Billy Connolly’s Route 66 Read online

  As far as luring people off the interstate, the Gemini Giant would certainly work for me. I can just imagine my kids when they were younger – ‘Dad, take us there. I wanna go to where the rocket man is. Take us there, Dad. Come on, Dad, come on.’ I’d cave in. And anyway, I’ve always loved that kind of thing myself – that part of America that’s always viewed as big and vulgar, but which really appeals to me. Things like the biggest chair in the world, the biggest frying pan and the tallest thermometer. I love all that. There’s something of the sideshow about it, something Coney Island, that tickles me. It’s fun and Americans know what fun is. After all, they’ve got the only constitution in the world with the word ‘happiness’ written into it.

  American adults believe in having fun. They’ve got more toys than us Europeans. If you go into an American’s garage, you’ll find a four-wheeled vehicle and a three-wheeled vehicle and bicycles and boats and dirt bikes and a motor home. I’m in total agreement with them. Life is supposed to be fun. It’s not a job or an occupation. We’re here only once and we should have a bit of a laugh. So these big men by the side of the road totally appeal to me.

  Wilmington itself is a nice enough place. There’s a dinosaur model on top of a tyre garage and a few other remnants of Route 66’s heyday in the main street, such as a boarded-up drive-through restaurant.

  Pushing on, heading for Pontiac, I was cruising happily when my eyes darted from the road and right there, in a diner’s car park in Bramlington, I spotted Elvis, James Dean and Betty Boop. Yelling at the crew, who were driving ahead of me in the truck, I pulled over. The Route 66-themed, 1950s-style joint – the Polk-a-Dot Drive-In – was a charming place, but this was Easter Sunday and it was closed. In Britain it would have been open, but they take the Christian thing more seriously in these parts. Outside the diner, lined up along a wall, stood those three fibreglass, slightly larger-than-life-size effigies. There was space for one more, which I later discovered had been occupied by Marilyn Monroe, with her white dress billowing in the classic pose from The Seven-Year Itch. I had some fun with Elvis and Betty. I cleaned up her skirt and posed and jived around in front of them, making a fool of myself, before moving on down the road.

  After just two miles I came to Godley, a tiny place with a population of less than six hundred but a racy history. Not so much a town as a single street with a collection of buildings on either side, Godley has a geographic quirk that shaped its destiny. The left side of the main street, which crosses Route 66, is in one county and the right side is in another. You might think that’s nothing special, but in the 1930s, when the Illinois coal mines and stone quarries were in full swing, it made Godley the hottest destination for miles around on a Friday night. Loaded up with their end-of-week pay, the miners and quarrymen would head for Godley, knowing there was a brothel there that had a unique way of evading the law. Some enterprising resident had turned a railway carriage into the brothel and parked it on the line. The lads would turn up and get down to drinking and shagging their earnings away. If word came down that there was going to be a raid, a shout would go up and all the lads would interrupt their activities to push the carriage into the neighbouring county. Once across the county line, neither police force could do anything about it. The crime had been perpetrated in one county, but they were now in the neighbouring county, so unless they got down to business again, they were back to being law-abiding citizens.

  Driving through Godley, I could barely concentrate on the road, I was laughing so much at the mental image of all those bare-arsed men diving out of bed to push the carriage into the next county while the hookers looked on and the two counties’ police forces scratched their heads, unable to do anything about it. The thought of a bunch of mad-shagging train-pushers made my heart sing. There’s something wonderful – and very pragmatic, in that typically American, no-nonsense way – about a brothel on wheels. And to think the little village was called Godley. It should have been called Godless.

  At first glance, Pontiac is just an ordinary town, like hundreds, maybe even thousands, of others in the Midwest of America. Located smack bang on Route 66 and built around a town square with a county courthouse on one side, it’s like so many small towns portrayed in so many Hollywood movies. It was even used as the setting for Grandview, USA, a 1980s romantic comedy starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Patrick Swayze and John Cusack. Time magazine called it one of the best small towns in America. You can imagine the kind of place – there are shops and restaurants around the square, and the courthouse has a clock tower, just like the one in Back to the Future.

  It’s the kind of place where you can picture that whole American Dream thing happening – people setting up in Pontiac and making successes of their lives in a modest, wholesome way. Those sitcoms of the fifties and sixties suddenly come alive when you’re in Pontiac; you realise they were based on real life. Then, in June 2009, the town’s local government did an amazing thing. It invited 160 artists to paint nineteen murals in the town in just four days. The council put up the artists, fed them and gave them booze, and the whole thing turned into a huge party. And, if you ask me, it was a huge success.

  The murals were painted by a group of artists called Walldogs, which is what the commercial painters of old were often nicknamed. The group’s members came from all over the world, and their paintings aren’t anything like those ghastly murals that look half like graffiti and always give me the pip. These murals are handsome replicas of the advertisements that used to be painted on the sides of businesses at the turn of the twentieth century. They are very detailed figurative paintings, beautifully executed, and they make the town look smashing.

  Residents of Pontiac stumbled on the idea of having their lovely town bedecked in murals after they had commissioned a Route 66 mural for the centre of the town. It was a simple image – the Route 66 highway shield – but it immediately drew visitors to the town. The nineteen murals painted in 2009 have been even more successful, doubling tourist numbers. I’m not surprised.

  I went for a walk round Pontiac to have a good look at the murals. They were all a delight, but I was most tickled by the one for the Allen Candy Company. It appeared to have been painted by several artists (the signatures read: ‘Roy, Noah, Brad, Teddy and Jackie’), and apparently one of them had owned a dog that died the week before the mural was painted. So the artist had the dog cremated and mixed its ashes in with the paint. Now the dog is part of the mural. I loved that.

  There’s more to Pontiac than the murals. They’ve also had funky wee cars inspired by Route 66 – each about the size of a kiddie’s pedal car – placed around the town. With the cars dotted all over the place and bolted to the ground, I had to watch my step, particularly on street corners. On the steps of the courthouse there’s a particularly weird car with a windswept Abraham Lincoln sitting in the back seat. Long before he became President, Lincoln had tried his first case as a lawyer in Pontiac. It was a strange thing to imagine as I strode around the town, dodging the wee cars and other artworks and admiring the murals.

  Some of the cars were painted in rainbow colours. One, a wee beauty called ‘Pussy Footin’ around Downtown’, had a leopard-skin pattern. Another, with big sunglasses and a cheesy smile, was called ‘InCARgnito’. Then there was a brightly coloured van called ‘Vincent “I’m not a Van” Gogh’ that had a reproduction of one of Van Gogh’s paintings on it.

  There are also pyramids and all sorts of nonsense, such as a pair of man-sized footprints in the concrete pavement next to a set of doggie paw-prints, so that it looks like some guy was just there, walking his dog. It’s terrific that a town will go to such lengths to cheer itself up. When you see so many towns falling into the abyss with pound shops and charity stores everywhere, it’s lovely to see one making the effort to tart itself up a bit.

  Before I give the impression that Pontiac is a wee bit of heaven on earth, I ought to get something off my chest that bothered me right from the start of the trip. It’s not something unique to Pont
iac, but by the time I reached the town it had become really hard to ignore. If this book inspires you to travel along Route 66 and you’re hoping to eat well, think again. There’s not much decent or wholesome – or even particularly healthy – food to be found along the Mother Road. There are plenty of pancakes and burgers and shakes and fries, but after a while it becomes a very monotonous diet.

  The night before I toured Pontiac, I visited a restaurant and ordered the broasted chicken. I only had it to see what broasted was. I soon discovered it meant broiled and roasted, or what most people would call burned. Maybe I should have known better when I saw the menu. It had pictures of the food, which is always a dead giveaway (unless you’re in Japan, where the food is invariably fantastic, even though the restaurants often have wax replicas of their dishes in the window). If you’re on Route 66 and you stop at a place where the menu has pictures of the grub, you’d be well advised to carry on until you find somewhere better. Unfortunately, along Route 66, there aren’t too many better places. I know it sounds deeply snobbish, and I probably shouldn’t say it, but the amount of fat and sugar and junk eaten in Middle America is scary. That’s why everyone’s getting obese.

  However, there’s a silver lining to every cloud. In this case, we have the inventor of one of the staples of unhealthy fast-food cuisine – the Cozy Dog – to thank for also creating one of the greatest artists associated with Route 66 – Robert Waldmire. Route 66 attracted a lot of poets, writers, painters, wanderers and all sorts of scallywags who were just in love with the road and made it their whole life. Bob was one of them. He was due to paint a mural in Pontiac in 2009, but he died before he could carry out the commission. Now a bunch of artists are going to get together and paint one in his memory.

  Bob grew up watching the Route 66 traffic pass by his parents’ restaurant in Springfield, Illinois (which was where his father, Ed, came up with the Cozy Dog, of which more later). In 1962 Ed took the whole family on a road trip along the 66 to California. Bob, who was already an accomplished artist at school, was hugely inspired by what he saw and fell in love with everything to do with the Mother Road – the motels, diners and truck stops, and particularly the Arizona and New Mexico deserts. He decided he wanted to spend his time travelling the route, but first he went off to university, where he spotted a fellow student’s illustration of the local town. Wishing to do something similar for his hometown, Bob had a brainwave: he would get local merchants to pay him to include their businesses in his poster.

  Bob appears to have been completely different from his father. He was a hippy type, a big, bearded vegetarian who ate ‘not dogs’ rather than hot dogs. His illustrations are very like those of Robert Crumb, very intricate and detailed, with little buildings in the plan of a town, all seen from above. He’d include all the details, like telegraph poles and street signs. They’re very, very good.

  His first poster was a great success, both critically and commercially. Bob made even more money from selling it to local residents than he’d made from getting the businesses to pay up front to be included in it, so he set off to visit college towns, repeating the formula as he travelled. This one idea changed his life for ever. Provided he lived relatively cheaply, he could travel back and forth across America supported entirely by his illustrations. Best of all, it meant that Bob, who hated the cold, could spend winters in his beloved desert, drawing the buildings, towns and landmarks of Route 66. These drawings became famous icons of the road themselves, as did the orange 1972 VW campervan in which he travelled. When Pixar made Cars, they based Fillmore, the VW bus character, loosely on Bob Waldmire.

  Some of Bob’s best work was his set of four large and highly intricate state posters of Route 66 winding through California, Illinois, New Mexico and Arizona. Filled with hundreds of drawings of scenic vistas, sketches of the wildlife and historical attractions, they also contained short philosophical comments, quotes from literature and pleas for peace, non-violence and sound ecological practices, many of them quietly rebellious. ‘It is estimated that Lake Mead and Lake Powell [two massive reservoirs created by the damming of the Colorado River] evaporate more water per year than the multi-billion-dollar central Arizona project will provide annually,’ it said on the Arizona poster. And on his New Mexico poster: ‘The state has a cradle to grave affair with nuclear technology – the atom bomb was born here, nuclear wastes are buried here.’

  But, personally, I think Bob did his best work when he turned his pen on hunters and really went to town. ‘The campaign to “control” the coyote is more like a war of extermination,’ he wrote in small print on his poster of Silver City, Arizona. ‘The Steel Jaw-Leghold Trap … Scourge of the Earth.’ However, a hunting shop spotted the comments and threatened to sue Waldmire. Fortunately, he managed to get the law on his side and avoid court.

  While I was in Pontiac, they were displaying Bob’s old converted bus in which he used to spend the winter travelling through the southwestern states. It’s one of those yellow American school buses with corrugated sides, but Bob added solar panels, rainwater collectors, a solar oven, a sauna and solar shower, and all sorts of gizmos so that he could live off-grid when he was in the desert. From the outside, it looks a bit ramshackle, but it’s an absolute dream machine. It’s even got a veranda and an observation deck on the back. I was so jealous.

  It was a bit of a squeeze to get in the bus, but well worth the effort. With his old shoes still lying near the steering wheel by the front door, and all his bits and pieces dotted about on shelves and tables and walls, it’s the cosiest place. All of Waldmire’s wee favourite things are still in there – ornaments, pictures, photographs of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, key rings and things that other people would consider junk – so it’s like stepping into Bob’s dream world. I don’t know what would have happened in an emergency stop in this bus. Everything would have ended up beside him on the floor, I imagine.

  All in all, the bus is an amazing thing. A great way for an artist to live, going away for four or five months every winter, a real free man. Before visiting it, I was kind of reluctant to go and see it. I wondered what the hell I’d have to say about a school bus in which a guy buggered off to New Mexico every winter. It seemed a limited subject. But when I got there I was delighted. It made me wish I’d known Bob Waldmire personally. He seemed like an amazing fella. And Pontiac is all the better for having his bus parked there.

  Outside the town, there’s another Route 66 landmark that’s worth a look if you’re passing. In 1926 Joe and Victor ‘Babe’ Seloti built a diner and petrol station on the road that would become Route 66 in a couple of months’ time. They named it the Log Cabin Inn. Close to the railway line and built of cedar telephone poles, it seated forty-five customers. The interior still has the original knotty pine walls. After the war, Route 66 was widened to four lanes and moved to the west side of the Log Cabin, which left the back of the restaurant facing the road, so Joe and Victor took a wonderfully pragmatic approach to their problem. First they jacked up the building. Then, using a team of horses, they turned it round to face the new road and dropped it back on to the ground. Business continued as usual.

  Pushing on from Pontiac, past Normal, through Shirley and McLean (neatly separated by Funks Grove, famous for its maple ‘sirup’, made since the 1820s by successive generations of Funks), I arrived in Atlanta. This is another lovely town, the highlight of which is a slightly strange story that makes the Seloti brothers’ ingenuity seem like child’s play.

  It reminded me of an old joke from Scotland about a railway station in the Highlands where people got off the train with their suitcases only to discover there’s nothing there. The village was away down the road, so they walked and walked with their cases until they finally reached it, exhausted.

  One of them asked a local, ‘How come the station isn’t closer to the village?’

  And the local said, ‘Well, we thought it would be much handier if the station was closer to the railway line.’
r />   That’s an old music-hall joke, but – believe it or not – life imitated comedy in Atlanta. The town began its existence as Newcastle in 1854 and was happily minding its own business until a year later, when the railway came to town. Or rather the railway didn’t come to town – for some reason, they laid the tracks more than a mile away from Newcastle. That worried the residents, who thought they’d miss out on all the passing trade, so they uprooted the whole town, lock, stock and barrel, and hoiked it up to the railway line. When they’d finished, they renamed it Atlanta. I find this an absolutely wonderful, inspiring story. It’s a very American, let’s-get-up-and-do-it kind of thing.

  A lot of old Atlanta is no longer standing, but it still has its outstanding 36-foot-tall clock tower, which dates back to 1908 and is one of the few in America that continues to be wound by hand. I met a guy called Bill Thomas, the owner of a café called the Palm Grove. Like a lot of places on Route 66, the Palm Grove had crumbled after the interstate bypassed Atlanta, but Bill had brought it back to life, partly through his championship-winning pie-making skills. He’d promised me a piece of his award-winning pie, but first I had to wind up his wee clock. I’m not belittling the Atlanta clock when I call it wee. It’s just that I’ve wound up Big Ben, and when you’ve done that, every other clock in the world is wee.

  Bill fixed a crank to the mechanism and let me at it. ‘How many cranks will it take?’ I asked.