Birthday february 23rd of this year. Swre the original handwritten lyrics on display. While most people recognize the song as a sing along from our Elementary School days, usually they didnt involve singing the fourth and the sixth verses which were much more a social commentary about how things really could be improved in our society. Yes, woody thought we had a beautiful land and he paints this gorgeous landscape of the things that he saw as he traveled from coast to coast. But he also wants to point out about things about the people and how were treating the people and how we should be taking care of each other better. There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me sign was painted, said private property but on the back side it didnt say nothing this land was made for you and me the idea of a land owner seeing people who were starving outside this beautiful land that he had and saying no, you have to keep out, this is private property didnt really go along with what woody thought demonstrated our beautiful country and what we have to offer our citizens. This land was made for you and me i think its important to note that woody was a class warrior in a day that so many artists were not. He was the person who gave a voice to the voiceless. The fog was lifting, this land was made for you and me my book ruth 66 the mother road came out in 1990. I wrote that book because i was totally inspired by the fact that people kept talking about route 66 in the past tense. And i knew full well that 85 of the road is still here between chicago and santa monica, through all eight states. And some stretches are even better than ever. So i wrote that book unabash edly as a love let tore the road and more importantly to the people of the road. Route 66, eight states, three time zones 2400plus miles chicago to santa monica. The urban experience is far different of course than it would be out in say, the high desert of new mexico or arizona, or the panhandle or texas or the ozarks or missouri or even farm lands of Central Illinois where the road its wide open, you know. In there its really and when it goes through a small town, or wherever its still main street in that town. But here its urban. So what youll see on 11th street, aka route 66 in tulsa, traditionally there were a lot of things related to the road such as automotive businesses garages, some small motels but you dont necessarily see the catch traveller Tourist Attractions that youll see out in the country like the Worlds Largest totem pole or the blue whale or the natural sights like the Painted Desert or the petrified fosh rest. So across the street you have this Public School and you have all of the route 66 states up there, americas main street around the corner. Tallys, road warriors come from all over the world to eat. Just a great place. Youre going the see businesses like this on this stretch that have, if nothing else, have put route 66 on their sign, you know, be it a car wash or a used car lot or a Sandwich Shop or something. So now weve had the city of tulsa come out and sort of fix up the intersection a bit. Well right now were at the centennial plaza. We at the incredibly important point on route 66 an important spot for the city of tulsa really. This plaza is dedicated to route 66 and especially to a man, an adopted tu lx san like me named cyrus avery. Who we consider the father of route 66. Thats cyrus avery behind me in that ford with his wife and his daughter. And hes driving along this new road that hell helped to create that was unveiled in 1926. And hes come across a teamster coming out of the oil patch hauling pipe and crude with his pup. And the horse is startled by the ford not used to seeing it coming down the road. And it represents the old and the new meeting. And thats why this point is so important here to the city and to the road. Because this is where we call east meets west. Right here on the banks of the arkansas river. This is where it all happened for tulsa. Cyrus Stevens Avery was its often overused but he really was a renaissance man. He was born in pennsylvania. He came to missouri as a young man with his family went to William Jewel college came down into old indian territory, lived for a while up in a route 66 town. But essentially we associate him in his adult life with tulsa where he became very important civic and business leader. But most of all he believed in roads. He liked roads. And he came along at a time when we were having the good roads movement. We were starting to get more and more automobiles and then henry ford came along with his Assembly Line and made automobiles that everybody could afford. A teamster could buy one a farmer could buy one, a schoolteacher could buy one. So people took to the road. They werent just play toys of the rich anymore. Everyone had to get a car. Its where americas love affair with the eternal combustible engine began. I dont think that affair has ever ended, sometimes much to my dismay. The point is we didnt have paved roads. So the people like avery got involved in this good roads movement. He became a highway commissioner and they tried to get as many roads, dirt roads paved as possible. Of course his biggest triumph was route 66 which came along in 1926 when we were building longer roads interstate roads. And thats what happened with route 66. Its a road that connected chicago, ran through down through the state of illinois, across the mississippi into st. Louis, down the ozark plateau nipped the corner of kansas came right across this state more miles than any other state, 410 going and blowing to the texas line, across the panhandle through northern new mexico Northern Arizona into the great mo has vi of california, up to barstow, took a left, sand bern dino and then all the way to pasadena, down through hollywood to santa monica to the pacific ocean. 2400plus miles, eight states, three time zones. Americas main street was born. I think the best way to look at route 66 is to look at the time period, the layers of the road the different generations of the road that came to be from 1926 to this very day. So it was a road that was born, if you will when the nation was between wars and on the wagon, the roaring 20s, the time of great stunts, flagpole sitting, marathon dancing with the charleston bootleg booze. So when the dirty 30s hit, socalled because it was the onetwo punch of Great Depression and the dust bowl out in this part of the country, really west of us, thats when the road began paying its dues. Thats when it earned the moniker that John Stein Beck gave it in his novel the grapes of wrath in 1939. It was the name i choose for the subtitle of my book, route 66, the mother road. It took in the migrants from western oklahoma, the texas panhandle, the Southern Plains and in this part of the country took in broken tenant farmers unemployed. And they got on the road and they headed west following the scent of orange blossoms and lemons, going to work in the fields in california where they were met with ridicule and clobbered with billy clubs and spit on by border guards. And generally degraded and reviled as okies or ar kis from arkansas. When in truth that word okie should have been and still is a badge of courage. Because it stood and still stands for the resiliency of these oklahoma people. And it transitioned right into the next incarnation, the war years. Even before we got in the war on route 66 and other places in this country, we were training troops to take on the axis. Up in oklahoma on route 66 we trained young british erica debts, 18, 19 years old to fight flash spit fires in the battle of britain. Some of them died in air stents up there. If you go up there today in the graveyard, youll see graves of young airmen who will be 19 years old forever with a union flag by each gravestone. Out in western oklahoma ft. Reno the graves of young germanitalian soldiers who died there of their wounds in a p. O. W. Camp during the war. General patent training his desert warriors to take on north africa. And thats who supplied the prisoners for the prison camps the captured troops from north africa, from italy, from sicily. It was a remarkable time because on the road there wasnt civilian traffic. We were not making automobiles for civilians. There was tire rationing gasoline rationing. The whole nation was involved in the war and so was route 66 filled with troop convoys or gis hitchhiking home for one last visit before getting shipped out. The war ended 1945 and what happened . America had prosperity of course. And the gis came home. And where did they come home to . They came home to the gi bill that they got to go to college they got to buy a house at a good rate