(jaunty piano music) ♪ (narrator) Since its inception in 1926, Route 66 has been an icon of the American West and a defining element of the American experience.

♪ From Chicago to Los Angeles, the Mother Road takes us on a journey from the East to the American West, with its wide open skies and a mix of different cultures.

(woman) Route 66 has opened the gateway to a lot of opportunities.

(woman) You can still drive it.

I'm like, "Oh, my gosh, how cool is that?"

-Where y'all from?

-Germany.

(narrator) International visitors come by the tens of thousands, hungry for an American experience.

(lively music) (speaking in foreign language) ♪ (tour guide) But the most famous person of all... -Who?

-Me.

(laughing) They grew up watching American television.

Route 66 with George Maharis, Martin Milner.

And they're all here to see America of yesterday.

(narrator) Beloved television shows, like the Route 66 TV show, and films like Easy Rider have celebrated the road from a male perspective in which women are seldom in the driver's seat.

(mellow music) (Heidi) We forgot that women were on those journeys, we forgot that women were working all along the way in those businesses.

(narrator) Despite its moniker, The Mother Road, little attention has been paid to diverse women's experiences across many different cultures and almost 100 years of history.

♪ (woman) When I first got to the motel and they were having a convention, and they said, "Well, no, a woman doesn't come.

There's no women."

And so they put this man beside me.

I don't know who he is.

But they just said, "Well, no, you just-- just has to be a man with you."

It's a mirror held up to the nation.

A road that can be, really, a living classroom.

(woman) She was entrepreneurial, she was very business oriented, and she allowed us to live a very comfortable life.

(narrator) From archeologists to politicians, and countless entrepreneurs, women overcame segregation and gender discrimination to build fulfilling lives for themselves and generations to come on America's most beloved road.

This is their story.

(traffic humming) So the story of the American West has been told as a story of mobile man.

(twangy banjo music) The man on horseback, the cowboy riding off onto the prairie, the Pony Express rider, the stage driver, the railroad engineer.

You can name any kind of stereotype of man conquering the West, and it's a man in motion.

♪ (Heidi) Women who were traveling, and they were always at a very strong disadvantage because they were at the mercy of men.

They might be propositioned, there would be rough language.

These were not comfortable situations for a proper woman to be in.

And so when the automobile came out, these women said, "Wow, I would rather go by car because that offers me privacy, safety," from the hubbub around them.

(narrator) Women were eager from the start to tackle the challenge of driving automobiles.

Controlling one's mobility was a step towards liberation.

(soft piano music) ♪ (Virginia) There were a lot of women driving around in the Southwest, and I think of somebody like the Home Extension agent Fabiola Cabeza de Baca.

And Fabiola would have been traveling on Route 66.

The United States Government wanted to help homemakers perform their work more efficiently, so they started a kind of Home Extension movement.

And the idea was our educated professional specialists will help the average housewife have a happier, healthier, more productive life.

So she joined the Home Extension service in 1929, but she did not know how to drive when she decided to do that.

She was told, "You are gonna be out on the road driving throughout Northern New Mexico," an enormous territory, until 1932 when her car was hit by a train.

(train whistle) (train chugging) She was injured so badly that she had to have a leg amputated.

And it was--seemed as if she would not recover from this and would not be able to resume her profession.

But after two years of recovery, she just got another car that was fitted out specially for her and went back on the road with a wooden leg and had another career for another 25 years in the Home Extension Service all over New Mexico, doing her work in both English and Spanish, learning some Tewa and Towa, so that she could work with women in pueblos.

(Tomas) And she wrote these two or three cookbooks.

She, I think, was very influential in New Mexico to document Hispanic cooking styles and also to preserve the history of Hispana cooking in New Mexico.

(Virginia) So the first real mass-market automobile was Henry Ford's Model T, of course.

And Henry Ford did not think that women were gonna be the drivers of this car.

He saw this as the family car for America, but it was Dad who was gonna be driving this thing.

Mom would be a passenger, because Mom, if Mom was gonna drive, he'd have to put all kinds of frills on this car, things like an automatic starter instead of a crank on it.

At one point, when General Motors began to manufacture cars in a variety of colors, and the Model T was still black, and he said, "Yeah, you can have any color you want, as long as it's black."

And then they said, "Well, why are you only making a black car?

Why don't you make cars in colors?"

And he said, "Well, I'm not in the millinery business."

(twangy banjo music) (narrator) The first cars marketed to women were electric cars.

Battery, longevity, and miles between charges were issues, however.

And so women had to prove they were up for the challenge of not only driving but also fixing the messier and less easy-to-handle gas automobile.

(water splashes) ♪ (Virginia) Early road trips that women took, they liked to take pictures of themselves when they came into really difficult circumstances.

Women wanted to prove that they could go on long distance drives, that they could drive gasoline cars that were tough and dirty and heavy to drive and had to be cranked.

So there was a kind of "I can do this" mentality about driving at that time.

(narrator) After women heroically drove ambulances during World War I, it was clear women could drive well, even under extreme conditions.

Women participated in the Good Roads Movement, which culminated in the creation of a National Highway System in 1926.

(soft piano music) Politicians, boosters, and businessmen all scrambled to get their piece of the pie, including Cyrus Avery, the father of Route 66.

(Sean) Cyrus Avery really produced a road that I think has been enduring and important in American history.

This is a diagonal road.

It's an even number road, which means it's east to west, but it's going north and south at the same time.

He represented a modern economic examination of what a highway could do or transportation route could do to some of the poorest counties in the United States.

(Glenda) Claim to fame for Springfield is the birthplace of Route 66 because that is where the group met and sent the telegram in that they would accept the 66 designation.

And it came from Springfield.

(woman) And you want this sent as a regular telegram, of course.

(man) Oh, sure, this is news.

(Heidi) And the roads were horrible, unpaved, and especially in mountainous regions where there was lots of rain and snow, like Northern Arizona, Northern New Mexico.

Those roads were impossible to travel.

And in the winter months, they would be washed out completely.

And places like Route 66 would just close down in the winter months in the northern regions.

So, there were a lot of women who ran for office in the West.

They often sat on committees that you would normally expect women to be on.

Oh, education committees and child welfare committees.

But they also sat on good roads committees.

And when they went in, they wanted budgets for roads.

To pave them, to improve signage, so that traveling was safe.

(narrator) Despite being told she couldn't win because of her gender, Isabella Greenway paved the way on Route 66 and brought women to the political forefront.

(Heidi) She was from elite society, but she'd grown up in ranching conditions.

When she made her debut to society in New York City, she became close friends, lifelong friends, with Eleanor Roosevelt.

These two women had, very early on, strong political instincts, and Isabella ended up coming out West because her husband, like so many people who had came West, had tuberculosis.

And when he died, she married his close friend, John Greenway, and moved to Arizona.

And got involved in veterans affairs, 'cause he was a veteran, and also involved with politics 'cause he was involved with the progressive party.

When he died, she bought a ranch outside of Williams, and she used it as a summer retreat, but she did entertain guests, like her close friends, dignitaries, state officials, and Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt.

She brought 'em here during the-- through the state on a whistle-stop tour, and she entertained them at her beautiful spread on 110,000 acres outside of Williams.

When she was done with that, her name was sort of a household name here in Arizona.

She ran for public office, she ran for Congress, and she was the first female to represent Arizona in Congress, elected in 1933 in a special election with over 70% of the vote.

Tells you how popular she was.

She had sort of a mandate when she went to Congress, and she had several issues that were important to her, veterans affairs but also good roads.

She worked very hard in Congress to get a great budget passed that gave funding to finally pave Route 66 in the late '30s, and it really improved transportation in this part of the country.

(lively piano music) ♪ (Joline) My father was working on Route 66 on the road crew, I presume with machines.

And they went through Halltown, where my mother lived, and they met, I don't know how, and fell in love and got married.

Daddy started accepting jobs that promoted him a little bit each time, and we moved to Miami, Oklahoma, when I was in fourth grade.

Daddy had his own Texaco account.

It was--became the second largest Texaco station in the United States.

It must have been an incredible and emotional rollercoaster ride living on the road.

For a family running businesses along Route 66, especially in the rural areas, all family members played a role.

For example, wives or girlfriends or spouses played a role in pumping gas or taking money -or working in the kitchen.

-They didn't always get counted in the census because working women who were married often were not counted that way because they were not the primary breadwinners.

Only primary breadwinners, their husbands, were counted.

We would come in and she'd have black and white Oxfords on and her plaid shirt.

(Joline) Mother was out there.

She would fix breakfast for whoever's at home and then run out to the garage and open it up.

She put gas in cars, washed the windshields, do all the things that they used to do.

We bought the new 1936 Chevrolet.

I was eight years old.

And my brother was six.

And she came to get us at school.

We were going home.

And she turned the motor on and we hopped.

She didn't put the clutch in right, I think.

And so we did that four or five times till we got to the corner, and then she pulled down on the gear shift.

We went around the corner on two wheels.

And she grabbed the knob off the gear shift and a team of horses in a wagon came out of the alley across the street from where we were.

And she managed to avoid them somehow.

And we roared, in first gear I'm sure, all the way home, which was not very far.

And she said, "I'm never driving again."

-And she didn't.

-And she never did.

She never drove again.

(narrator) Despite some women's ambivalence to the horseless carriage, with few opportunities at home, women embraced the automobile when love or necessity forced them to on Route 66.

(Keiko) My grandmother came here around 1917 from Japan.

I understand it was a dispute with her parents, and she decided to become a picture bride, exchange pictures, and she found a match with my grandfather.

She was very independent.

She was really a character.

(Susie) So here are the-- Yutaro and Naka.

-That's right.

-Uyeda.

-In the Western clothing, huh?

-Right, yes.

My grandfather came here first at the turn of the century, early 1900s, via Hawaii from Japan.

He worked on the railroads there and some field work, and then he had the opportunity to come here to California and Los Angeles to work on the railroad tracks.

And so, when the railroad tracks stopped at Monrovia, that's where he settled and he loved it here.

But Monrovia, as-- for a Japanese man or Japanese family, there weren't any jobs available.

And from what I understand, there were jobs but not for Japanese.

They were not American citizens, and so they could not own property.

So my grandfather bought property in the name of my uncle, because he was born here, he was an American citizen.

(mellow music) Then he went into farming, and he became very prosperous here and well-known, farming the fields behind the property and also looking for empty properties for him to garden and grow his crops.

My grandmother and my mother and aunt sold the fruits and primarily strawberries.

My grandmother did not work the crops.

From the beginning, she took care of the money.

She was--didn't like it here and was planning to go back to Japan, so my grandfather didn't know about her sending money back there for her future needs.

I think it was about five cents or a few pennies for a whole flat of strawberries.

So my grandfather, in marketing, what he'd do, he'd put the flats of strawberries along Route 66.

(Susie) And it says in the back, "First car."

-The family now had a car.

-Car, mm-hm.

Yes.

Look at that car.

(Susie) And this photograph of Isamu says 1928.

I think this was the one that was prepared for his service or funeral.

(Keiko) Oh, 'cause my mother would have been five at that time, and so he was four years-- about four years older, so, yes.

My uncle, Isamu, was nine when he was killed after he was kicked by one of the big horses.

They were playing on it.

He was at the Children's Hospital because he survived for-- I guess for several months after.

My grandmother visited him in the hospital almost daily.

I never saw her drive ever in my life, but evidently, at that time, she did drive the car into Los Angeles down Route 66 to visit him.

I don't think she would have had a driver's license.

It was just a tragic accident, and the firstborn son for both of 'em.

My mother was born on Route 66.

My mother is second one from-- (Susie) Second girl from the left.

It's an incredible picture that was captured of the Japanese-American community in Monrovia.

My mother lived on Huntington Drive.

Monroe School was only about three blocks away.

This is where I went to elementary school, right in Monrovia.

And when she was growing up, from Huntington, she was not able to attend Monroe.

They couldn't cross one street that was just three blocks from them.

That's how they were segregated.

(Candacy) 44 out of the 89 counties along Route 66 were sundown towns.

And sundown towns were all-white communities.

They were all-white on purpose.

There were still, at that time, many gas stations that wouldn't serve Black people.

A lot of people traveled with chauffeurs hats, especially for the middle class Black drivers who had nicer cars, so if they got pulled over, they--that was the story that they would tell the police officer is that, you know, "This isn't my car, this is my employer's car."

And he'd ask, "Well, where's your hat?"

And they'd have the chauffer's hat there.

Those were the things that they had to do to travel safely across the country.

(narrator) Segregation was the law during the era of Jim Crow.

Life and travel opportunities were not the same for all Americans.

But some women entrepreneurs found their niche serving those who would not otherwise be served on Route 66.

(Irv) Alberta Ellis, Northcutt Ellis, properly, was my grandmother, and she was a business woman in Springfield, Missouri, and she--originally, she worked as a-- at the Bell Telephone Company there.

And she was very resourceful.

I'm sorry, the line is busy.

I'll keep trying and call you.

(Irv) And she saw a need for travelers on the road, African-American travelers.

The law at that time said that there was segregation, so that the African Americans couldn't stay in the white hotels, like the Kentwood Arms or the Colonial or places of that sort back in those days, but they were allowed to stay at Alberta's.

Within the hotel, she had other businesses, of course.

She hired local people or she allowed them to rent space.

So you had a beauty shop, a barber shop.

She had a rumpus room.

You know, so there was quite a complex for African Americans, and it became well-known and travelers came there.

Alberta's Hotel was in the Green Book.

(Candacy) The Negro Motorist Green Book was created by Victor H. Green.

And he was a postal worker from Harlem.

And he was a Black man.

And he saw that even in, you know, in the 1930s, even though he was in New York, there was incredible racial discrimination.

It was like a AAA for Black people.

(Irv) When someone comes to town like Ray Charles, he's not permitted to stay in a place where he's going to entertain, you know, people.

He has to come, you know, and stay at Alberta's.

We have records of the people who stayed at the hotel.

And some of them you would recognize, like Roy Hamilton and, you know, names like Ray Charles, the Globetrotters, you know, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers.

This is in the early days of rock and roll.

She worked an eight-hour-a-day job and then did all of the rest of this after that.

(Candacy) Green Book businesses were owned by Blacks, but then there were some that weren't.

Here we are at Clifton's, the original west end of the Mother Road.

Clifton's was a Green Book property.

There are 220 Green Book properties in Los Angeles, 23 of them downtown, and only, out of those 23, six are still standing.

Clifton's was established in 1932, and that was right in the Depression era restaurant.

It was one of the classic places to come, not only because it was so-- it was right in the middle of downtown, it was right at the very end of Route 66.

It was also a place where you could Dine Free Unless Delighted, that was the term.

They had a five-cent meal, or you could pay what you felt like the food was worth.

So you had the option of not paying, which was very unique, but in the spirit of the times and in the spirit of Clifford Clinton, who owned Clifton's.

Clifford Clinton was a white man who owned this property.

He thought of this in the Depression when there was still, you know, so much fear and scarcity, but he saw that there was still too much here for people to-- to not have a warm meal and not have the basics.

And he created a business model that made it possible for him to give away free food.

(narrator) Across the Southwest along Route 66, elite women were involved in pursuits that combined historic preservation with packaging of the imagined past of the Southwest -to appeal to tourists.

-So we're here at the Casa de Adobe in Highland Park, Los Angeles.

It was built by the Hispanic Society of California.

(Marva) It's a replica of a 19th century Spanish rancho home.

And it was built with the purpose of introducing the public to the early Spanish settlers.

(Maren) This site is unique in that it was always an interpretative or educational site, never an active working ranch site.

However, it was used for many different types of programs over the years, and especially during the peak popularity of Route 66.

(Marva) For the first few years, it was a few blocks from Route 66, but that still benefited the visitation.

And then, in the early 1930s, the alignment was changed and the Casa sat right on Route 66.

This booklet is a Casa de Adobe handbook.

In the inside cover, actually, we have a photograph of Señora Florencia Sepulveda de Schoneman.

She's saying, "Buenas tardes, amigas!"

She was the Casa's first hostess.

And she worked very hard to give visitors some kind of sense of early Spanish Californian life.

(Maren) Right behind me is the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, which is perched up on a hillside.

The Southwest Museum was the first museum in Los Angeles.

And the Casa de Adobe came under the auspices of the Southwest Museum in 1925.

(Maren) Casa de Adobe was hand-built using traditional adobe brick, brick by brick, tens of thousands of bricks are what make this structure.

(Marva) And one of the curators there, Mark Raymond Harrington, became very interested in it.

He was interested in the architecture of adobes, preserving California history, and he became a great supporter.

And he worked very closely with Señora Florencia Sepulveda de Schoneman.

They established a Casa de Adobe Committee to raise money to furnish the Casa, to open it, and to care for it.

(narrator) At the Southwest Museum up the hill, women also worked in anthropology and archaeology.

Bertha Parker Pallan Cody was the first female Native American archaeologist.

She worked alongside her uncle and father at dig sites across the Southwest.

However, her title was secretary.

She exhibited her findings at the Southwest Museum and wrote for its publication Masterkey, all the while participating in events at the Casa de Adobe.

(dreamy music) Route 66 traverses over 29 tribal lands, and its immediate predecessor in the area was the Atchison, Topeka, Santa Fe Railroad.

(train whistle) Instead of selling land rights to the railroad, Laguna Pueblo traded land access for jobs for pueblo members.

(soft singing, drumming) (Larrilynn) We are celebrating the Laguna Colony Days Festival in Winslow, Arizona.

These are two days of celebrating the Laguna culture, as well as the Laguna colony that was affiliated with the Santa Fe Railroad.

What happened was that the officials over at Santa Fe met with the governor of Laguna and said, "We need your land."

A verbal agreement was struck and it's called The Flower of Friendship.

This was during the 1920s.

So, what happened was, in return for the land being used by the Santa Fe, jobs were distributed among the Laguna people.

So men and women from the Laguna reservation -were relocated.

-Route 66 went right through the city of Winslow, and the Laguna colony was on the west side of town right next to the railroad tracks.

Our boxcars were set up right there, and very nice boxcars, apartments.

My parents were members of the Santa Fe Indian Band.

That was part of the colony.

(Rosemary) Back in the early 1920s, the manager, Charlie Earickson, was with the group and wanted some kind of music being played at the picnic.

So there was a small group that began by just picking up, I believe it was a trumpet, a bass horn, and a dented peck horn.

And so the Santa Fe Railroad just decided that they would be their sponsors for them to be a professional group, to travel coast to coast.

(mellow music) My father, Tony "Lefty" Siow, plays the big drum here.

♪ My mother, Louise Riley Siow, was the band carrier for the Santa Fe Band.

And as a child, I was with them, so I am standing waiting for them on the side here.

My folks bought me a clarinet, and I started the elementary band.

And then when I transferred into the Santa Fe Band, the clarinet had to give that first note and tune 'em up.

Ah, so that's-- I felt that I was important.

We traveled to the pow wows in Flagstaff and Gallup.

In August, there was these pow wows that went on, 'cause we paraded.

And then, in November, we were the host band for the Arizona State Fair, opening day.

I really enjoyed it.

This photo I have in hand was taken in Washington, D.C., in 1952 when we were there for the inauguration of Eisenhower.

It's in front of the Department of the Interior.

We were chosen for the state of Arizona to participate in this band, and I was then only about 13 years old.

And it was a long parade.

It was kind of exciting 'cause it was all Indians and the menfolk started doing the war whoops.

(Denise) When the band went to the Gallup Ceremonial or the Flagstaff Pow Wow or any place to perform, we were right there with them.

And it was such a big influence in my life, that I remember thinking, "When I grow up, I'm gonna learn how to play every one of those instruments."

So I went to college and became a music teacher.

(energetic music) (Ann-Mary) The reason why they put the railroad here was that the 35th parallel was a geographically natural way to get across the country, and so, you know, that's why the Beale Wagon Road was here, then the railroad, then Route 66.

I mean, it has more to do with geography.

Route 66 is primarily known, I think, in people's imaginations, as a tourism center.

But in Winslow and many other towns along the Route, it was also the business or the civic district for the people that lived here.

(JoAn) The La Posada sat right close to the railroad tracks.

So, but it had Highway 66 running around on the other side of it.

But if you came on the train, you definitely had to come in to the Harvey House.

And if you ever came in off the highway, again, you had to park out front and come in that door.

I worked behind the counter.

There was two big horseshoe-type counters, and they all had these beautiful tile tops on, I mean squares of tile.

(narrator) The Fred Harvey Company had a partnership with the Atchison, Topeka, Santa Fe Railroad to provide a fine dining experience to travelers along the railroad.

The Harvey Girls were employed to work as waitstaff.

(Stephen) Of course, you know, the Harvey Girls started, you know, 30 years before women could vote.

So, it's a pretty feminist story at each generation.

So, this has everything from law notices from Fred's family, and then every little story.

You can download these online now, but back then you had to find them, bring them in, the microfilm, to the University of Pennsylvania Library, and take pictures of them.

I mean this is actually from our anniversary, the year the book was done.

I wanted an El Tovar seltzer bottle that says Fred Harvey El Tovar on it.

(narrator) Whimsical ashtrays for numerous smoking clientele were among many things designed by the Fred Harvey Company's lead interior designer and architect, Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter.

Colter drew upon the Southwest and Native American traditions and iconography for inspiration.

(mellow jazz music) (William) I think what's really interesting about Mary Colter is her real focus on trying to bring this idea of what the Southwest should look like to the public.

She's gone through in color palettes and the history and the types of furniture, as well as being able to blend that into something that somebody from back east who's never been out west might be able to understand and see.

(Richard) She had a real sensitivity to the landscape.

She renovated the Painted Desert Inn in some really wonderful ways, namely, she had worked with Fred Kabotie before, and Fred Kabotie, a Hopi muralist, on her invitation, came in and painted several amazing murals that are still on the walls of Painted Desert Inn today.

She was a pretty feisty character, and rightfully so.

She had to probably assert herself.

(mellow piano music) (Elizabeth) El Navajo was a Harvey House hotel in Gallup, New Mexico.

It had a couple of openings, but the second and main opening was in the mid 1920s, before Route 66 was officially completed, but there was still enough of Route 66, from Albuquerque to Gallup, that people came on Route 66 to attend the opening ceremony of this hotel.

The hotel was controversial.

For the interiors of El Navajo, she wanted to give it some authenticity.

She was very charmed by sand paintings, so she commissioned Navajo artists to recreate sand paintings for the walls of the lobby of El Navajo.

A lot of the elders in the Navajo Nation were disapproving of that decision, and they did quite a bit of negotiation.

Finally, they arrived at a compromise where the Harvey Company would invite the Navajos to come and bless the building and do a sacred ritual to bless the paintings so that they could be used -and looked at.

-By a lot of descriptions, she was a hard woman to get along with.

But here's a woman who had to work in a predominantly male area.

She wanted to get things done.

And she chain-smoked cigarettes.

(Virginia) So one thing that Route 66 did for Native peoples was to give them a market for their arts and crafts goods.

So, people like Erna Fergusson, who started a thing called the Indian Detours, automobile tours for tourists that would be led by women guides that would take them to far-flung places in New Mexico where they could purchase Navajo blankets or purchase pueblo pottery.

That kind of thing really had a kind of invigorating effect on the Indian arts and crafts market.

And you think about people like Maria Martinez, who is understood as an innovator in pueblo pottery styles, had a market that she would never otherwise have had, had that road not been built and had those tourists not been coming through.

(narrator) The Fred Harvey Company expanded its reach to accommodate the motoring public by partnering with Erna Fergusson on the Detours.

These excursions departed from Fred Harvey establishments, conveniently positioned near both the railroad and Route 66.

(woman) How many people are we expecting?

(Kathy) Today it is four people.

They're from Arizona.

The first Harvey Car left the Castaneda Hotel in May of 1926.

So a lot of people did come off the highway and visited Las Vegas, because, at that point, it was only six miles off the highway.

And then get into those fabulous Harvey Cars, which were Packards and Cadillacs.

The Packards broke down a lot on the highway because it was pretty rough.

Of course, everyone loves Santa Fe, and that actually became the headquarters for the Indian Detours about six months later.

(lively music) ♪ (Jenny) So, this map that was painted by Gerald Cassidy was used by the Detour couriers, educated women trained in Southwest history and art.

The couriers would sit down and go through the map and show them where they were gonna go, what they were gonna see, how long they were gonna be gone.

And so this was basically today's Google or road map back in the '20s.

(Barbara) Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter did a lot of work at the hotel.

And so what's fascinating about this room is we believe this is one of the most intact rooms left in the hotel.

And so there's old photographs that show the light fixtures.

He actually has sketches showing what these light fixtures should look like.

(Jenny) So, that really was a very watershed moment for tourism changing in the Southwest, and Route 66 was the vehicle, pardon the pun, to have that transition from rail travel into car travel.

(narrator) Not everyone's experience of Route 66 was so pleasant.

For Native American children taken to off-reservation boarding schools, it was very traumatic.

The goal of the schools was not education, but rather eradication of their culture and identity.

(Katherine) I was born and raised on Laguna Pueblo in the house that my grandfather built.

The road, Route 66, ran right through the pueblo itself.

As the cars would turn a certain curve on that road, the light would shine on my face, and I would be awake some nights just to watch those lights on the wall and on my face and wonder where these cars were going.

The day schools in the villages had grades up to sixth grade.

And by the time you were in the seventh grade, then you either had to go to Santa Fe or the Albuquerque Indian School.

And the bus always came to the villages to collect children to go to these schools.

When I boarded the bus in my village of Paguate, my grandmother took me to the school to board the bus.

She carried my little suitcase.

And she was crying when I left.

And I think I cried all the way to Albuquerque.

I did not know where-- exactly where I was going.

And I had no idea when I was going to get back to my home.

Because none of this was ever discussed.

When I got to the boarding school, it was so foreign, living in a dormitory with several hundred other girls and doing everything by the sound of bells.

I had to learn to speak English in a hurry in order to get by.

My language was Keresian, with bits of Spanish.

At the boarding school, they wanted to do away with our language and our culture and our traditions.

And that's the way it was going to be.

And you were punished if you spoke your language.

They actually were trying to make you feel ashamed you were Indian.

I think they did not succeed very well with me because I continued to stay with my traditions, my culture, and my language.

(narrator) As much as it was used for tourism and entrepreneurial activities, Route 66, in its early years, was also frequently the road taken by the uprooted and displaced.

In 1929, the stock market crashed, starting a worldwide economic crisis.

In the Midwest, the Great Depression, combined with drought and dust storm, forced 350,000 people to leave their homes and land behind.

(announcer) For Highway 66, their path of exodus, across mountains and desert to the green promised land, California.

(soft music) (Lyndia) Amarillo was the largest city in the area that became the Dust Bowl.

The surrounding area was farmers.

During the 1920s, this was the first time that mechanized farm equipment began to be used in the Midwest.

By 1930 and 1931, everything was constantly covered in dust, including most of the goods in the fur store, so they had to be kept in cloth bags to keep the dust off.

Mother was Sarah, with an H, Finegold Rubenstein.

It says "Amarillo, Texas, 1932.

I'm five feet tall and weigh 100 pounds."

I love that.

Natural gas was discovered in Amarillo in the 1920s.

It was a wonderful place to open a luxury store.

The mistresses of the oil workers would come in to buy jewelry and a fur coat.

And my grandfather's store was on the main road, downtown Route 66, Polk Street, named for the President.

This was the road that people took as they were going to California.

It was such hard work.

She was in the store seven days a week.

She was dealing with people who didn't have very much money, so that was layaway.

During the summer, she would store fur coats, so when the fall came and it was cold again, she would sell off the coats that had been left without any money.

(narrator) For self-supporting creative women like Sally Rand and Dorothea Lange, life was hard, but they found new ways to support themselves on Route 66 that shaped their lives and legacies.

Rand had tasted success as an actor working for Cecil B. DeMille.

But with the advent of talkies, her career plummeted alongside the stock market.

She found herself without work and headed back home to the Midwest, where she launched her burlesque act at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933.

Despite frequent arrests for indecency, Rand performed her legendary fan dance an estimated 65,000 times.

Lange, on the other hand, took a job documenting the plight of migrants on Route 66 and turned her camera, in particular, on the suffering and heroism of women and girls.

John Steinbeck looked at Lange's photos when he was doing research for his epic novel The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939.

He called Route 66 "the mother road, the road of flight."

After looking at Lange's photo of Florence Thompson, who was originally from the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, near Route 66, Steinbeck wrote Lange a letter.

"Thank you for sending that picture.

Nothing was ever taken that so illustrates the time."

Women who were breadwinners found themselves taking jobs and moving to places that, under ordinary circumstances, they would never have considered.

(Joe) Towns along Route 66 in the Mojave Desert, the climate out there, that's what most people think of when they think of living out there.

It gets extremely hot, and I mean 120, 115 in the summertime.

But the wintertimes can be brutally cold.

Life for the families out there, particularly the women who lived in these communities, was austere.

So their job was cooking, cleaning, and raising all these children.

(soft music) But teachers out there have a special place in my heart.

They were very caring and certainly had to be resilient and resourceful.

When Nellie first arrived in Chubbuck, a small desert mining community, I think she knew what she was getting into.

She was highly educated, but she couldn't find a job.

And I think most of the jobs were being taken by men.

And they offered her this, I think the salary was $100 a month or something like that.

She was recently widowed before she came out there.

(soft music) She lived in the school in one room that was adjacent to the school, divided from the classroom by a curtain, with her two boys and a dog.

(narrator) A high percentage of the families living in the desert communities along Route 66 were Latinos seeking refuge in the desert from the mass deportations of Mexican Americans that occurred in the 1930s.

(Luz) During the Depression, it was very difficult.

We had a man from Prescott come with a big truck with food for the poor people.

Well, Augustine and I went and just-- we lived not too far from the store where the truck was.

He rubbed his little hands together and said, "Come on, Luz, let's go get some food.

We're gonna surprise Mom and take her some ham."

Well, he got up to the truck, he's just a little boy, I think about ten, nine, ten years old.

And he got up to the truck and he put his little hands up to get a piece-- to get a piece of ham.

The man said, "You're Mexican, I can't give you any food."

(somber music) Augustine and I were so sorry that we couldn't take Mother a piece of ham.

(jazz music) We went--we walked home, just very, very sad.

But we had other things that topped that.

The Delgadillo Dance Band was well-known.

Smoke and we were very dedicated.

And we produced good music.

Dance music.

(laughing) My brother, Juan, started a band in the '30s in (inaudible).

I come from a family of 11.

And he took all the younger brothers and sisters and taught us music.

He was with a band in Ash Fork, playing with Hank Bedcur.

And he'd take me with him, and he said, "Luz, I just want you to watch the piano player and don't move and watch him."

And I said, "Watch what?"

He said, "Watch his hands.

See what he does with his hands."

So, for all the rehearsal hours, I watched Mr. Bedcur's hands.

♪ The house I grew up on was on the original Route 66.

Practiced in the living room, and in that living room, you could hear the sound of a bunch of kids.

Charles was the manager.

He'd come in and say, "You know what?

There's a bunch of cars listening to your music."

We played for prom dances, graduation.

Any activity, anything that went on in Seligman, Ash Fort, Williams, Flagstaff, Prescott, Winslow.

And we traveled all Route 66 in an old Dodge car.

And we were never late to a dancing gag, we were never late.

Set up before nine, be ready to play the first tune, the first notes at nine, and we'll take 15-minute break about 11, and then get back on the dancefloor, on the stage, and play till one.

Well, sometimes we didn't get home till 3:00 in the morning.

Well, my dear mother never went to sleep.

She'd meet us to the back door of the kitchen and just say: "Ah, gracias a Dios llegaron."

She'd say, "Thank God you're here."

Didn't know it then, we knew after what we had done, we didn't know we were getting over those barriers, we didn't realize that.

We were too busy entertaining.

(narrator) For many travelers on Route 66 who were California bound, out of necessity or for pleasure, a rest stop after crossing the high desert was a much-needed relief.

The city of San Bernardino was the entry-point into the Los Angeles Basin.

And Route 66 created a thriving environment -for business.

-My name is Irene Montaño, and I'm the daughter-in-law of Lucia Rodriguez, who was the original owner of Mitla Cafe.

Lucia didn't have a formal education.

She came from Mexico with her husband, she had her children, she didn't speak English, but she could tally up totals of math in her head like nobody's business.

Her husband was working at Santa Fe at the railroad, and she started the Mitla.

She was here at 4:00 in the morning working.

I think--and I think at that time they were open 24 hours a day.

Route 66 really propelled this already growing and developing Mexican community and made it a much more diverse community in that it allowed Mexican Americans to become merchants.

(Patti) My grandmother was a very strong lady, and because she knew what it was to go without food for several days, that she didn't want her children going through that.

And, therefore, she was gonna open a restaurant and make sure that the kids were fed whenever they wanted to eat.

(jazz music) ♪ She brought her daughters to work with her, and to help her, so it was all women.

And my mother, Vera, only had an eighth grade education, but she, I think, followed in my grandmother's footsteps, where she was an entrepreneur, she knew how to run the business, she knew books, she knew money, she--and she was very, very good at it.

(Mark) San Bernardino was typical of other Southwestern communities at the time.

There was segregation within schools for Mexican children, segregation within public recreational spaces.

The Mitla Cafe promoted community identity, especially one that was Mexican, one that was ethnic, one that was instilling pride into the residents of these neighborhoods.

Not only that, it was also an inter-ethnic space in that white patrons were coming in and introducing themselves to Mexican culture, Mexican food, and Mexican people as well.

So, it was this space that challenged segregationist practices.

(Irene) In the 1950s, Glen Bell had a local stand across the street from here, and he used to come in and have tacos.

And he--he really liked 'em and he wanted to know how they were made.

So my father-in-law accommodated him -and took him in the back.

-When I started working, I would see him come in for breakfast before he went to his little hot dog stand.

Lucia, she taught you how to do it and she expected you to do it the way she taught you.

That's the right way to do it.

So, a little after that, he moved away from there.

He sold his little hot dog stand and he went to start his Taco Bell empire, I guess you'd call it.

The automobile opened up worlds for women.

It's been dubbed "automobility," and it's allowed women to break out of their traditional roles.

(John) Darlene was a woman from my hometown.

And she wanted to go to college, and her father just didn't think, in 1930, that a girl needed to go to college.

And so he made her a counteroffer that if she would go to beauty school and stay at home, he would pay for beauty school and he would buy her a car.

Darlene began to invite friends to go on summer vacations with her.

Over the period of nine years, there were 20 different young women, all single, who ended up going on the vacation.

Gypsy Coed became a name that they adopted in about 1940, '41, and it stuck with them for the rest of the time.

The top on the car had been destroyed and they went to an awning shop and bought awning remnants, and they stitched them together to make the top of the car.

So when they put the top of the car up, they looked at it and they said, "This kind of looks like a gypsy wagon."

(Kaisa) So how did they meet Henry Ford?

(John) Well, the girls were camping in Wisconsin and Devil's Lake.

Some of the boys that were camping next to them looked at the Silver Streak, and they said, "This coming weekend, they're having a big 75th birthday party for Henry in Dearborn, Michigan."

And Darlene called all the girls together at the campfire that night and said, "We're breaking camp in the morning.

We're gonna go to Detroit and we're gonna wish Henry Ford a happy birthday."

And I think when the girls came-- pulled up at his front door in this vehicle, it just gave him a lot of satisfaction.

"You know, that old Model T of mine, it really keeps running."

(Kaisa) That 1940 trip was a trip from Illinois to California -on Route 66.

-That's right.

Yes, it was.

They got on Route 66 at Bloomington, Illinois, and they actually got off at Amarillo to go down to Carlsbad Cavern.

They stayed in country schoolyards and country churchyards, because, typically, they had an outdoor pump and they had outhouses.

(Kaisa) Now, traveling at 35 miles per hour, how long did it take them?

(John) The diary that was kept said six and a half weeks or 13 flat tires, whichever way you wanted to count.

On many of the trips, there were six girls.

Now look around here and tell me how six girls got in this car with their suitcases on the side.

It's a very basic car, rudimentary, I like to say.

(car door opens) (Kaisa) All right.

California bound?

(John laughs) (engine starts) (John) When they got into Oklahoma, they had a major engine problem and they struggled with that all the way to the West Coast.

And finally the car quit altogether and-- 75 miles outside of San Francisco.

They had to get towed into the city.

Ford came and got the car, took it to their plant, and overhauled it while the girls were at the Golden Gate Exhibition.

-Is that right?

-Yeah.

-Let's go!

-Let's go.

It has a couple of horns.

(beeps horn) (jaunty piano music) ♪ (narrator) In the 1940s, World War II and Route 66 opened up new opportunities for women in the workplace.

(announcer) They're holding down man-size jobs and handling those jobs with comparable skills.

(piano music) ♪