts is the story of the Mother Road at 100: what is still there, what is for sale, what is already gone.
Route 66 was officially commissioned on November 11, 1926, 2,448 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica across eight states. The centennial is technically three months away. In practice it is already here. On August 13, a 25-foot neon corndog went up at the Route 66 Experience park near the Illinois State Fairgrounds in Springfield, honroing the Cozy Dog Drive-In. The City of West Hollywood is throwing a free centennial celebration at Plummer Park on Sunday, August 16. And on July 29, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted unanimously by voice vote to advance S. 2887, the bill that would designate Route 66 as a National Historic Trail before its birthday.
The preservation stakes are the reason everyone is paying attention. According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, its Preserve Route 66 initiative awarded $350,000 in FY23, including $60,000 for a micro-grant program for women-owned Route 66 businesses and $50,000 to identify Latine Route 66 sites. The 1929 Osterman Filling Station in Peach Springs, Arizona, owned by the Hualapai Tribe, was named to the Trust's 2023 list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places; it received $158,000 in stabilization funds from the Trust, combined with $210,000 from from Arizona for roof and wall repairs.
So the physical artifacts have advocates. Buildings, signs, pumps. There is a professional class of people fighting to keep them standing.
The traveler's view was never professional
The road itself has a different problem. The buildings can be preserved because they are still, more or less, where you left them. The experience of Route 66, what it looked like from the passenger seat of a '58 station wagon at four in the afternoon in Arizona, was never captured by anyone with a budget.
Professional film of Route 66's heyday, roughly 1946 to 1970 before I-40 gutted it, is mostly promotinal. Chamber-of-commerce reels. Neon glow at night, tail-fin cars sliding into a diner lot, a waitress in a paper hat. The b-roll is real but the framing is a pitch. Nobody was hired to shoot the boring middle: the two-lane blur through nothing, the kids sweating in the back, the mother pointing at a motor court, the father pumping the shutter release on a Brownie 8mm because the light on the pavement looked right.
That footage exists. It survives almost exclusively on amateur reels, on the 8mm and Super 8 cameras American families started buying in serious numbers in exactly the years Route 66 was at its peak. The overlap is close to total. We handle these reels for a living. Splicing, cleaning, wet-gate scanning to 4K. Road-trip footage is one of the largest and least-known categories in the American amateur record.
What the reels actually show
A specific example. Somewhere in Arizona in 1958, a family pulls off onto rocky desert ground. Their station wagon is red and white. A man is standing beside it in the sun. The film is color, bleached by six decades but not gone. Nobody is performing. The car is dusty. That is the whole clip. Its also, for a documentary editor trying to show what a middle-class American family actually looked like at a Route 66 rest stop in the Eisenhower years, close to the entire genre.
The gas stations are the other half of it. In Las Vegas, Nevada in 1966, someone shoots from inside a moving car as it passes a classic filling station with a Route 66 sign out front. It is the pass-through view: not a still portrait of the signage but the sign as it registered through a windshield at speed. When a place like the Skyliner in Stroud finds a buyer, or does not, this is the kind of footage that shows what its lot looked like when the paint was fresh.
The packing shots are the ones that surprise editors. In Toledo, Ohio in 1964, a man in a purple shirt and a cap loads suitcases into the trunk of a white station wagon while a woman in a white blouse stands nearby. It is a driveway scene, not a road scene. But every Route 66 documentary needs the before: the departure, the loading of the car, the pause before the trip that eventually becomes the trip. Professional footage of that moment is almost impossible to source. Home movies are full of it.
Home movies belong at the preservation table
The centennial coverage right now is running two tracks in parallel. One is celebratory: the neon corndog, the West Hollywood party at Plummer Park, the pending federal trail designation. The other is elegiac: the west wing of the Route 66 Inn burning in Santa Rosa, the Osterman station in Peach Springs holding together on grant money and Hualapai stewardship.
Both tracks assume the road is a set of physical objects that either survive or do not. That is the argument that produces conservation dollars, and it is a good argument. But the road was also a lived thing, and the lived thing has a separate preservation problem, one the Preserve Route 66 initiative is not structured to solve.
Small-gauge film (8mm, Super 8, 16mm) is chemically finite. Color reels shot in the 1950s and 1960s were never designed to last a century. They fade. They shrink. Splices dry out and let go. The reels that captured what the Mother Road actually looked like at eye level, from the family sedan, are decaying on a schedule that has nothing to do with whether their subject buildings are still standing.
The Route 66 Experience park now has a 25-foot neon corndog honoring the Cozy Dog. Fine. Somewhere in a shoebox in Springfield or Amarillo or Barstow there is a reel of a kid eating one in 1963. The corndog will outlast the reel unless someone gets to the reel first.
We hold thousands of American road-trip home movies from roughly 1950 to 1970, wet-gate scanned to 4K from the original small-gauge stock. If you are building something for the centennial and you need the traveler's-eye view rather than the postcard, our American road trips and highways collection is a place to start. Everything on it came off a family's reel and through our scanner. Nothing was generated. Nothing was upscaled from a lower-resolution intermediate. It is what the pavement looked like at the time, from the seat where the camera actually was.
The buildings deserve their grants. The film deserves a scanner.