presiding commissioner of Tulsa County, where he oversaw the development of the 11th Street bridge. He also worked with the Ozark Trails Association and served as vice president.
Avery was appointed Oklahoma state highway commissioner in 1924, and soon thereafter he was appointed to a board of highway officials tasked with developing a national highway system. This led to the creation of U. S. Route 66 – a federal highway linking Chicago to Los Angeles using existing roadways.
Joining forces with John Woodruff, Avery cofounded the U. S. 66 Highway Association in 1927 to market the highway and encourage travelers to use it. The association advertised the road in magazines, describing it as“ the shortest, best, and most scenic route from Chicago through St. Louis to Los Angeles,” and with attractions like the 1928 Bunion Derby, a footrace from Los Angeles to New York City that followed Route 66 to Chicago.
Avery also worked to support his adopted town of Tulsa, helping to develop an airport, a park, a public water system,
and more, while also running his family’ s farm and staying active in politics. He died in Los Angeles on July 2, 1963.
John Steinbeck: Author of The Grapes of Wrath
Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, John Steinbeck became one of America’ s most notable authors. During his career, we wrote 33 books, including Of Mice and Men( 1937), Cannery Row( 1945), and East of Eden( 1952), and he won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature“ for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception.”
Steinbeck’ s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award, is considered his masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. Set during the Great Depression, the novel follows the Joad family, tenant farmers forced to leave their Oklahoma home after drought, financial hardship, changing farming practices, and bank foreclosures leave them with nowhere to turn. Like thousands of other displaced families, they head west on Route 66 in an overloaded, dilapidated truck, hoping to find work, rebuild their lives, and discover a better future in California.
Steinbeck’ s vivid description of Route 66 in The Grapes of Wrath established one of the
road’ s most enduring nicknames, the“ Mother Road”:
Highway 66 is the main migrant road. 66 – the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down the map, from Mississippi to Bakersfield – over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the Divide and down into the bright and terrible desert, and across the desert to the mountains again, and into the rich California valleys. … 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.
Steinbeck took a bit of artistic license with this description. Route 66 never passed through Bakersfield, which is situated in the lower part of California’ s San Joaquin Valley, a vast agricultural area in the center of the state that was the ultimate destination for many Dust Bowl migrants. Route 66 passed far to the south of Bakersfield, across the Mojave Desert through towns like Needles, Amboy, Baker, Barstow, and Victorville before descending through Cajon Pass and making its way through the Los Angeles basin to the Pacific. The Joad family would have departed Route 66 at Barstow and taken the branch highway U. S. Route 466( present- day California Route 58) north over Tehachapi Pass to reach the San Joaquin Valley.
Such a deviation notwithstanding, Steinbeck’ s widely read and beloved novel helped imprint Route 66 – the Mother Road – onto the American psyche.
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