Route 66 Revisited

ABOVE: Bennie Nez enjoys his lunch at the Eagle Cafe on Historic Route 66 on Tuesday afternoon. The cafe is one of a few businesses that have been around since the 1930's. BELOW: A guest at the El Rancho looks over photographs of famous actors who have visited the establishment on Tuesday afternoon. The hotel is one of a few businesses that have been around since the 1930's .— © 2008 Gallup Independent / Brian Leddy

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — Members of the Society for Commercial Archeology will be coming to Gallup Thursday to try to get an idea of what life on Historic Route 66 is all about.

The problem is that they are coming 60 years too late.

The organization, which is devoted to the preservation of this country’s cultural landscapes, plans to visit vintage motels, diners, and observe the neon signs and other cultural artifacts this week throughout the state that once made Route 66 so famous.

Local Indian Trader Bill Richardson knows that when they get to Gallup, they’ll see only the shell of what Gallup was like in the heyday when Route 66 was the busiest highway in the country and totally changed life in the many small towns along its route. Richardson owns Richardson Trading Co. & Cash Pawn, which has been located on Route 66 since the late 1940s.

Today, tourists like the Dormer family — Bill and Dotty — who traveled through Gallup on their way from Ontario, Calif., to visit relatives in Ohio, will see only a slice of Gallup. In their case, it was only the restaurant at the El Rancho where they ate a quick midafternoon meal and got back in their car to reach Albuquerque by the early evening.

“It looks like a nice town,” Bill Dormer said. They both hurriedly declined the suggestion of staying in Gallup longer to see the murals downtown or getting a better look at the town. To them, Gallup probably looked like almost every other small town they passed.

That wasn’t the situation 60 years ago.

World War II was over. Rationing of gasoline was a thing of the past, and everyone seemed to have a car and everyone wanted to see the United States. There was no interstate system. For those traveling on Route 66, they had no choice but to pass through downtown Gallup, with many of them exhausted from traveling on the two-lane Route 66 and ready to take a break.

“Traveling on Route 66 was slow,” said Richardson, “because you were traveling behind trucks and cars going 40 to 45 miles an hour.” Flagstaff was almost five hours away, and Albuquerque three to four hours. It could go faster, but to do that you would have to take a lot of chances by passing cars. Richardson pointed out that the doctors at St. Mary’s Hospital in Gallup were kept busy seven days a week from the mid-’40s through the ’60s patching up people — or in some cases burying them — who tried and failed to get back into their lane on time.

“The downtown streets were packed from 6 in the morning until 10 at night,” he said. People stopped to take a break from the road, eating at the Eagle Cafe or one of the other numerous restaurants in the downtown area, or maybe relaxing over a cold drink at one of the bars in the downtown areas.

Gallup at that time was primarily the downtown area. The El Rancho Hotel, which looks pretty much the same as it did in the ’40s, was located near the eastern end of the city, and the western end was about where the El Sombrero Restaurant is now.

“We had a couple of cheap motels where Rico and Gurleys are now,” said Richardson. Both were only a couple of blocks from the downtown area.

Something seemed to be going on every night, he said,
There would be lines to get into the restaurants, one of the three drug stores which had actual fountains where people could get a soda pop or a sandwich. Theaters also had long lines before each feature.

Growing up in Gallup at that time was a great opportunity for young kids to see everyone from a movie star to a thief, all in the space of a couple of minutes, by just standing on a corner on Route 66 and watching the cars go by.

The El Rancho has become famous over the years as the hotel of movie stars, and photos of many of the stars who stayed at the hotel are on the walls for tourists to see.

But this pales to the number of stars who actually traveled through Gallup at one time of another in the ’40s and ’50s. Old-timers talk about seeing movie stars like Bob Hope and William Powell at a local eatery downtown, where one could watch from afar and hear them talk about Hollywood gossip.

Or maybe they could just watch those men who wore dark suits even on the hottest days of summer and who were standing on the corner marking down the license plate numbers of cars as they came from the West and headed toward Albuquerque.

FBI historians say Gallup was loved by then Director J. Edgar Hoover, who stationed his agents on the Gallup roads near traffic lights so they could check the license plate numbers against a list of cars reported stolen in California to be sold back East. He used these figures to show how much money the FBI was recovering so he could hit up Congress the next year for a higher budget.

“All the businesses were making money in those days,” Richardson said, adding that the hustle and bustle that people saw along Route 66 drew them in by the thousands each day.

By the late ’50s, the mines were beginning to close down and motels were being built further east and west, which reduced the traffic in the downtown area. Airplanes became safer and movie stars, instead of traveling by car, took to the air. The FBI found better ways to catch car thieves. And then, in the early 1970s, the interstate system finally made it to Gallup, and downtown businesses soon saw their customer base shrink by 70 percent or more.

What members of the Society for Commercial Archaeology will see on Thursday is the aftermath of all of these changes — a few people on the streets of downtown Gallup during the day and if they come by after 6 p.m., they’re likely, said Richardson, to see the streets along Route 66 deserted and all of the businesses closed up.

It’s enough to make most of Gallup’s old-timers give a sigh of regret.

“I really enjoyed Gallup during those old days,” said Richardson. “I enjoyed every part of it.”