‘Required pit stop’ along Route 66 is Adrian, Texas

One of the most popular destinations for motorists to gather to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of U.S. Route 66 in 2026 is the little town of Adrian, Texas, located in the Panhandle region near the top of the state.

Visitors can grab a bite to eat at Adrian’s legendary MidPoint Café and Gift Shop. 

The establishment is aptly named; the town is famously situated “at the geo-mathematical midpoint” of Route 66 – 1,139 miles from both Chicago, Ill., and Los Angeles, Calif.

 

Adrian’s town motto is: “When you are here, you’re halfway there.”

 

The 138 folks who live in Adrian like the feeling; it makes them special. (A few have moved elsewhere since they put up the green city limits sign, noting the population as 166.)

Business is good at the 54-seat MidPoint Café, according to owner Brenda Hammit, 62, She started as a cook at the restaurant in 2013 and took over ownership in 2018.

 

Hammit is doing her level best to carry on the café’s proud traditions that were established by the late Fran Houser, a former owner. 

Houser “was the inspiration” for the character of “Flo” at “Flo’s V8 Café” in the fictional town of “Radiator Springs,” which is featured in the 2006 Pixar animated movie “Cars.”

Flo is a light turquoise/green-colored 1950s General Motors Motorama show car. 

She is not based on a single production model, but is a custom, one-of-a-kind vehicle inspired by GM concepts of that era, featuring elements from the 1951 Buick LeSabre and 1951 Buick XP-300.

 

Also, the “Mia and Tia” twins that appear in the film were based on two MidPoint Café servers – sisters Mary Lou and Christina Mendez.

 

Mia and Tia are red Mazda Miata twins with black roofs.

             Over the course of the film, they display a variety of Lightning McQueen stickers.

In the film, Flo’s, “as a drive-in restaurant for anthropomorphic cars,” boasted that it served “the finest fuel on Route 66.”

Shane McAuliffe, who hosts “The Texas Bucket List,” a weekly, nationally syndicated television program, recently dropped by the MidPoint Café to order a triple-decker cheeseburger.

 

Hammit told him to be sure to save room for a piece of her “Ugly Crust Pie.” It’s a slice of Americana – a specialty dessert that was introduced by Joann Harwell, who formerly served as Midpoint Café’s pastry chef. 

Using her grandmother’s pie recipes, Harwell would lament that her crusts never measured up to perfection.

“The main ingredient in any recipe I have is the love that goes with the attempt. I don’t make a perfect pie crust, but I’ve come to see that there’s more to life than being perfect,” Harwell said.

Writing for Chron.com, based in Houston, Rebecca Treon said: “Today, Hammit herself makes roughly 20 pies per day – sometimes starting at 3 a.m. – and they almost always sell out.”

“Coconut cream is MidPoint’s most popular flavor, but Hammit also makes an Elvis-inspired pie that has chocolate, peanut butter and banana.” 

“There’s also the MidPoint version of a Derby pie, with Tennessee whiskey, chocolate and pecan, plus more common flavors, like apple and lemon meringue.”

Treon said: “The rest of the menu includes amped-up American diner classics: burgers almost too big to get your mouth around, BLTs with 10 pieces of bacon and a quarter-pound hot dog. But there are no French fries, because MidPoint doesn’t have a fryer; instead, they serve chips, coleslaw or potato salad. Hammit coordinates with tour buses in advance.”

 

“MidPoint’s decor has evolved organically over time, thanks to its customers,” Treon wrote. “The walls are lined with license plates, and the register displays currency from around the world. The dining room has brightly hued, vintage diner tables and Naugahyde booths, and the walls are covered with 1950s, Route 66 and Coca-Cola memorabilia.”

 

“This is probably one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done,” Hammit says. “I love meeting people. I’ve made so many friends. It’s not about the money – I’ve just had a blast in here, it’s just amazing.”

Golf stories seem to get better with age

Mark Twain is often cited as the source of the quote: “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” 

He was a wise man; I couldn’t agree more.

My best round of golf in North Carolina was the time I got to drive the beverage cart at a Boone Area Chamber of Commerce benefit tournament played at Linville Ridge Country Club in Avery County.

 

My worst round of golf in North Carolina was the time I had to sub in for a player who didn’t show up at a Boone Area Chamber of Commerce benefit tournament played at Hound Ears Club in Watauga County. I ran out of balls by the 8th hole.

I felt better after reading about a golfing experience involving Fred Raphael, the entrepreneurial promoter who came up with the idea of televising a “Legends of Golf” competition in the late 1970s.

Raphael was a marketing guy and had never played golf. He decided he’d better take up the game, so there he was at Pine Valley Golf Club, a difficult, exclusive layout in New Jersey.

Counting whiffs, lost balls and every other penalty, I shot 154,” Raphael said. “It’s a good thing (golfer) Gene Sarazen had given me a lot of golf balls.”

 

What Raphael didn’t know was that the balls he had been given were British undersized balls that were not authorized for U.S. courses.

 

“A couple of weeks later, the member who got me on at Pine Valley called to say the club president sent out a letter saying 28 illegal British balls were found in the rough and that anyone caught playing the illegal balls would be kicked out of the club,” Raphael said.

“What should I tell him?” the member asked Raphael.

“Tell him to keep looking,” Raphael said. “There are four more out there.”

Then, there’s the poster displayed at a golf club in Liverpool, England, that summarizes the objective of the game: “Swat the ball as far as you can…and if you find it on the same day, you have won.”

An article in Golf Digest in 2009, authored by Bill Fields of Pinehurst, N.C., said today’s PGA Champions Tour began to form “on a soggy April Day in 1979 at Onion Creek Country Club in Austin, Texas.

 

The notion of a senior tour took flight, Fields said, during a dramatic, emotionally charged six-hole, nationally televised playoff between the doubles team of Julius Boros-Roberto De Vicenzo versus Tommy Bolt-Art Wall Jr. in Fred Raphael’s “Legends of Golf.”

Boros (above) and De Vincenzo

They competitors range in age from 55 to 63, and the action “overflowed with stellar shots and counterpunches,” Fields said, convincing people that “a second act for the sport’s aging champions was a good idea.” About 5,000 people came out to the course to watch and marvel at the old goats’ shot-making abilities.

Bolt (above) and Wall

 

One pro golfer who noticed in 1979 was Bob Goalby. He had amassed 11 PGA titles over the course of his career between 1958-71. (His first victory came at the 1958 Greater Greensboro (N.C.) Open, and his sole Major Tournament win came in 1968 at The Masters.)

Goalby was the ringleader who put together a small group of PGA players who were “past their prime” to formulate a plan for a “senior tour.” Key participants were Boros, Bolt, Sam Snead, Gardner Dickinson, Dan January and Dan Sikes.

“I was optimistic,” Goalby said. “I remember saying, ‘We’re going to have a senior tour someday. The public is going to find a place for Arnold (Palmer) to play.’” 

(Palmer was approaching his 50th birthday on Sept. 10, 1979.)

Route 66 saw boost in traffic volume after World War II

Post-World War II, traffic on Route 66 increased dramatically. Families with more income and leisure time began the tradition of the great American “road trip,” heading west on Route 66 to destinations such as the Grand Canyon, Disneyland and California beaches.

For one World War II veteran, however, the journey west on Route 66 was “a business trip.”

Bobby Troup had served a four-year hitch as an officer in the Marine Corps. He was the music director at Camp Montford Point in Jacksonville, N.C., where he was given leadership responsibility for the training of African-American troops.

 

Marine Capt. Bobby Troup with Pvt. Finis Henderson at Montford Point.

Bobby Troup and his wife, Cynthia, packed up their 1941 Buick and headed west. Bobby wanted to try his hand as a Hollywood songwriter. He had a talent for putting rhyming words and music together.

She suggested that he compose a song about their journey, titling it: “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66.”

The lyrics mention several communities that they passed through on their 10-day trip: St. Louis, Joplin, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Gallup, Flagstaff, Winona, Kingman, Barstow and San Bernardino.

It was a snappy tune. Nat King Cole, with the King Cole Trio, first recorded “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” as a rhythm and blues song in 1946 at Radio Recorders in Los Angeles. Capitol Records released it as a single, and the song reached No. 11 on Billboard magazine’s singles chart.

 

A new television show, “Route 66,” premiered as an American adventure drama in 1960. It was created by Herbert B. Leonard and Stirling Silliphant.

Rather than pay royalties to Troup for the use of his song, Leonard and Silliphant commissioned Nelson Riddle in 1962 to write the “Route 66 Theme” as an instrumental. 

(In 1963, Stanley Styne wrote lyrics for jazz singer Teri Thorton. Her vocal version was retitled “Open Highway.”)

 

The “Route 66” TV series was an anthology that followed two young men traversing the western United States along Route 66 in a photogenic Chevrolet Corvette convertible. When the characters ran low on funds, they worked odd jobs to pad their wallets.

 

Martin Milner starred as Tod Stiles, and George Maharis played his friend Buz Murdock. 

During the third season, Maharis was diagnosed with infectious hepatitis, requiring him to take an extended leave of absence. 

He was replaced in the cast by Glenn Corbett, who played a recently discharged Vietnam veteran named Lincoln “Linc” Case. He continued through the final episode in 1964.

 

Despite the name of the series, most episodes did not take place on the historic road. A long list of well-known artists appeared as guest stars on the series, including Ed Asner, Peter Lorre, Barbara Eden, Jack Lord, Cloris Leachman, Tuesday Weld, William Shatner, Joan Crawford, Julie Newmar, Martin Sheen, James Caan, Lee Marvin…and dozens more.

Chevrolet supplied complimentary Corvettes, upgrading every season with the latest models.

 

The boom in traffic along Route 66 in the 1950s was temporary. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Aid Act in 1956, creating the Interstate Highway system. 

 

Over the next three decades, interstates replaced “almost all” of U.S. 66 with I-40. Route 66 was officially decommissioned in 1985.

Route 66 lived on, however, as people nostalgic for the old highway started campaigns to preserve the historic road. The U.S. Congress passed the Route 66 Study Act of 1990, recognizing that Route 66 was “a symbol of the American people’s heritage of travel and their legacy of seeking a better life.”

 

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Route 66, and communities all along the original route are staging all sorts of celebratory events. We’ll check it out.

Route 66 was America’s ‘Mother Road’ and ‘Main Street’

How Route 66 came to be known as America’s “Mother Road” is an interesting story.

American novelist John Steinbeck (1902-68) wrote about Route 66 and used the term “Mother Road” in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” published in 1939.

 

The story describes the effects of the severe drought that struck the Midwest in the 1930s –the infamous “Dust Bowl.”

Travel writer Austin Whittall commented: “Strong winds provoked vast dust storms known as ‘black blizzards’…that blanketed the prairies of Canada and the United States.

 

“More than 100 million acres of once verdant farmland were ruined,” Whittall said. “Farmers lost their crops and cattle. Facing famine, and unable to pay back their bank loans, they defaulted on their mortgages. The farmers lost everything. Move on and find work, or starve.”

“An estimated 210,000 people took to the road and headed west, seeking jobs in California,” he said.

“However, the Great Depression that began with the ‘Black Tuesday’ stock market crash in October 1929 had shattered the economy,” Whittall said.

Still, the farm families from The Plains were determined to move west on a wing and a prayer.

 

Steinbeck wrote: “Highway 66 is the main migrant road…the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map, from the Mississippi to Bakersfield – over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the Divide and down into the bright and terrible desert, and across the desert to the mountains again, and into the rich California valleys.”

“66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and…from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there.”

“From all of these, the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.”

Whittall said that for countless families, the journey was pure misery: “Thousands of cars, wrecks along the highway, lack of money, food, no spares, old jalopies, threadbare tires, strained engines, thirst, despair….”

 

(Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” was an instant literary success, and a movie directed by John Ford was shot in 1940, starring actor Henry Fonda.)

 

On the more positive side, one of the chief promoters of Route 66 was Cyrus Avery. He was instrumental in plotting and planning Route 66 from Chicago to dip south and run through St. Louis, Mo.

Avery rationalized: “Like the pioneer days, when they outfitted at St. Louis for all points in the West and Southwest, so today people traveling by auto find themselves coming to St. Louis over the various U.S. roads, and when arriving in St. Louis, by consulting their map, find U.S. 66 is the most direct road to the Pacific coast and likewise to all points in the great Southwest.”

“I challenge anyone to show a road of equal length that traverses more scenery, more agricultural wealth and more mineral wealth than does U.S. 66,” he said.

Avery labeled Route 66 as “America’s Main Street,” and the highway has been memorialized in popular songs and with a television drama series.

 

Two popular movies are also associated closely with Route 66. One is “Easy Rider” (1969), a “landmark counterculture film” featuring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Terry Southern and Jack Nicholson. 

The other is “Thelma & Louise” (1991), starring Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon. Their “girls’ road trip” into the American Southwest goes from bad to worse.