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by theresa m ripley, roadside observer

Almost everyone I know grew up in a neighborhood. Their stories about the multiplicity of big and small city neighbors or suburban ghettos interest me tremendously. As a rural kid, I did not have neighborhoods. But I did live by Route 66, which provided all the diversity one needed.

By the time I was ten Route 66 was a mighty four-lane highway. It was the artery between Chicago and Los Angeles, famous enough by itself, but immortalized by TV and song while I lived on its perimeter. I fantasized that Todd and Buzz from the TV series Route 66 would drive down our front lane in their Corvette some evening. I really believed that because everyone else seemed to drop by. George Makaris, Buzz, was so classically handsome that I certainly would have liked to meet him.

Route 66 had a friendliness about it the modern interstates never attain with their regulated entrances and exits. Everyone who lived on Route 66 had their own driveways to the road. Thus, passersby had access to every farmhouse and small town enroute. We intermingled, and it made my best early education on the variety of people that lived and traveled in America. This exchange allowed me to appreciate the lives of people far different from a tenant farm family tending 200 acres 100 miles south of Chicago. With Route 66 in our back pocket, anybody from anywhere at anytime might venture into our lane; and, as you'll see, they often did.

According to family stories I was born, or more specifically, brought home from the hospital at age three weeks in October 1944. At this very time the first two lanes of Route 66 were being resurfaced so it made getting the new baby into the house difficult. I vividly recall the next two lanes being poured about 1954 or 55 because it impeded traveling the well-worn path to Ocoya which was on the opposide side of the road. My parents were not pleased about the additional two lanes. It meant greater difficulty getting our farm equipment across Route 66, which we needed to do, because the grain elevator and my brother's farm were on the other side. Getting farm equipment, which could be one tractor with two trailers hitched behind, across two lanes was difficult enough; but after 1955, four lanes had to be managed. The median strip between the lanes was very narrow, and my mother always imagined the worst on the days when Dad and Ray, my brother, had to do a lot of crossing. In addition to the difficult crossings it meant "more traffic coming into and out of Chicago," as my dad would say. That translated into more noise and the possibility of more people coming into our lane for a variety of reasons.

I never thought negatively about more people and more traffic because living on the lifeline between Chicago and Los Angeles had an excitement all its own. To meet people going to and from distant places was my desire. Hardly a two-week period went by that we were not assisting some stranded traveler. Dad and Ray were good mechanics, and they would give what mechanical help they could. The most common problem was overheated radiators in the summer. Lots of water was carried out to the waiting, overheated, steaming cars. Running out of gas was a close second to overheated cars. Often we would need to take gas from our large gas storage tank used for our farm equipment to fill a particularly inept traveler's tank who had reached empty near the Ripley farm. In addition to overheating and running out of gas, the litany of car problems included flat tires and stalled engines. I can still see men standing by their cars with quizzical looks on their faces. Dad and Ray believed city people knew little or nothing about cars or engines. The evidence mounted for this over the years.

Mom always made these stranded travelers feel welcome and often fed them. In cold weather it was not uncommon to have a whole family huddled in our small, cold living room. It seemed the single traveler rarely got in trouble; it was families with small children, older cars, and little money who needed our attention. Mom was particularly good in these cases and ended up mothering the mother as well as the children in attendance. Dad was outside trying to get the car to start or assessing whether someone else had to be brought in to finish the job. It was all too common that these winter travelers rarely had the right clothes. They evidently left home without boots, gloves, hats, or coats to help with the necessary outside work. They stayed inside where a drama was being played out in our living room about the upset plans and the decisions that needed to be made. We housed more than one stranded traveler overnight as they worked through the crisis.

My parents never took money for this except to pay for the supplied gas. Ray might take money for changing a tire. The real payment usually came two or three weeks later when we got postcards from people as they reached their destination and a sincere thanks for the assist. Our kitchen overflowed with such cards; and after we had running water, Mom use to tack them above the sink to look at while she worked. Before that they were usually tossed in the oak sideboard that dominated the kitchen/dining room.

Route 66 and the railroad that paralleled it were also traveled by people on foot, and we met scores of them. Most people would call them bums or vagrants (today's term would be homeless); but as far as I could tell, my parents treated them with the same respect as they would anyone else. A typical scene would go like this. One of us would be looking out the front window and down the lane and see an older man, at least he looked old, with a hat and old wool jacket (even in summer) lumbering up the road. Often they were not carrying anything; or at times a sack or small satchel. We knew the request that was coming; it was for "a bite to eat." Mom would start rummaging through the refrigerator even before they came to the door and fix a sandwich and a glass of milk. If the road traveler was lucky, Mom would have a piece of sour cream chocolate cake available. In the summer the outside well platform was the designated eating area and in the colder months it was the back porch. We did not invite them into the house, but our hospitality seemed congenial enough to our visitors. Even if Mom and I were alone in the house, there was no fear. Usually there was not a lot of conversation with these road travelers. They just ate and moved on. I often wondered where they came from and where they were going, but my curiosity never went far enough to try to engage them in conversation. None of them seemed particularly fond of children, and they did not try to talk with me. Docile, expressionless, and forlorn are the main words I associate with these travelers. I have no idea what they thought of the farm family they encountered; thanks were never overwhelming from this group.

The only times I remember fearing life on Route 66 was when a convict escaped from the Pontiac medium security prison which was about five miles north. The natural escape route was along the highway to flag down a car, hop a freight, or go to a farmhouse near the road. Since almost 100% of Pontiac prisoners were from the south side of Chicago, it was 9 chances out of 10 that the prisoner was black, or colored to use the word of that era. Hard to hide in this 100% white farm area. Many escapes occurred, but no escapees appeared at the Ripley doorstep. Not surprising when I really begin to think about it, since Chicago was north, not south, from the prison. Dad did have a shotgun and rifle hung above the inside kitchen door. He said they were for getting coyotes, wolves, or other varmint interlopers; but who knows, an interloper comes in many shapes and sizes.

Mom's egg business provided the most contact with Route 66 travelers. Most days found at least one egg buyer in from the road, not able to resist Mom's hand-lettered Ripley's Eggs, Believe it or Not sign. Mom considered it a wasted day if no one stopped, particularly if she had dozens of eggs on hand. She encouraged me often in a joking way to stand out underneath the sign and wave people into our farm. "Go make yourself useful," she would say. I believe she would have done it herself if Raymond (as she called Dad) would have approved, which he would not.

Mom's inventory was usually good, but some times she was out of eggs. It was not beyond Mom to ask me to entertain the potential customer who had just driven in as she went out to the henhouse to see if her business partners were cooperating. She would come back and say, "I've got a half dozen real fresh eggs. How will that do?" It usually did real well, and Mom could assure herself that if these people ever traveled Route 66 again they would probably stop. Town folks, we discovered, rarely got fresh eggs. Their only complaint about Ripley eggs was they could not boil the eggs and peel off the shell the next day. Mom had to educate these customers that eggs had to be a few days old before they had that thin membrane that made peeling so easy. Store-bought eggs were never that fresh so peeling was never a problem with them.

Route 66 provided two other sources of income besides selling eggs. One was renting billboard space. We had at least three billboards on our strip of Route 66. Payment was minimal ($5 a year and a box of candy), but it must have been worth giving up a few stalks of corn and circling the machinery around the wooden billboard frames. The farmer a mile farther south had the Burma Shave signs. My favorite: "Said Farmer Brown, who was bald on top, I wish I could rotate the crop." The second income from the highway was raising test plots of seed corn. Our arrangement was with Pioneer Seed Corn, and they furnished varieties of seed corn which we planted. Pioneer put up small signs which gave the lot numbers of the particular seed corn. Farmers traveling Route 66 travelers assessed for themselves which variety did what.

Besides all the people who came off Route 66, the road itself provided a daily source of entertainment. Especially in summer. I would perch out on the front porch rail and identify by make, model, and year every car that was heading south. (I knew every American made car of the 50's.) The folks, too, would get in the act and bring their two aluminum porch chairs out to the front lawn and watch the parade going by. Sitting in the back yard was quieter, but it was not as interesting. The railroad tracks paralleled Route 66. Thus, entertainment widened to counting the number of railroad cars on any one train. It was always over 100.

Looking back, Route 66 was a big part of growing up for me. Being essentially an only child (my brother was 10 years older than I) and living on a farm could have been very isolating. A farming community has a sameness about it which is wonderful and awful at the same time. The sameness means that everyone dresses alike, has the same Midwest twang in their voice, and is concerned about the same things (the crops, weather, livestock, and government farm programs). But Route 66 brought new faces, experiences, and challenges. It introduced me to people who did not wear farm caps and overalls. I met my first blacks usually riding in the stereotypical shiny, big cars that often overheated. I also met Hispanics, Polish people, Jewish people, and about every ethnic group that lived in Chicago. It gave me the opportunity to see my parents relate with people under a variety of circumstances, and they did it well.

I also learned that "city folks" did not know much about farmers. Dad was amused for days over an egg buyer asking him whether our corn was "cow corn or people corn." City dwellers seemed to be mystified that we were almost entirely self-sufficient. We grew our own vegetables, fruit, beef, pork, hauled away our own trash, butchered our own beef, slaughtered and dressed our own chickens, made most of our clothes, did repairs on machinery and cars, put up and mended our own fences, and shoveled out our driveways in winter storms. In our spare time we did the main work of tending the crops and livestock and also assisted travelers on Route 66.

Route 66, at least our portion of it, ceased to exist in the early 1970's as it was replaced section by section with Interstate 55. The interstate was built about a mile and a half north of our farm (right next to the farm of my godparents who were very displeased at the prospect of being neighbors to the interstate), and Mom and Dad could no longer hear the traffic of those cars traveling down the road. The interstate, of course, had no exits to the rural farms on its route; but since Mom's egg business had been stopped a few years before, the most positive aspect to being by the road was gone.

By the time the interstate was built I was living in Oregon. On one of my visits home the final portion of our part of Interstate 55 was being completed. My parents always had little treats in mind when I came to visit. For this visit one of the treats was to take me out and drive over a completed, but yet to be used, overpass of the new interstate. The overpass raised us about 20 feet above the surrounding area. To my folks this was a great view of the countryside. Having lived in and around the hills and mountains of Oregon for a time, I was not nearly as impressed with being 20 feet above the flat ground of downstate Illinois. But to them this was great. And I would imagine that Mom could tell it would be much easier to get farm equipment across the highway this way, except now we no longer needed to do it since the elevator, our farm, and Ray's farm were all on the same side of the interstate. We had finally integrated.

Old Route 66 remains as a nameless secondary road used by the locals to travel between the small towns that Route 66 had once linked and the interstate now bypasses. By 1983 I had gained a fond appreciation of having lived next to the lifeline of America called Route 66 and had visions of writing a book about the grand road. Many others had done it, but why should that stop me. My brother encouraged the project and had the local volunteer librarian (who had been my sophomore English teacher, now retired) gather all kinds of material from the state library. Jack, coauthor on many projects, thought it a good idea; and we fantasized a trip across as much of old Route 66 as we could taking photographs and writing stories along the way.

In the summer of 1983 I went home to visit Ray and his family, and we talked and did some research on the Route 66 project and had great fun doing so. Ray took me to the state police headquarters in our area which was still situated on old Route 66 (no longer called that) and the police officer in charge had an original Route 66 sign up on the wall. (The Route 66 signs had been taken down years before much like a basketball team retires the number of a favorite player.) We took the sign off the wall, took it outside, and nailed it up on an old post with Route 66 in the background and took pictures. The favorite picture I have of Ray is him standing by the Route 66 sign with the old highway in the background. That picture now rests on my desk.

More years have passed. My parents and brother have died, and Jack (who is now my husband) and I have not written a book about Route 66 or even traveled it. Last year I found a large poster calendar that featured Route 66 as its theme and immediately snapped it up and loved looking at it all year. The calendar year has passed, but I have been unable to throw the poster away. Pretty soon I will be watching Nick at Night to view old episodes of Route 66.

Where will this stop? I guess I just like being a part of the folklore that surrounds Route 66. I probably will never write a book about Route 66, but I have tried to capture in 2900 words what it was like to be a part of this living piece of concrete.