Billy Connolly’s Route 66 Read online

  ‘About fifty-three total. And Billy, see what you’re doing? Right up here.’ He pointed to a weight on a wire. ‘That’s what you’re actually lifting.’

  ‘It’s exactly the same method as Big Ben, although it’s smaller scale.’

  ‘And see this? You want to stop.’ A white mark on the apparatus had reached a bar. ‘Stop. You’ve done it.’

  ‘Oh, glory be.’

  Then, because I’d wound the mechanism correctly, he declared me an honorary ‘Keeper of the Clock’. I even got a certificate.

  ‘Lucky me!’ I said.

  ‘It might help with the police or in a bar or something.’

  ‘And you’ve spelled my name right and everything. Thank you very much. Now, to the pies.’

  I’d really enjoyed it. And my new status as an official clock-winder of Atlanta has improved my CV no end. I’m sure I’ll pick up loads of work in that field as I wind my way through life from now on.

  Bill’s café was a delight. He had worked very hard to make it look like it might have done in the 1930s. I had the last piece of peach pie. I nearly went for the apple, but I thought: Oh come on, be original. My super-duper favourite is key lime pie, especially from diners on the road. I also like coconut cream and banana cream, but Bill recommended the peach. As soon as I took a bite, I could appreciate why he’d won awards. It was delicious. The crew wolfed down blackberry, strawberry, apple and all sorts of other pies. A wonderful time was had by all.

  Over the road from Bill’s café stood another Route 66 giant – exactly the same size as the Launching Pad’s spaceman, but this time holding a big hot dog in place of the rocket. In the time since I’d seen the Gemini Giant, I’d found out a bit more about these massive figurines. Most of them were made in the 1960s by International Fiberglass, a company based in Venice, California. The first, designed to hold an axe, was made for the Paul Bunyan Café on Route 66. Most similar statues along the road came from exactly the same mould, albeit without the axe, which explained why they all had their hands held out in front of them. The one with the huge hot dog had spent thirty-eight years outside a restaurant in Cicero, Illinois. Then, in 2003, someone from Atlanta spotted it for sale on eBay and cheekily asked the seller if he could have it for nothing.

  ‘Fine,’ said the seller. ‘Come and get him.’

  So the giant with the big hot dog arrived on permanent loan in Atlanta, Illinois. And the seller, whoever he is, booked his place in heaven.

  I’d already had a great time in Atlanta, then things got even better. Having broken the banjo badge I usually wear on my lapel, I went into a shop to buy a new one. It was a funky wee shop, full of esoterica and built with Route 66 travellers in mind. The owner, Gene, who was a really friendly guy, had heard I was on a bike and asked me about it.

  ‘Actually, I’m on a trike,’ I said.

  ‘Can I see it?’

  I let Gene sit on the trike – because he asked me nicely – then he invited me to his home. He said I could visit any time I liked and that he’d take me up in his aeroplane. I’m very tempted to return to Atlanta just for that. We returned to his store and I bumped into a woman from York. She’d been following me around because her sister was a huge fan, and she asked for an autograph. When I’d finished writing a wee note and signing it, she thanked me, then dug something out of her bag.

  ‘Here’s some decent tea,’ she said, holding out four Yorkshire teabags. ‘You’ll have trouble getting a decent cup of tea as you go along Route 66.’

  I don’t recall ever meeting so many nice people in such a short space of time. Atlanta was an absolute joy.

  My next stop was Springfield, where Abraham Lincoln lived before going to Washington, DC as the sixteenth President of the United States. For the first time since leaving Chicago, I was back on an interstate. Riding in torrential rain, it was quite heart-stopping at times, especially when passing trucks. With the spray and the shit flying everywhere, it was tough going. And as I’ve said, I’m a poser, so I don’t believe in riding in the rain. I don’t want to be wringing out my underwear every time I stop. I’ve seen some guys who are even prepared to ride in the snow, but that’s a different trip. That’s pure sado-masochism. I like the fun of bikes. And this was no fun.

  But I made it to Springfield. It was a totally crap night by the time I reached the hotel, but I told myself that something good would come of it. I’m a great believer in carrying on and not stopping just because it’s raining.

  Ahead of me, less than a hundred miles down Route 66, a tornado had struck Missouri. Watching the television news in my hotel room that night, I saw a bus sitting on top of the airport building in St Louis. Outside the room, thick branches were flying past the window. I couldn’t foresee any kind of lush day hanging out in the sun, covered in suntan oil, coming up any time soon. Ever since we’d arrived in Chicago, the weather had taken a turn for the weird, but I was determined to make a go of my Route 66 trip. It will be good, I kept telling myself. It will be fun.

  5

  Travel My Way, Take the Highway

  I’d stopped in Springfield to see Lincoln’s home and tomb, but to be honest I wasn’t looking forward to visiting either of them. In America, Lincoln is often portrayed as a leading opponent of slavery, but having recently read about him, I’d started to doubt how much liberty he was really willing to grant the slaves. Everyone assumes he wanted total freedom, but I wasn’t so sure. Although he was anti-slavery, I suspected he wasn’t too keen on former slaves and other black Americans having the vote. So I was in two minds about one of America’s most revered statesmen, frequently referred to as the greatest President in American history.

  Going to Lincoln’s house, a charming and handsome – but still quite modest – painted-frame building in a shady residential neighbourhood with wood-plank pavements, started to change my mind. It might sound ridiculous to describe it this way, but Lincoln’s house was a really human home. He came over as a father, a man who had been a good dad to his children and a good husband to his wife, quite apart from being the President of America and leading his country through one of the bloodiest civil wars in history.

  Lincoln was born in poverty to a Kentucky farming family. With illiterate parents and only a year’s formal education, he had few prospects, but while working as a storekeeper and postmaster he developed a love of reading and a keen interest in politics. In 1834 he was elected to the Illinois State Legislature, and two years later he passed his bar exams to become a lawyer. Seeking work in his new profession, in 1837 he arrived in Springfield, the state capital of Illinois. A wee while later, he met Mary Todd, and they married in 1842. The next year, the couple’s first son, Robert, was born, and in 1844 they bought a little house, painted white with green shutters, from the Reverend Charles Dresser, who had performed their marriage ceremony. Over the years, the Lincolns enlarged the house to a full two-storey Greek Revival-style home for their growing family. By 1853, the couple had four sons, although only Robert reached adulthood, married and had children of his own. The others died of pneumonia, tuberculosis or yellow fever, spread by flies from the Washington swamps.

  The Lincoln home has been declared a national historic site and forms part of a small national park dedicated to the President. Four blocks of a section of Springfield that used to be quite rundown and occasionally dangerous have been restored to something approaching their mid-nineteenth-century prime. Lincoln’s house is the centrepiece, and you can walk right through it. You can even inspect his outside loo. Around the house, several other buildings have been equally well restored. Most of them were once occupied by friends of the Lincoln family.

  It’s always very strange to visit a place where a great person used to live. When they’re dead and gone, it’s hard to imagine them inhabiting the space. And yet you can touch things that they’ve touched. Lincoln’s house is particularly peculiar in that way because it’s such a historically important place. In 1860 the Republican Committee arrived in his front ro
om and offered him their nomination for President. I stood on the exact spot where Lincoln stood, all six feet four of him, when they made the offer. He pondered what to do, saying, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ At the time, he was on the court circuit and still a member of the State Legislature, so I suppose he was quite comfortable with that. I like the fact that he clearly wasn’t one of those hell-driven careerists. That’s probably what made him such an outstanding leader of his country. He knew that accepting the presidential nomination would launch him from the relative anonymity of Illinois to national fame. Of course, we all know what happened to him in the end, though.

  Walking around the house, I started to feel great warmth for the man. There were little bits of paper on the desk where he worked. And the dining room where the family used to have their meals still had the stand on which Mary, who did most of the cooking, placed the cakes she made for them. I’d imagined a huge dining room to entertain great dignitaries, but, like everything about the man, it was very modest and homely. Upstairs, the bedrooms were just as interesting. I especially loved the wallpaper, an intricately patterned design that was possibly made by a French company. It said so much about Lincoln and his wife. I bet they were a really modern couple for their time.

  But the kitchen was my favourite room in the house. With a wood-burning stove – a bit like an Aga – it must have been like hell in there, with smoke and flames everywhere. When they moved to Washington, Mary wanted to take the stove with her, but someone put their foot down and said, ‘No, come on, behave yourself.’ But I could see why she wanted to take it with her: it’s absolutely beautiful.

  The more I learned about Abraham Lincoln, the more I liked him. In the parlour, where the family spent a lot of their time, the kids would roll around and play on the floor, and Abe would either read or roll around on the floor with them, while Mary would do a bit of sewing and stitching. Apparently Lincoln was very fond of his children and liked to spoil them. One of his kids once had a birthday party and Lincoln invited sixty children, so the place must have been in uproar. He was often seen pulling his kids along the street in a cart, something that was considered very unmanly and feminine in those days. I liked the sound of that because I remembered pushing my own son around in a pushchair in Glasgow. It was the delight of my life at the time, but even then people responded to me strangely and often looked at me as if I was a bit of an odd hippy. They’d say, ‘Aren’t you embarrassed? That’s a woman’s thing to do.’ So I could only imagine how the residents of Springfield must have reacted to Lincoln in the nineteenth century.

  Another thing I like about him is that he lived in a sort of suburbia, a modest neighbourhood. He was born in a log cabin, so the Springfield house must have been a huge move up for him, and it was the only house he ever owned. He moved straight from Springfield to the White House in February 1861. Four years later, it was boom, goodnight Vienna, when John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathiser, shot him in the back of the head.

  Lincoln was a giant and I came away from his old home in great admiration of the man. And I’ll retain that admiration, I think.

  Clearly, I’m not the only one to hold Lincoln in such high regard. For evidence, you only need to look at his tomb, built in Springfield after that stumer shot him. (‘Stumer’ is a Scottish word that really appeals to me. I don’t know where it comes from, but I like to think of it as a cross between ‘stupid’ and ‘tumour’. It means you’re no good for anything.) The centrepiece of Oak Ridge Cemetery, Lincoln’s final resting place is surrounded by towering oak trees in a gently rolling landscape. His 117-foot-tall granite tomb also contains the bodies of Mary and three of their four sons – Edward, William and Thomas.

  Although relatively modest by the standards of presidential tombs, this is one of the most revered places in America – and rightly so. It’s worth a visit just to see the sculptures of Lincoln, both inside and outside the tomb, the most impressive of which is a large bronze bust of the President at the entrance. A facsimile of a marble bust that stands in the US Capitol in Washington, DC, the bronze was created by Gutzon Borglum, who also sculpted the vast Lincoln figurehead at Mount Rushmore. Many visitors rub the nose of the Springfield bust for good luck. It’s not encouraged, but I’ve never done what’s encouraged, so I gave it a rub.

  Inside the building, other bronze statues portray Lincoln in various stages of his life. Some include excerpts from his most famous speeches. Walking down a circular hallway to a marble burial chamber, I was confronted by the sombre words that Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, uttered at his death: ‘Now he belongs to the ages.’ Stanton’s next words after the assassination – ‘There lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen’ – aren’t displayed in the tomb, but I think they would have been quite appropriate. Standing in the chamber, there’s a very real sense of the terrible human cost of the American Civil War, almost as if Lincoln died yesterday.

  A red marble marker stands above the underground vault where Lincoln’s coffin lies. People have twice tried to steal the body, so the vault has now been reinforced with concrete and steel to foil grave robbers. God only knows why anyone might want to steal it. What would they do with it? Put it on eBay?

  One of the things that sums up Lincoln for me is that he spoke for less than three minutes at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where four and a half months earlier, the Union armies had decisively defeated those of the Confederacy. Before the President’s concise, powerful and deeply moving speech, Edward Everett, a former Secretary of State, had talked for two solid hours. Everett’s seldom-read, 13,607-word oration was slated to be the main event of the day, but Lincoln’s ‘few appropriate remarks’, which summarised the war in just ten sentences, is now recognised by everyone in America as the Gettysburg Address.

  He began the speech with a reference to the American Revolution of 1776: ‘Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’ Then he invoked the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence and redefined the Civil War not merely as a struggle for the Union but as ‘a new birth of freedom’, which would bring true equality to all of America’s citizens, ensure that democracy remained a viable form of government, and create a unified nation.

  Now one of the best-known speeches in American history, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was greeted first by a stunned silence and then by wild, prolonged applause for the man who was guiding the nation through the Civil War and preserving the Union. He was a fantastic guy and a true lover of freedom. His assassination did nobody any good. John Wilkes Booth simply killed a very good man.

  As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, I had arrived in Springfield swithering, as we say in Scotland, between whether Lincoln was a truly great guy or just an ordinary guy made to look great by history. By the time I left, I was in no doubt. To abolish slavery and to keep the Union of America intact were two extraordinary achievements. I ended the day wishing I’d had the chance to meet Lincoln. I think he would have been a friend of mine. I reckon I would have liked him and I hope he would have liked me.

  In a few hours I’d completely changed my opinion of the man. And I kinda like that. I’m not locked closed on everything.

  Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, I climbed on to my trike, headed out of the cemetery, passed the Illinois State Capitol Building (built from Romeoville limestone) and arrived at the home of the Cozy Dog, one of the birthplaces of fast food.

  This was the place where Bob Waldmire, that fabulous artist who lived on a bus, grew up watching the traffic on Route 66. His father, Ed, invented the Cozy Dog after visiting Oklahoma and eating a speciality of the state – a corn dog – which is a sausage baked in cornbread. Ed liked it, but thought it took far too long to prepare. He mentioned it to a pal, but then the Second World War intervened and he thought no more of it.

>   A few years later, when Ed was stationed in Amarillo, Texas, with the US Air Force, his pal wrote to say that he had developed a batter that would stick to frankfurter sausages, allowing them to be deep-fried. He sent some of the batter to Ed, who tested it in the air force kitchens, creating a thickly battered hot dog on a stick. Ed called them ‘crusty curs’.

  These meat lollipops became hugely popular on the air force base and around town, so when Ed was discharged in 1946, he decided to set up a restaurant to sell his creation. But his wife thought ‘crusty cur’ was a terrible name and suggested Cozy Dog instead, possibly because it was like a hot dog in a blanket. Their Cozy Dog restaurant in Springfield was the first fast-food joint on Route 66. For the first time in history, big groups of people were driving long distances and they needed places to grab a quick bite to eat. Cozy Dogs could be prepared in advance, so the customers could grab one and then just keep driving.

  Incidentally, did you know that it took a wee while for anyone to come up with the idea of putting a frankfurter in a bun to make a hot dog? The story goes that a Bavarian sausage seller called Anton Ludwig Feuchtwanger had been selling frankfurters with a pair of white gloves so that his customers could eat the hot sausages in comfort. But when the customers started keeping the gloves as souvenirs, Feuchtwanger responded by serving his sausages in rolls. Nobody seems to know for sure whether he first tried this at the 1893 World’s Fair: Columbian Exposition in Chicago or the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis. Whichever it was, Feuchtwanger is credited with inventing the hot dog, although I can’t believe that nobody thought to put a frankfurter in a bread roll between the thirteenth century – when the sausages were invented in Germany – and 1893. By the way, if you’ve ever wondered why a hot dog tastes the way it does – with that unique flavour that no other sausage or meat has – well, the answer is coriander. That’s the secret ingredient. Tell your friends. And tell them who told you.