Musical Road Trip
Do you like to take road trips? I do, especially in the spring. In the last eight years, road trips have taken me to the Savannah Music Festival, the Hudson River Valley, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. In this Covid-19 spring of 2020, I miss being on the road! But Route 66, a piece our Quail Ridge Chorus was to have performed on April 2, has inspired me to sift through memories and recall a road trip my friend Marjo and I took in 2012 along part of this historic highway.
Road Trips USA provides a succinct history of this 2000-mile highway:
Before it was called Route 66, and long before it was even paved in 1926, this corridor was traversed by the National Old Trails Highway, one of the country’s first transcontinental highways. For three decades before and after World War II, Route 66 earned the title “Main Street of America” because it wound through small towns across the Midwest and Southwest, lined by hundreds of cafés, motels, gas stations, and tourist attractions.
During the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of farm families, displaced from the Dust Bowl, made their way west along Route 66 to California, following what John Steinbeck called “The Mother Road” in his vivid portrait, The Grapes of Wrath. After World War II, many thousands more expressed their upward mobility by leaving the industrial East, bound for good jobs in the suburban idyll of Southern California—again following Route 66, which came to embody the demographic shift from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt.
My connection with Route 66 is deeply personal. I grew up in Phillips, Texas, a refinery town of 5,000 that was 52 miles northeast of Amarillo. My father worked for the Phillips Petroleum Company, which patterned its logo after Route 66 signs. The colors for Phillips High School team and band uniforms were orange and black, like their original logo, before it was changed to red and white. For more about my hometown, now a ghost town, click on this post: Boomtown Texas.
When I get to the word “Amarillo” as we sing Route 66, I smile so wide I can barely sing. Amarillo is where I went to see my first National Geographic film, my first Symphony concert, my only SAT test, and my audition to play a piano concerto with the Amarillo Symphony (didn’t win). If Megert’s Music Store in Borger didn’t have the music we needed, we could find it at Tolzien’s in Amarillo. I loved eating at the Silver Grill on Polk Street and Batson’s Dining Room. My father and I tried to memorize the names of all the US Presidents before and after Polk, because the north-south streets of Amarillo were named for them in order. Only after I graduated from high school was construction begun on Interstate 40, which appropriated Route 66’s imprint on Amarillo.
Amarillo was where Carolyn Moore Rhea and I embarked on a trip to Girls State in 1961. On the train to Austin, 500 miles to the south, I met Patti Lewis, from Amarillo High School, whom I met again a year later during Freshman Week at Rice. She is still a dear friend. Here she is in 2011 with our brother-in-law Joe Simmons at a party she hosted in her Houston home for our 45th Rice Reunion.
My father, whose job title was “natural gas superintendent,” knew the roads in the Texas Panhandle intimately. Sometimes he would be called out late at night to locate and fix a malfunctioning gas pipeline. Usually, those fixes were far from main roads, but he must have had a 3-D map of Hutchinson, Gray and Potter Counties in his head. The next morning he would explain, “we had to get that natural gas to Chicago. It’s cold there; they need it!”
“It’s a beautiful day in Chicago!” we heard on KGNC radio every Saturday at noon, even if Chicago’s temperature was below zero. Dad tuned our radio to the National Farm and Home Hour in order to keep up with the challenges his brother faced maintaining the large farm/ranch they jointly owned in Lewisville, north of Dallas, 350 miles away. KGNC broadcast itself as “the 10,000-watt voice of the Golden Spread, an area that stretched 300 miles east-west on Route 66 from Sayre OK to Santa Rosa NM and another 300 miles north-south from Liberal KS to Lubbock TX. Dad had traversed much of that area locating oil wells and natural gas installations. Joel and I loved how he always pointed out the “old roads” wherever we went. After my brothers went off to college, Dad took me to White Deer for a Polish sausage festival, to Pampa to his favorite cafe, and again and again to Amarillo. Maybe that’s why I like road trips so much.
After high school I spent little time in the Panhandle. Four years at Rice, one summer working at Glacier National Park, and one summer in Austria exposed me to other worlds. Just a week after graduating from Rice, Steve and I got married on June 11, 1966, at the First Presbyterian Church in Borger. Here we are leaving our mothers behind at the church. We spent our wedding night in Amarillo.
Dad had retired in 1963. Not long after our wedding my parents sold their house in Phillips and built a new one on the land in Lewisville that Dad and his brother Tom owned. Sadly, Dad died in 1970. Fifty years later, I still feel his love. Two years later my mother married her former beau, Hugh Cooper, and moved to Amarillo. At last she had the two-story house of her dreams and I had opportunities to return to Amarillo. Visiting her there one Easter, Lilli, David, and I boiled and dyed eggs. I thought I had hidden them in her yard, but the strong High Plains winds blew those boiled eggs out of their hiding places. The kids found them easily.
When my second cousin, Julia O’Dell, moved to Amarillo in 1976, my mother introduced us to each other. Though Julia is nine years younger, we shared a love of teaching piano. In 1978 Julia and Sammy brought their baby daughter Christy with them to my mother’s surprise 75th party at the Amarillo Country Club. We put her portable crib right next to the one where our two-month-old Shelby was sleeping. When these girls were all grown, she and I enjoyed getting together at Annual Conferences of the Music Teachers National Association in Dallas, Los Angeles, Washington, Denver, and Austin. It’s hard to imagine that this year’s Conference is only online!
My Phillips High 50th reunion was scheduled for mid-July 2012. Marjo and I spent months planning the activities and contacting classmates. We decided that a road trip to Santa Fe would be the perfect prelude. An intrepid traveler, Marjo drove her Jeep to Amarillo from Dayton OH, generally following the direction of Route 66. I flew in from Virginia. Julia and Sammy O’Dell hosted a welcome dinner for us at an Amarillo restaurant and introduced us to their daughters’ growing families. These days I keep up with them on Facebook.
Early the next morning Marjo and I motored west on I-40, the successor to Route 66, stopping to see Cadillac Ranch just west of Amarillo. This ranch features graffitied, upended Cadillacs, not cattle. We had lunch in Tucumcari, filled our gas tank at a Phillips station in Albuquerque, then turned north to Santa Fe. There we visited Bandolier National Monument and joined my “other daughter” Courtney Morris and my friend Elizabeth Lodal for a performance of Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers at the Santa Fe Opera.
Returning to the Panhandle on I-40, we turned north on Route 60 to Borger, where reunions are held, since Phillips is no longer a town, only a refinery. Our Phillips High School Class of ’62 is fiercely loyal. For years I have kept up with a dozen men and women who began first grade with me. Over a third of our graduating class of seventy-seven attended our 50th Reunion. Phillips Texas Kids have their own page on Facebook.
After our joyous 50th reunion, Marjo took me to the Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport, named after Rick Husband, an Amarillo native who was the Captain of the Space Shuttle Columbia. On February 1, 2003, that craft disintegrated as it re-entered the atmosphere, killing all on board. A bronze statue of this brave Plainsman looks upward to stars painted on the ceiling of the terminal. Just two months ago I saw another memorial to Husband at the Kennedy Space Center.
Back in 1997, when our class had its 35th reunion, Misha, a young Russian stayed with us for three weeks, while serving as interpreter for a group of Russian teens visiting our church in Arlington. Aeroflot announced that their return flight would be delayed until after I was due to depart for Texas. When I apologized for not being able to see them off, Misha quickly rejoined: “Oh, Martha, it’s important to visit the Mother Country!”
Yes, Amarillo, Borger, and Phillips are my Mother Country. Last January I felt that pull at the Norton Museum’s exhibit about Georgia O’Keeffe. Early in her career, O’Keeffe taught art in Amarillo and Canyon and developed a lifelong love of the Southwest. Seeing her art made me realize anew how much I miss the Texas Panhandle. My family and my Phillips friends are deep in my heart, as are the friendly, loving people my mother got to know during her final years in Amarillo. Yes, Marjo and I found lots of “kicks” on Route 66. But beyond that. we renewed treasured relationships. Recalling them helps me through this barren time.
What was so special about Phillips? Some called it “godforsaken,” that only God could love it! I loved the magnificent sunrises and sunsets in the huge sky, the Milky Way sparkling in inky-dark nights, the low humidity that kept my curly hair at its best. Elm and oak trees struggled, but cottonwoods by the Canadian River flourished. Yes, the wind could blow boiled eggs around, but it also swept away the pollutants the refinery generated. And that refinery had a beauty of its own. This photo by my new friend, Mona Hendrickson Fannon now hangs near my writing desk.
Most of all, I loved the people I knew in the Panhandle, with their pioneering spirit, adaptability, friendliness, and faithfulness. People with a passion for art, music, history and living: first of all, my parents and then many teachers and friends. I’ll write more about each of them in future posts.
Back to Route 66: When I did the math, the trip Marjo and I took on Route 66, from Amarillo to Albuquerque and back, totaled only 500 miles. That paled next to the mileage Julia and Sammy racked up when Karen attended Azusa Pacific University near Los Angeles. Driving that thousand-mile trip west several times, they found their “kicks” in Barstow CA , where they returned to civilization after hundreds of miles in the desert.
But wait, what about the other thousand miles of Route 66, from Amarillo east to Chicago? I found more memories from almost sixty years of travel along this route.
It winds from Chicago to L.A.: I first visited Chicago in 1993 with our family and Fiona Salama, an exchange student from Madrid; then again in 1997 with Marjo. Three years ago our family had such a wonderful time in Chicago, that I stayed a couple more days, singing Chicago, Chicago the whole time! As for the western end of Route 66, Julia and I attended a Music Teachers Conference in Los Angeles in 1999 and visited the Getty Museum and Beverly Hills. Lilli and I returned to LA a few years later to see Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of the Lady of the Angels.
Well you can go through St. Looey: In August 1963 I traveled by bus through Tulsa to St. Louis to assist my brother Joel and his wife when my niece Susan was born. The Gateway Arch was under construction then. Now I want to go back and see the finished product. Lilli attended a two-week architecture program at Washington University in St. Louis the summer before her senior year in high school. She studied Eero Saarinen’s design and got a close-up view of the Arch. That was her gateway to architecture as a career. She has never doubted that choice.
Son David worked for AAA in McLean VA the summer of 1993, helping many international visitors plan their trips on US highways. Remember TripTiks? My Dad would have been so delighted to know that David, who was named for my Dad’s father, shared his passion for and skill with maps. In this photo he is wearing a tie printed with a map of Route 66! Chicago’s at the top, LA at the bottom. With this blogpost, perhaps he will understand why it pleased me so much to see him wear that tie.
Our son-in-law Sean Eidson grew up in Albuquerque on Route 66. He seems to love his hometown as much as I do mine. What a joy two years ago to meet Shelby and Sean and the boys in Albuquerque and see the fabulous Balloon Festival.
Hold on! I found more about Route 66! Here’s an 11-minute video that highlights 20 must-see stops. Can’t wait for next spring when we can travel again!
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