Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 15, 1990                   TAG: 9004150324
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: F-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By ELLEN KNICKMEYER ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE:    HYDRO, OKLA.                                LENGTH: Medium

ROUTE 66 GETS ITS KICKS BY AVOIDING THE GENERIC LABEL

Eula Mae Brown, 67, remembers when it was something to have the traveler perched on the Nehi icebox at her father's Hydro station turn out to be from the East Coast.

"I always found it just exciting," Brown said. "Some of the people who talked a different dialect would amuse me so."

Now the people who pull up to the pumps under the station's old-fashioned clapboard overhang talk with British accents, Australian accents.

They ask Lucille Hamons to autograph her photograph in a glossy book on Route 66 that confirms her status as living history. Hamons has run the station since her husband took it over in 1941, 14 years after Brown's father built it.

Hamons sells sandwiches and soft drinks from her gas station, and since 1966 also has sold what she calls the coldest beer in Oklahoma.

"You know who will be coming here next, don't you? It'll be the Japanese," Hamons says, anticipating the next wave of tourists on the highway that ran from Chicago to the West Coast.

Tulsa writer Michael Wallis said he already has seen Japanese among the tourists and filmmakers at barbecue joints and cafes along Route 66 this year. Four independent filmmakers are working on documentaries about the highway, he said.

St. Martin's Press is due to publish Wallis' own book about the road this spring. Wallis plans to tool down 66 in a 1964 Corvette to promote it.

Route 66 crosses eight states and three time zones, starting at the shores of Lake Michigan in Illinois. It makes its winding, wooded way south from the lake, and from Oklahoma City on makes a pretty straight shot through the Western Plains and desert, over the Rocky Mountains, and through arid country again to the beach at Santa Monica.

It opens to four lanes in spots, but is mainly a two-lane highway with curbs and curves that used to send Packards and Plymouths spinning off the road and into tree trunks.

Legislation is under way to make all 2,400 miles a national monument. This winter, Kansas became the eighth and final state to establish a Route 66 association, devoted to the 12 miles that hook through its territory, Wallis said.

Oklahoma tourism is catching on. Promoters plan a Route 66 car rally and a Mr. and Mrs. Route 66 contest this summer. Businesses are capitalizing on the "Route 66" moniker to sell everything from art to antiques.

Oklahoma could capitalize on Route 66 retaining more of its old feel than it does in some other states, Wallis said.

Oklahoma also happens to be the only state that earned a qualitative statement in a song listing the cities lining Route 66 (" . . . Saint Louey Joplin Missouri, And Oklahoma City is mighty pretty. . . . ").

Bobby Troup thought up the song as he drove out to California when he got out of the service. Pop singer Michael Martin Murphy is putting it through its 25th recording, Wallis said.

It's a song about getting your nostalgia kicks on Route 66.

"But this is a case where nostalgia has really symbolized the best of something," Wallis said. "It's still a corridor of America that's not generic."

"It's an America that's before fax machines and fern bars, before the malling of America," he said. "I remember when it was an adventure, starting when Dad used to back the Plymouth down the highway."

Today, Hamons sells Route 66 T-shirts, coffee mugs and refrigerator magnets along with beer. But business is not the most important thing to her. "It's what you've seen, and who you've come to know," she said. "To me, that's 66. It's not so much a money-making deal. It's just memories."