Growing up, my favorite television series was Route 66. I never really knew where Route 66 went but I rarely missed an episode, and never on purpose. All I had to do was hear the Theme from Route 66 to get in the mood for adventure.
Todd Stiles and Buzz Murdoch were my heroes. Buzz always got the girl and Todd always got a broken heart but whatever happened they faced it with a sense of adventure and élan.
Todd and Buzz were Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. I’m not sure who was which (or maybe which was who). One thing I do know, that lusty red Corvette was their faithful steed that carried them into battle.
The highway known to the faithful as the Mother Road bisects Oklahoma and is only a mile from where I live, Edmond’s 2nd Street. If you travel east, you will soon reach the little town of Arcadia where the main attraction was once the Round Barn. Now it is a café and filling station named Pop’s. The café features hundreds, maybe thousands of different sodas from around the world. The same billionaire oilman that owns an interest in Oklahoma’s new NBA franchise owns Pop’s.
If you head south on the Broadway Extension (along the old path of Route 66) out of Edmond you’ll be taking the same historic road many Okies used when moving to California during the Dust Bowl. The landscape is still fairly green from lots of spring rain but later on, in the dog days of August when the grass is dead and dust devils are twisting along the highway, it’s won’t be hard to imagine a ghostly procession moving slowly along the road with you.
Marilyn and I were in a local restaurant when two men sat across from us at the oblong bar. They were well into their second Budweiser when they asked the bartender about Route 66. The young man shook his head and pointed them to a wall in back where they had a few pictures. Even though he had lived in Edmond all his life he proclaimed to know little about Route 66.
The bartender’s statement got me thinking about what else we don’t know about important things that are right under our noses.
With my fiction writer brain working overtime, I wondered if the two men were sons of Todd and Buzz. Maybe I wasn’t so far off. They left the restaurant just before Marilyn and me. As we climbed into our car, I watched as the back of a gorgeous 1960 Corvette disappeared around a darkened corner. Yes, it was fire engine red.
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