This will sadden a lot of fried-chicken eaters in the Chicagoland area — Doris Mae Hastert, owner of White Fence Farm on Route 66 in Lemont and a longtime greeter at the restaurant’s front door, died at age 93 on Monday.

White Fence Farm has been an area institution for about 50 years. It seats more than 1,000 people, and Hastert reportedly was there greeting people as recently as three weeks ago. I lived in northern Illinois nearly 15 years ago, and I heard about Doris Mae and her restaurant even then on WLS-AM commercials.

Here’s an excellent obituary in the Chicago Tribune, including a history of the restaurant and funeral information.

(Thanks to Lynn “Lulu” Bagdon for the tip.) 

The Route 66 ARTScrawl will be held Friday from 5 to 9 p.m. For details, go here.

(via Duke City Fix)

Because “Once Upon a Highway: Route 66 in Oklahoma” (162 pages, New Forums, $36.95) is written and illustrated by an architect, you would expect drawings of intricately designed buildings, such as the Coleman Theatre Beautiful and the First United Methodist Church in Clinton, that latter which was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright.

But what makes John Calvin Womack’s book special is he also shows everyday sights along the Mother Road in the Sooner State — a chat pile, barns, grain elevators, bridges (such as the Rock Creek Bridge near Sapulpa, below), railroad trestles and abandoned houses. It’s obvious he loves all facets of Route 66, not just the neat and pretty stuff.

In the forward, Womack says he became interested in Route 66 in 1971 when he first saw the Round Barn in Arcadia during a drive from Edmond to Chandler. As he studied the Mother Road over the years, he admired it for its “vernacular” architecture — buildings designed by locals with functionality in mind. He also liked the old road’s authenticity — many modern-day designs, he says, seem fake or forced into its settings.

The 150 or so pen-and-ink drawings are finely detailed. You see the Art Deco details of well-preserved structures such as the Will Rogers Hotel in Claremore and the Farmers Market Building in Tulsa. But you also see the weeds growing up around a long-closed service station south of Afton. You see the rotting boards of a now-demolished church in Arcadia.

Although most the drawings were done in past few years, several of the sites are already gone. Among the departed are the Daily Ranch and Buffalo Ranch of Afton, the 66 Motel of Tulsa, the Sanders Camera Shop of Edmond and the Yukon Motel sign (seen above). The loss of the Yukon is particularly galling to Womack. It was one of his favorite signs on Route 66, “but of all the signs I have studied, photographed and sketched, this is the one sign that has been taken down and removed — and was replaced with a bland, generic sign of a national motel chain. It is rumored that the original sign was shipped to somewhere in Virginia.”

Each illustration contains a well-researched, brief history. Unlike other Route 66 books I’ve read, I can’t find any factual errors. The book’s format also includes photographs of other sights along the road and nuggets of Mother Road history.

“Once Upon a Highway: Route 66 in Oklahoma” is a worthy addition to a roadie’s library. As a bonus, it comes with a translucent dust cover that marks it as one of the publisher’s Oklahoma Centennial Collector Series.

Stater Bros., a grocery chain based on Southern California, is marking its 70th year. The San Bernardino Sun published a story about the chain’s history and interviewed its CEO, Jack Brown.

This story is going on Route 66 News because Stater Bros. is the major sponsor of the Route 66 Rendezvous. In fact, the event receives prominent mention in the story:

Brown and Stater Bros. strive to present the supermarket chain as a “hometown” business, and Husing said one example of the chain’s local presence can be seen through its sponsorship of the Route 66 Rendezvous, an annual car show and celebration in San Bernardino. Businesses whose local executives have to answer to bosses in distant cities often do not make the same kind of local connections as Stater Bros. and companies from the past, Husing said.

“Those folks aren’t vested in the community. They’re vested in the corporate structure,” he said.

Route 66 researcher Carl Johnson sent me this excerpt about the Shakey’s Pizza chain that was published recently in the Springfield (Ill.) Journal-Register (I no longer have the link, as it’s gone into a fee-based archive):

Shakey’s Restaurant, 2441 S. MacArthur Blvd., is changing its name to Diamond’s Buffet Restaurant.  Shakey’s USA is going to a new concept, focusing on sit-down, order-from-the-menu restaurants, that don’t include buffets.  But local owner Dale Diamond wants to keep the buffet concept in Springfield.

At one time, Shakey’s had more than 275 restaurants.  Now there are fewer than 25, mostly in California.

 

“Only three buffet restaurants were left, all in the Midwest,” Diamond said.  ‘The new owners want to be identified as a pizza parlor rather than a buffet.  And they want to make all the Shakey’s the same.

 

“I can’t make my restaurant into a sit-down restaurant.  So as of Sept. 1, I’ll no longer be a Shakey’s franchise.”

 

Diamond hopes only the name will change.

There’s a slew of Shakey’s restaurants in California, including at least one on Route 66 in Arcadia. But the one in Springfield was the last survivor in Illinois. I remember there being one in Decatur; as my family would sometimes take me there and we’d hear a live ragtime band perform on the premises. Very cool.