I took this off the Oklahoma Route 66 Association site and added info and links where applicable:

The Roger Miller Festival will be Oct. 22 in Erick, Okla. While you’re there, go see the Roger Miller Museum to honor the “King of the Road” and visit the Sandhills Curiosity Shop for music and goofy comedy. The contact number at Erick is Glenda West at 580-526-3332.

The Oklahoma Route 66 Association is having its quarterly meeting at 2 p.m. Oct. 23 at the Oklahoma Tourism Information Center at I-35 at 122nd in Oklahoma City.

The deadline for a photography contest sponsored by the association and the Route 66 Museum in Clinton, Okla., is Nov. 1. Photos must be taken between Jan. 1, 2005, and the deadline. Categories include roadside scene, historic landmark, animals and events. Call Marilyn Emde at 405-258-0008 at the association or the museum at 580-323-7866.

UPDATE: I just received a letter from the Missouri Route 66 Association. It is having a meeting Nov. 5 at 12:30 p.m. at Granny Shaffer’s Restaurant at 2728 North Range Line Road in Joplin. A mail-in registration form can be found here. 

Tulsa author Michael Wallis, author of the best-sellling “Route 66: The Mother Road,” is about to begin production on the “American Road” television series. There will be 13 half-hour episodes about scenic highways, including Route 66.

It will be shot by Pro Video Productions of Duluth, Minn. It will air on PBS.

If any of you readers are in the Great Lakes area, and the production team will have a booth at the National Scenic Byways Conference in Cleveland on Oct. 16-19.

UPDATE: Deleted reference to Wallis being at the conference. His production team will be, however. 

The Illinois Department of Transportation is replacing a 1925 bridge in Pontiac, Ill., on old Route 4, which is a precursor to Route 66. The agency took considerable pains to make sure the new bridge looks like the old one. This story here explains it nicely. The construction is estimated to be finished by winter.

The newspaper had no photo of the bridge, but I’m almost certain it’s the one on this Illinois Route 66 Association document here. It’s listed about halfway down, listed under Pontiac, Ill. Preservationists John and Lenore Weiss showed it to us one day.

It looks like there’s a theatre in Seattle that’s putting on a production of “The Grapes of Wrath,” based on the John Steinbeck novel of impoverished Okies trying to find a better life, any life, down Route 66 to California. A review of the production is here. The interesting part is that the play’s ending more closely follows the book. Here is the theatre where “The Grapes of Wrath” is running, until Nov. 13.

Tulsa County voters in 2003 approved the Vision 2025 sales tax for massive capital improvements. One of those improvements was to the county’s length Route 66, to the tune of $15 million.

To put that in perspective, the Route 66 Corridor Act approved by Congress in the late 1990s was authorized for just $10 million over 10 years. And the Corridor Act has been given a fraction of that money, less than $500,000 annually for each year but one. Vision 2025 money dwarfs all other Route 66 government projects. So it’s fair to say that Vision 2025 gained a fair amount of attention in the Route 66 community.

For months, I’ve heard a lot of insider chatter about Vision 2025 and Tulsa Route 66, but few specifics. And I’ve heard the final recommendations for what will be done and what won’t are reaching a critical point.

It’s worthwhile to look over the early days of planning a big project to see how it proceeds. So I obtained a copy of the “Vision 2025 Route 66 Enhancements and Promotion Master Plan of Development.” The research for the report was done by the Littlefield marketing firm. Not only were Route 66 advocates interviewed during the research, but so were locals and regular people as far away as St. Louis, Kansas City and Dallas. The survey sought opinions on what might attract them to Route 66 in Tulsa.

One thing that stuck out in the survey results is that a “generation chasm” may hamper future interest in Route 66. Anyone born after the final baby-boom year of 1964 “sees this highway as an old, worn-out piece of technology,” the report said. So Littlefield and Vision 2025 figured they had a tough job on their hands — make Tulsa’s Mother Road appeal not only to more receptive folks like baby boomers and hardcore Route 66ers, but also spark interest to the more skeptical, young, tech-savvy travelers.

Here are the guidelines in the Route 66 plan, some of which are paraphrased:

– Celebrate the county’s Route 66 heritage
— Eventually restore the historic 11th Street Bridge
— “Create an urban energy — (Generation) Xers want a cool downtown, where Route 66 runs right through.”
— Foster creativity (especially through artists)
— Create memories through food and entertainment
— “Make it hip — in the era of iPods and blogs, Route 66 desperately needs a cool factor”
— “Inspire — Let visitors discover the magic for themselves”
— “Think BIG — better to do one thing right than lots of little things wrong”
— “Create life — Let’s plant the seeds for new life along 66 … A crossroads of America … Where old meets new, east meets west, history meets the future, comfort meets nouveau cuisine and tradition meets change.”

I think the researchers did their homework and made sound conclusions. Yes, they loaded with master plan with buzzwords. But speaking from experience, a generation gap does exist with Route 66, and I generally agree with those findings.

However, retro styles remain popular with the young as well as the old. Then there’s the “it’s so square, it’s hip” factor. Then there’s the valued rap motto of “keepin’ it real.”

Route 66 is square, and it’s real. To sterilize or Disney-fy it would ruin it. I’m not saying Vision 2025 would necessarily do this, but they should be cautious about trying too hard to capture the youth market and alter Route 66 into something unrecognizable.

Next on Part 2: a look at the Tulsa Route 66 proposals and their costs.

The Western swing group just finished playing in Oklahoma City. The last two journal entries are here and here.