One of the original long-distance paved U.S. Highways, Route 66 always had about it an aura of romance born of wide-open horizons and travel on it that spanned not just a country, but a continent.
Then, during the 1930s, it became the major and much fabled path to new lives in the West for untold thousands rendered destitute due to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma.
Now, through countless societies, museums and publications, the romance of Route 66 lives on even as the nation's Interstate system has effectively rung its death knell.