The iconic cross-American highway — Route 66 — was decertified 38 years ago today
A bricklayer’s dream, Route 66’s surface varied from pavement to dirt to brick near Aburn, Illinois.
Photo by Peter Armstrong
After nearly six decades of use, the iconic Route 66 entered the realm of history on this day in 1985 — 38 years ago — when the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials decertified the road and voted to remove all its highway signs.
Some 2,200 miles long in its heyday, Route 66 stretched from Chicago to Santa Monica, California, passing through eight states.
According to a New York Times article about its decertification, most of Route 66 followed a path through the wilderness forged in 1857 by U.S. Navy Lieutenant Edward Beale at the head of a caravan of camels. Over the years, wagon trains and cattlemen eventually made way for trucks and passenger automobiles.
The idea of building a highway along this route surfaced in Oklahoma in the mid-1920s as a way to link the state to cities like Chicago and Los Angeles. Cyrus S. Avery, the highway commissioner, touted it as a way of diverting traffic from Kansas City and Denver.
In 1926, the highway earned its official designation as Route 66. The diagonal course of Route 66 linked hundreds of mostly rural communities to the cities along its route, allowing farmers to more easily transport grain and other types of produce for distribution.
The highway was also a lifeline for the long-distance trucking industry, which by 1930 was competing with the railroad for dominance in the shipping market. Route 66 was also the scene of a mass westward migration during the 1930s, when more than 200,000 people traveled from the poverty-stricken Dust Bowl to California.
John Steinbeck immortalized the highway — which he called the "Mother Road" — in his classic 1939 novel, "The Grapes of Wrath."
Beginning in the 1950s, the building of a massive system of interstate highways made older roads increasingly obsolete. By 1970, modern four-lane highways had bypassed nearly all sections of Route 66.
In October, 1984, Interstate 40 bypassed the last original stretch of Route 66 at Williams, Arizona, and the following year the road was decertified. According to the National Historic Route 66 Federation, drivers can still use 85 percent of the road, and Route 66 has become a destination for tourists from all over the world.
Often called the "Main Street of America," Route 66 became a pop culture mainstay over the years, inspiring its own song written in 1947 by Bobby Troup. The song, “Route 66” was later recorded by artists as varied as Nat "King" Cole, Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones as well as a 1960s television series.
Here, Asleep at the Wheel performs “Route 66”
Thanks History.com
The Gay Parita Sinclair Station, three miles west of Halltown, Missouri, on Route 66
Photo by Peter Armstrong
Alice Liddell is an unfamiliar name to most people, but the character she inspired is one of the most recognizable in the world.
She was the young muse for Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” which has been translated into 174 languages.
Written in 1865, this is the 158th anniversary of the work. The fantasy book was a milestone when it was published in Victorian England. Until then, children’s books were intended to give lessons.
But Carroll, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an Oxford lecturer in mathematics, created a fantastical world with a disobedient heroine and satirized royal politics. While on a boating trip near Oxford, he regaled the daughters of the dean who hired him with a tale that had both logic puzzles and talking animals.
One daughter, Alice, begged him to write down the story. So he wrote “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground” for her, and gave her a handwritten, illustrated copy. Then he expanded it into what was published.
A sequel followed in 1871, called “Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.” Without that curious young girl, we might never have read about Wonderland.
Thanks New York Times!
The Strand Book Store
Photo by George Etheredge
The Strand Book Story in New York City turns 96 years old this week.
Founded by Benjamin Bass in 1927, The Strand is part of a cluster of booksellers on Fourth Avenue. And while it’s not the city’s oldest bookstore still in operation (that distinction is claimed by Argosy Books in Midtown, founded in 1925), The Strand may be one of the more fortunate.
History has not been kind to the purveyors of pamphlets, old maps and dog-eared books that lined Fourth Avenue, mostly between Astor Place and 13th Street, a stretch once known as Book Row. When the row was established in 1890, there were 48 bookstores. Rent increases in the 1930s scattered many of them.
The Strand remained even as rents doubled for neighboring bookstores. The landlord who controlled the area had developed a close relationship with Bass. Rents continued to rise in the 1950s, and the old bookstores that had survived on Fourth Avenue again faced eviction.
When an agent from the Department of Commerce and Public Events visited in 1956, “the antiquarians wept, dustily, on his neck,” The New York Times reported. They begged the city to find a new row for them. (It never did.)
A year later, Bass’s son, Fred Bass, moved the Strand to Broadway and 12th Street, where it has remained and expanded. Today, the bookstore, named after a street in London, offers around 2.5 million new, used and rare volumes. It is run by Nancy Bass Wyden, a granddaughter of Benjamin Bass, and by her father, Fred Bass.
The most expensive item in the store? A $38,000 copy of “Ulysses” by James Joyce, signed by the author and illustrated by Matisse. The oldest is an edition of “Magna Moralia” published in 1496. It’s priced at $4,500.
In the age of Amazon, Ms. Wyden said shops like hers offer New Yorkers something different. They’re places for discovery, conversation, to meet someone new or to pop the question (which, she said, she sees quite a bit).
“When customers come in, time slows down for them,” she said, “and in our chaotic city, New Yorkers need that.”
Thanks New York Times!
Doc Pomus singing at the Pied Piper with Uffe Bode, Sol Yaged, John Levy and Rex William Stuart, 1947
Photo by William Gottlieb
Jerome Solon Felder, better known as Doc Pomus, was born 98 years ago today.
A blues singer and songwriter, Pomus was the lyricist of many classic rock and roll hits.
Born in 1925 in Brooklyn, Pomus’s parents were Jewish immigrants. He became a fan of the blues after hearing a Big Joe Turner record. Having had polio as a boy, he used crutches to walk. Later, due to post-polio syndrome, exacerbated by an accident, Felder eventually relied on a wheelchair. His brother is New York attorney, Raoul Felder.
Using the stage name "Doc Pomus," Felder began performing as a teenager, becoming a blues singer. His stage name wasn't inspired by anyone in particular, he just thought it sounded better for a blues singer than his real name, Jerry Felder.
Pomus stated that more often as not, he was the only Caucasian in the clubs, but that as both a Jew and a polio victim, he felt a special "underdog" kinship with African-Americans. In turn, the audiences both respected his courage and were impressed with his talent.
Gigging at various clubs in and around New York City, Pomus often performed with the likes of Milt Jackson and King Curtis. Pomus recorded approximately 40 sides as a singer during the '40s and '50s for record companies such as Chess and Apollo.
In the 1950s, Pomus started writing magazine articles as well as songwriting to make more money to support a family, as he had married (Willi Burke, a Broadway actress). His first big songwriting break came when he chanced upon the Coasters' version of his "Young Blood" on a jukebox while on his honeymoon.
Pomus had written the song, then given it to Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who radically rewrote it. Still, Doc was given co-credit as an author, and he soon received a royalty check for $1500, which convinced him that songwriting was a career direction well worth pursuing.
By 1957, Pomus had given up performing in order to devote himself full-time to songwriting. He collaborated with the pianist, Mort Shuman, whom he had met when Shuman was dating Doc's younger cousin. They wrote for Hill & Range Music Co./Rumbalero Music at its offices in New York City's Brill Building.
Pomus asked Shuman to write with him because Doc didn't know much about rock and roll at the time, whereas Mort was well versed in many of the popular artists of the day. Their songwriting efforts had Pomus write the lyrics and Shuman the melody, although quite often they worked on both.
They wrote the hit songs: "A Teenager in Love," "Save The Last Dance For Me," "Hushabye," "This Magic Moment," "Turn Me Loose," "Sweets For My Sweet" (a hit for the Drifters and then the Searchers), "Go Jimmy Go," "Little Sister," "Surrender" and "(Marie's the Name) His Latest Flame."
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pomus also wrote several songs with Phil Spector including "Young Boy Blues," "Ecstasy," "Here Comes The Night" and "What Am I To Do?" With Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber, he wrote "Young Blood" and "She's Not You." He also wrote with many other Brill Building-era writers.
Pomus also wrote "Lonely Avenue," which became a 1956 hit for Ray Charles. In the 1970s and 1980s in his eleventh-floor, two-room apartment at the Westover Hotel at 253 West 72nd Street, Pomus wrote songs with Dr. John, Ken Hirsch and Willy DeVille. He called them “...those people stumbling around in the night out there, uncertain or not always so certain of exactly where they fit in and where they were headed."
These songs included "There Must Be A Better World," "There Is Always One More Time," "That World Outside," "You Just Keep Holding On" and "Something Beautiful Dying." They were recorded by Willy DeVille, B.B. King, Irma Thomas, Marianne Faithfull, Charlie Rich, Ruth Brown, Dr. John, James Booker and Johnny Adams.
These are considered by the late Dr. John, writer Peter Guralnick and producer Joel Dorn to be signatures of Pomus’s best craft.
The documentary film, A.K.A. Doc Pomus (2012), directed by filmmaker Peter Miller and Will Hechter, details Pomus' life. The film won the grand prize at the Stony Brook Film Festival, the first time a documentary was awarded that honor, and screened at dozens of other film festivals in 2012 and 2013.
Pomus died in 1991 from lung cancer at the age of 65.
Here is the trailer from the documentary, A.K.A. Doc Pomus
Emma Goldman is shown addressing a rally at Union Square, New York, 1916
Emma Goldman was born 154 years ago today.
Goldman was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century.
Like Edward Snowden and many others before them, Goldman’s life reflects the hardships that come when the U.S. Government declares a person its enemy.
Born in Kovno in the Russian Empire (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), Goldman emigrated to the U.S. in 1885 and lived in New York City, where she joined the burgeoning anarchist movement in 1889. Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands.
She and the anarchist writer, Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier, Henry Clay Frick, as an act of propaganda of the deed.
Although Frick survived the attempt on his life, Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control.
In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal, Mother Earth.
In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to "induce persons not to register" for the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested — along with hundreds of others — and deported to Russia.
Initially supportive of that country's Bolshevik revolution, Goldman quickly voiced her opposition to the Soviet use of violence and the repression of independent voices.
In 1923, she wrote a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. While living in England, Canada and France, she wrote an autobiography, Living My Life. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there.
She died in Toronto on May 14, 1940 at age 70.
During her life, Goldman was lionized as a free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and denounced by critics as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love and homosexuality.
Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman's iconic status was revived in the 1970s, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest in her life.
Steve Binder, only 26 at the time, directs Elvis in his comeback television special in 1968
There was quite a bit more than just 12 years and a few extra pounds separating the Elvis Presley of 1968 from the Elvis that set the world on fire in 1956.
With a nearly decade-long string of forgettable movies and inconsistent recordings behind him, Elvis had drifted so far from his glorious, youthful incarnation that he'd turned himself into a historical artifact.
And then something amazing happened: A television special for NBC that Elvis' manager Colonel Tom Parker envisioned as an Andy Williams-like sequence of Christmas carol performances instead became a thrilling turning point in Elvis's legendary career.
Elvis began taping his legendary "Comeback Special" on this day in 1968 — 55 years ago.
Much of the credit for the Comeback Special goes to the young director that NBC turned to on the project. Only 26 years old but with a strong background in televised music, Steve Binder had the skills and creativity to put together a more interesting program than the one originally planned.
Binder also had the youthful confidence to tell Elvis that a successful show was an absolute necessity if he wanted to regain his relevance. "Basically, I told him I thought his career was in the toilet," Binder recalled in an interview almost four decades later.
Binder’s influence was so great that Elvis told his manager, Colonial Tom Parker, that he was going to rely on Binder’s approach, not Parker’s, for the television special.
(Later, I studied studio television directing with Binder, who offered great advice on how to manage a project similar to the one with Elvis.)
From the beginning, Elvis embraced almost every suggestion Binder made, including what would turn out to be the best one, which came after Binder watched Elvis jamming with his friends and fellow musicians in his dressing room one night after rehearsals.
"Wait a minute, this is history," Binder recalls thinking. "I want to film this." Binder sold Elvis on the idea that would become the most memorable segment of the show: an informal, "unplugged" session before a live audience.
Elvis went to Hawaii with his wife, Priscilla, and their infant daughter, Lisa Marie, in the weeks leading up to the taping, and when he returned, he was tanned, rested and thinner than he'd been at any time since leaving the Army.
"He was totally keyed up now, on edge in a way he had rarely been since abandoning live performing a decade before," wrote Peter Guralnick in Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, the second volume of his Elvis biography. "His professionalism continued to be noted by the entire crew...but there was something else now, too. For the first time in a long time he didn't bother to hide the fact that he really cared."
When Elvis took to the stage on this night in 1968 to record the "jam session" portion of the Comeback Special, he did so only after Binder talked him out of a last-minute case of stage fright. After a nervous start, Presley gave the legendary performance that would reinvigorate his flagging career.
Here’s Elvis performing “That’s All Right” from the 1968 TV special
Thanks History.com
On this day in 1939 — 84 years ago — one of the most famous scenes in movie history was filmed — Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara parting in Gone with the Wind.
Director Victor Fleming also shot the scene using the alternate line, "Frankly, my dear, I just don't care," in case the film censors objected to the word "damn." The censors approved the movie, but fined producer David O. Selznick $5,000 for including the word “damn.”
The filming was itself an epic, with two and half years elapsing between Selznick's purchase of the rights to Margaret Mitchell's novel and the movie's debut in Atlanta in December, 1939. Selznick had balked at paying an unprecedented $50,000 for the rights to a first novel, but Mitchell stuck to her asking price and Selznick finally agreed in July, 1937.
He hired director George Cukor immediately, and casting began in the fall. Selznick launched a nationwide talent search, hoping to find a new actress to play Scarlett. Meanwhile, he set writers to work on the script. A year later, Selznick still hadn't found an actress or received a satisfactory script.
In May, 1938, running low on funds, Selznick struck a deal with MGM. He sold the worldwide distribution rights for the film to the studio for $1.5 million, and MGM agreed to lend Clark Gable to Selznick. Filming finally began on December 10, 1938, with the burning of Atlanta scene, although Scarlett still hadn't been cast.
British actress Vivien Leigh, newly arrived from London, dropped by the set to visit her agent, Myron Selznick, brother of the producer. David Selznick asked her to test for Scarlett. In January, Leigh signed on as Scarlett and Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes, and at last, principal filming began.
By February, however, there was trouble on the set. Gable clashed with the director, and by February 14, Victor Fleming replaced Cukor. Principal filming ended on June 27, 1939.
The film debuted in Atlanta on December 15, 1939, and became an instant hit, breaking all box office records. The film was nominated for more than a dozen Oscars, and won nine, including Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress (which went to Hattie McDaniel, the first African American actress to win the award).
The movie was digitally restored and the sound re-mastered for its 1998 re-release by New Line Pictures.
Here’s the classic scene