Father of Route 66: The Story of Cy Avery by Susan Croce Kelly (review)

Generations of Americans knew Route 66 as the “Mother Road” that connected Chicago to Los Angeles via St. Louis, Tulsa, Amarillo, and a host of other southwestern cities and towns. Starting in the 1920s, the road became significant for its role in transporting motoring travelers and migrants westward to California. As Susan Croce Kelly shows in Father of Route 66, the road did not create itself. Rather, progressive Tulsa oilman Cyrus “Cy” Avery was a major figure in planning and shaping the route. A straightforward yet lively account of Avery’s life, this book is a valuable resource for those interested in the history of the early-1900s “good roads” movement, Great Plains progressivism, and Route 66.

Cyrus Avery was born in Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna valley in 1871, just six years after the Civil War. In 1884 his father moved the family to what was then Indian Territory. By 1904, Cy had graduated from William Jewell College near Kansas City and formed the Avery Oil and Gas Company in Vinita, Oklahoma. In 1907, the twenty-six-year-old moved his family to Tulsa, a city that was positioning itself to be “the financial, business, and transportation center for those oil fields” (18). Avery became a land speculator, snatching up Native American allotments, as well as a real estate developer. He developed parts of Tulsa’s African-American Greenwood neighborhood and even contributed land for city parks and the municipal airport. Avery was also instrumental in implementing the Spavinaw Water Project, which brought good drinking water to Tulsa in the early 1920s.

Most significantly, Avery was a major proponent of the movement to build good, paved roads that would connect far-flung cities and towns. A “joiner” and “promoter” (38), he never missed a chance to spread his highway gospel. Avery was a member of the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) and was elected president of the Associated Highways of America (AHA) in 1922. Through such organizations, Avery pressed federal, state, and local governments to fund highway improvements. While serving as Oklahoma highway commissioner in 1924 he promoted a law that implemented one of the nation’s earliest gasoline taxes for funding roads. In 1925 and 1926, Avery helped plan the original interstate highway routes authorized by the 1921 Federal Aid Highway Act. A particularly fascinating chapter in Father of Route 66 details the lengthy debates and negotiations that ended up giving the road the famous designation “66”—rather than the round “60” (which Avery had initially preferred) or the less sonorous “62,” which was favored by factions that wanted “60” to designate the trans-continental highway that passed from Virginia Beach to California via Kentucky.

This is a thoroughly researched biography. Kelly has dug deeply into Avery’s manuscript collection at Oklahoma State University–Tulsa, as well as papers located elsewhere in Oklahoma, Missouri, and the National Archives. She successfully places Avery’s life and work in historical context. At times the book does tend to slip into hagiography, with the author implying that no other person could have made Route 66 into a reality. Kelly is correct, though, in stating Avery’s tremendous impact on the famous road.

When Cy Avery died in 1963, Route 66 “had been the muse for a Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, a long-running television show, and an ever-popular song” (3). It had carried legions of Americans across mountains and deserts before rolling into Hollywood and terminating “on a sandy Pacific beach” (3). Although Route 66 was decommissioned in 1985—when it had been replaced by multiple segments of the post–World War II Interstate Highway System—the meanings of Avery’s road continued to reverberate. America’s metaphorical main street now lives on in memory, nostalgia, and popular culture references—as well as frontage roads, bypasses, and isolated sections of cracked pavement. This biography helps us understand the building of the 2,400-mile concrete ribbon that fostered westward travel during...