Angel Delgadillo and the Resurrection of Route Sixty-Six

By the spring of nineteen eighty-seven, Interstate Forty had bypassed Seligman for nearly a decade. The interstate had won. The trucks and tourists and cross-country drivers who had once made Seligman a going concern were gone, routed around the town on a highway that didn't slow down for anyone. Businesses on the old road were closing. The town's population was declining. Route Sixty-Six, the road Steinbeck had called the Mother Road, looked like it was going to end as a footnote.

Angel Delgadillo was a barber in Seligman. His family had been there for generations. He had cut hair on Route Sixty-Six his entire working life, watched the traffic thin out year by year as the interstate crept closer, and watched it disappear almost entirely after nineteen seventy-eight, when the interstate bypass around Seligman was complete. In February of nineteen eighty-seven, he organized a meeting of Route Sixty-Six business owners at the Seligman Chamber of Commerce. A few dozen people showed up. By the end of the meeting, they had formed the Historic Route Sixty-Six Association of Arizona.

What happened next was not inevitable. Preservation movements fail all the time. But this one caught. The Arizona association reached out to similar groups in other states. An eight-state coalition formed. Articles were written. Travelers who had grown up on the road started coming back to see what was left of it. In nineteen ninety, Congress passed the Route Sixty-Six Study Act, which began the process of formally recognizing the highway's historical significance. The eventual National Register listing of sections of the route brought federal attention and tourist infrastructure.

Angel's barbershop, which he converted into a gift shop, became a pilgrimage destination. Visitors from dozens of countries pinned their business cards to the walls. The man most responsible for creating the global Route Sixty-Six travel brand was a barber who never left his small town.