Angel Delgadillo and the Day Seligman Woke Up

On September twenty-second, nineteen seventy-eight, Interstate Forty opened its final bypass around Seligman, Arizona, and the traffic on Route Sixty-Six through town dropped by ninety percent in a matter of weeks. Motels that had filled every room during summer driving season began leaving vacancy signs on year-round. Diners closed. Gas stations closed. The population of Seligman, never large, began to shrink.

Angel Delgadillo had been born in Seligman in nineteen twenty-seven. His family had run the Snow Cap Drive-In on Route Sixty-Six. He himself was a barber, operating a shop on the main street, the same main street that cars no longer traveled in any number. He watched the town empty over the next several years and decided that doing nothing was not an option.

On February eighteenth, nineteen eighty-seven, he organized a meeting in his barber shop and founded the Arizona Historic Route Sixty-Six Association. He then wrote letters, made phone calls, and reached out to Route Sixty-Six preservation groups in other states. Within months, he had helped launch the national Route Sixty-Six preservation movement. The Historic Route Sixty-Six Association of America followed. The state of Arizona designated its surviving Route Sixty-Six alignment as a historic highway. Other states followed.

What Delgadillo understood, before most people in highway planning or preservation did, was that Route Sixty-Six was not merely obsolete infrastructure. It was a cultural object, and cultural objects can have economic lives independent of their original function. The motels in Seligman today are full. The Snow Cap Drive-In serves customers from Germany and Japan who have made a pilgrimage to a highway they read about before they could drive one.

Angel Delgadillo has been called the father of Route Sixty-Six preservation. He spent his career in a barber shop on a road the country forgot, and he reminded it.