Feds To Pick Up $1.66M Of $1.88M Cost To Replace Old Hwy 66 Amboy Bridge

The Dola Ditch and Lanzit Ditch bridges on old Route 66 near Amboy are two of 127 historic timber-trestle bridges to be replaced by San Bernardino County. (Google)

San Bernardino County Sentinel

The San Bernardino County Public Works Department will defray 88.5 percent of the cost of replacing the Lanzit Ditch Bridge on old Route 66 in the Amboy area with federal funds.

This week, the county board of supervisors complied with county public works director Gerry Newcombe’s recommendation that the county apply $1,663,645 in federal Highway Bridge Program funds administered through the State of California Department of Transportation and then utilize local matching funds, in this case $215,544 in gasoline taxes, for the construction phase of the National Trails Highway renovation project at Lanzit Ditch near Amboy where a long-existing bridge is on the brink of failure.

This defined project is one of several the county is undertaking along what was historically the primary roadway into California, U.S. Route 66, which in the 1920s was converted from the National Trails Highway. Route 66 was officially removed from the United States Highway System in 1985 but remains a far lesser used alternative route to Interstates 10 & 15 & 40.

According to Newcombe, “The Lanzit Ditch Bridge is located in San Bernardino County, approximately 2.77 miles east of Kelbaker Road near the unincorporated community of Amboy. This project is one of several ongoing efforts to replace bridges on National Trails Highway that have exceeded their design lifespan. This item meets the county and chief executive officer’s goals by working with Caltrans to ensure that the necessary agreements are processed in accordance with Caltrans guidelines in order to receive federal funds as reimbursement for project costs.”

Newcombe said “Discretionary general funding has been authorized to prepare plans to address all of the 127 bridges in priority groups as part of the county’s ongoing efforts to rehabilitate or replace 1930s era timber trestle bridges on National Trails Highway. This project began prior to the discretionary general funding availability and the department has budgeted gasoline tax funds as the local match for this project, so no portion of the authorized discretionary general funding will be used at this time on the project. Those funds remain authorized to be used toward future costs associated with the 127 bridges along National Trails Highway. Receiving $1,663,645 of Highway Bridge Program funds will assist in funding the project’s construction costs.”

Plans underway to preserve historic High Desert stretch of Route 66

A car passes through Amboy on historic U.S. Route 66., Thursday, July 31, 2014. (John Valenzuela)

By Joe Nelson
The San Bernardino Sun

America’s love affair with Route 66 endures.

Songs have been written about it. A television show was named after it. It played a prominent role in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” as the route taken by the Joad family from Oklahoma to California to escape the Dust Bowl.

And for nearly a quarter of a century, the city of San Bernardino paid tribute to it with its annual Route 66 Rendezvous, a weekend street faire for classic car enthusiasts.

And now, plans are underway to preserve and enhance a 150-mile stretch of the two-lane historic highway from Needles to Barstow, creating roadside kiosks and mobile apps, among other things, to attract visitors and keep its memory alive.

“I’m convinced the route will get busier and busier because of tourism and the baby boomers retiring,” said Albert Okura, owner of the historic roadside Roy’s Motel and Cafe in Amboy, one of the mainstay attractions along the dusty desert stretch of Historic Route 66.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the California Historic Route 66 Association released their Route 66 Draft Corridor Management Plan.

A 30-day public comment period on the plan is now underway. A webcast is scheduled for Feb. 19. The webcast, as well as a digital copy of the plan, can be accessed at http://cmp.route66ca.org.

Hard copies are also available for review at the BLM California Desert District Office in Moreno Valley, the BLM’s Barstow and Needles field offices, the Barstow Chamber of Commerce, the Barstow Public Library, the Needles Chamber of Commerce, and the Needles Public Library.

A limited number of black-and-white hard copies of the plan may be requested via email at cahistoricrt66@aol.com, with “CMP Hard Copy Request” entered in the subject line of the email.

The long-term plan includes the most comprehensive strategy to date on the preservation and marketing of the highway stretch. Once the plan is complete, the BLM and California Historic Route 66 Association will push to get it designated as a National Scenic Byway by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The targeted audience includes Route 66 enthusiasts, historians, multi-generational travelers and travel groups, photographers and railway enthusiasts.

“It represents a great chance to introduce people to the Mojave Desert,” said Jim Klein, the project’s lead planner.

He said several gateway centers with kiosks are planned for Barstow, Needles, Amboy, Essex, Goffs and Ludlow. An interactive mobile app would allow travelers to see then-and-now photos of the many stopovers and other geographic points of interest along the highway, he said.

“When you’re trying to draw people toward Barstow, you need to create something for them to see and do,” Klein said. “There are a lot of great old photographs of all these communities. Some of them are no longer there.”

Building new infrastructure along the highway stretch and refurbishing many, if not all, of the 128 timber trestle bridges dotting the historic route is also a top priority, Klein said. He said the stretch of Route 66 from Needles to Barstow has most of the antiquated wooden bridges, which were built in the 1920s during construction of the highway.

Written comments on the draft plan will be accepted through Feb. 28, and may be submitted by mail to Lardner/Klein Landscape Architects, 815 N. Royal St., Suite 200, attn: Route 66 CMP, Alexandria, VA 22314. Comments can also be sent via email to cart66cmp@lardnerklein.com.

A Chicken Magnate's Quest to Revive a Desert Ghost Town

Photo from "The Silence and the Sun" by Joe De Kehoe, courtesy of Martha Burnau and Sally Carlos.

by Matt Blitz
Curbed Network

In the middle of October, the Mojave Desert is cool by desert standards. The wind is so strong it's hard to stand up straight. The air is so dry that thirst is a constant. Dust, rock, and sand get into every crevice. Few brave living here.

Eighty years ago, though, this desert was alive with trains, people, stores, cars, gas stations, and cafes. Many of those buildings are still here, but only a few are occupied. By the mid-20th century, there was no longer enough to live here for. Not enough trains or cars passing through. Not enough commerce to sustain a community. Not enough committed citizens to reinvent the towns. The buildings were left as they were, as if the former occupants had every intention of coming back. The mostly-wooden structures still stand, swaying with the wind, baking in the heat, and collecting dust.

The Mojave Desert is filled with these ghost towns, places like Essex, Baghdad, Ludlow, Chubbuck, and Goffs, all teetering on the edge of existence. They inspire questions about our responsibility to abandoned buildings. Do we just let them rot away? Do we continue to hope that people will come back? Is preserving the past a noble cause or a fool's errand?

Amboy, one of the many wind-blown towns of the Mojave left to fade away in the sun, has changed ownership numerous times with no one able or willing to put in the work to revive it. In 2003, Amboy was listed on Ebay for $1.9 million. There were no takers and the property entered foreclosure. In 2005, at a much-discounted price, it finally landed in the hands of a Southern California chicken magnate, Albert Okura, who committed to reviving the town. Nine years have passed and Okura remains steadfast in his commitment. But the future of Amboy is up in the air, swirling around with the dust and sand.

Amboy's official birth year was 1883, but it was actually settled in 1858, when prospectors came to claim the hills' iron ore. According to an 1877 map (right) drawn up by Lieutenant J.C. Mallery of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a road established in these years connected Amboy to the Dale mining district.

It is not exactly clear why the settlement was named "Amboy." As the railroad established water stops in California, the communities were named in alphabetical order from west to east, stopping at the Arizona state line. Amboy was the first.

Seven years later, in 1865, the Southern Pacific Railroad Company was founded with the goal of establishing rail service from San Francisco to San Diego. The company did just that, but its goals were much loftier. Beginning in 1862, the Pacific Railway Acts promoted the construction of a transcontinental railway through land grants and government bonds. The Southern Pacific Railroad Company took full advantage of these government handouts. By 1884, through land grants, bonds, company consolidation, and leasing of other railroads, the "mighty" Southern Pacific reached New Orleans (a route nicknamed "the Sunset Route").

Southern Pacific promised to build at least twenty miles of rail per year beginning in 1870. Construction fell behind, but on June 22nd, 1883, the Southern Pacific Railroad finished its 223 miles of rail connecting the Mojave Desert to Needles, California, allowing the giant steel beasts known as locomotives to pass through the desert.

At first, Amboy was nothing more than a water and repair stop for the trains. Amboy didn't have a bank or a fire department, though a two-room wooden schoolhouse was built in 1903. (Western railroad towns, in general, tended to be unimaginative in design and created for the sole purpose of catering to the railroad worker and self-sufficiency.)

Other communities in the Mojave, like Ludlow or Essex, were different from Amboy. They became 'blow-off' towns for the thirsty, recreation-starved miners who had to deal with alcohol-free mining camps. With their abundance of pool halls, saloons, and brothels, communities like these lived off of workers' vices. Amboy, though, got a boost from the discovery of a natural resource. This resource wasn't found in the mountains, but at the bottom of Bristol Lake.

That resource was salt, or calcium chloride. Drilling a water well in 1910, the railroad company had discovered that the water contained 10 times as much salt as the ocean. The Pacific Cement Plaster Company had already built a mill in Amboy in 1904 to process the gypsum at the bottom of Bristol Lake, and the salt offered another revenue stream. By 1914, mining in Bristol Lake for both salt and gypsum was at its height. Mills, worker residences, and even saloons were hastily built in the nearby town of Amboy. But like all booms, this one was short-lived. Over-mining and discovery of other salt deposits in easier-to-reach places forced all the mills to close by 1924. Amboy began to deteriorate, just like the other towns of the Mojave Desert.

Other problems followed. On October 29th, 1929, "Black Tuesday," the stock market lost nearly thirteen percent of its value. The subsequent Great Depression decimated the railroads. The Tonopah and Tidewater and the Ludlow and Southern line, other famed desert railroads, were ripped up by 1935. The mighty Southern Pacific, bigger and more financially solvent than its competitors, continued to operate and was still turning a profit until the late 1940s, but the end was nearing for even the strongest of the locomotives.

But the invention that came next, the automobile, revolutionized the way Americans traveled and breathed new life into Amboy.

In 1927, Cyrus Avery (right) and the newly formed US Highway 66 Association convinced Congress to establish a well-maintained, easily passable interstate highway from Chicago to Los Angeles. Construction began on US 66 that same year and all 2,448 miles were paved by 1938. Route 66 was built specifically to follow the railroad, which had carved a clear path, both in infrastructure and notoriety, through the southwest. The road was built nearly parallel to both the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads. For this reason, Amboy was included on the route.

During the mid-1930s, with the Depression at its height and the dust storms wrecking havoc across the Midwest, thousands of people traveled the newly-built Route 66 in search of a better life elsewhere. As immortalized by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, Route 66 was "the path for people in flight, refugees from the dust."

Amboy flourished, hitting its peak right when the Depression was at its worst. The permanent population jumped to nearly 200 people. Three gas stations, two cafes, three motor courts, four garages, a post office, a church, and a school were built, all with colorful signs and enticing offers (air conditioning!) to lure in visitors.

If Amboy was an oasis in the middle of the desert, then Roy Crowl was mainly responsible for its reemergence. Working as a railroad line operator a few miles down the road in Saltus, he noticed the rise of car traffic and decided it was time to go where the people were. He moved to Amboy and built Roy's Garage. The desert roads were rough on cars and thus made Roy's the busiest place in town. Soon, Roy realized that waiting customers got hungry, so he built a café. Auto parts weren't always available, so travelers had to wait, sometimes overnight. Luckily, Roy also built a motel.

Roy's Motel & Café has since become a Route 66 legend. Opened in 1938 by Roy and his wife Betty, along with their son-in-law Buster Burris, the motel has five cabins with a café next door. Roy did so well with his properties that he was able to buy Betty, a trained pilot, a runway left over from the 1920s. Propeller planes still land on this runway (in fact, Harrison Ford made an unscheduled stop there in the mid-2000s). Roy and Betty retired in 1959, leaving Roy's in Buster's name. Buster traveled to Los Angeles for design ideas and renovated Roy's in the style he observed there. The Roy's sign still stands over the town of Amboy, its retro-future look harking back to another era.

On June 29th, 1956, Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law the Federal-Aid Highway Act. He called it "the greatest public works project in the history of the world." It is said that a cross-country trip that would have taken twenty days in 1950 would now only take four.

For Amboy, it was another death sentence. Route 66, with its twisty, turning road and lower speed limits, would become obsolete. And so would the small towns that populated the road. By 1964, the concrete had been poured for the new super highway, Interstate 40, and cars were bypassing Amboy and the other Mojave towns. Life again screeched to a halt in the desert.

Today, Amboy feels more forgotten than dead. The landscape is still dotted with rubble, but there are signs of life. A dog barks in the near distance. Some of the houses are lived in. RVs and trailers along the side of the road provide traveling homes for a few. An estimated 15 to 20 people live here year-round. On nice days, like this one in October, cars pass through, stopping for a picture of the most photographed sign in the world. The trains still huff and puff occasionally on the outskirts of the town.

But Amboy is still very much on the mind of Albert Okura. In 2005, Okura bought the town of Amboy from Buster Burris' ninety-year-old widow for $425,000. She had better offers, but Okura had cash and a promise. Okura explained over the phone, "I told her I am going to keep it pure."

Okura grew up in Wilmington, only a few miles from Long Beach on the coast of southern California. His first job was at a Burger King in 1970. Fourteen years later, Okura opened his own fast-food restaurant with an uncle in San Bernardino County (about 55 miles from Wilmington)—a Mexican rotisserie chicken place called Juan Pollo. Today, there are 27 locations throughout Southern California. Okura purchased the site of the very first McDonald's in San Bernardino County in 1998, which was run by the McDonald brothers in the 1940s before Ray Kroc bought out their company. He turned the site into the corporate offices of Juan Pollo on one side and a McDonald's museum on the other. On the surface, the McDonald's site purchase makes more sense than Okura's decision to buy Amboy, but Taylor Louden, a preservation architect who helped Okura with Amboy, describes Albert as a benevolent collector. "Things just find their way to him. He's sort of a one-man orphanage."

When Amboy appeared on Ebay in 2003, a friend who knew of his tendency toward collecting alerted Okura. The price was too high, but Okura, believing it was "his destiny" to own Amboy, kept checking in until the number came down. Okura immediately went to work cleaning, repainting, and preserving the town. In the nine years he has owned it, he hasn't knocked anything down, and the only thing he's built is a small storage shed. He has simply tried to keep the town afloat. Okura reopened Roy's, not as a motel or café, but as a gift shop with hopes of turning it into "an authentic Route 66 diner" someday. Okura hired a few people living in town to work shifts at Roy's. He was able to bring back gas to two pumps (a third was already functional). Okura and Louden even gave Amboy a clever nickname, "the ghost town that ain't dead yet," in hopes of attracting tourists. Despite all of this hard work, Okura admits the task is tougher than he thought. Okura explains he never had any delusions of making money off of Amboy itself; the value for him was promotional, "if I keep it pure, functional, historically accurate, than me and my company…get recognition."

Still, he tells me that he spends upwards of $5,000 a month on staffing, keeping gas flowing, and general maintenance. It took two years to get electricity because "Buster, the great man that he was, did his own electric work and it wasn't up to county codes." Okura says he loses money on his investment on a yearly basis.

Despite Okura's best intentions, Amboy sits in a state of suspended life. The old cabins that still stand off to the side of the former café have a decently fresh coat of paint but are a mess inside. A "Keep Out" sign blocks off visitors from the rest of the cabins behind Roy's. The giant white church down the road (built about the same time as the new school) is empty inside, save for a single ghostly chair delicately placed at a piano, as if waiting for someone to play it one more time.

Amboy illustrates the difficulty of preserving the past. Towns like Amboy must adapt or die in a kind of Ghost Town Darwinism. Although Okura has no plans to demolish any buildings in Amboy, perhaps that should be an option. If no one wants to live there or turn it into a useful property, why expend energy and resources preserving something that provides very little, if any, value back?

Before I leave Amboy, I wander into Roy's. Thirsty from the Mojave, I pick up a bottle of water and approach the man at the cash register, whose name is Kevin. I ask him how business is today ("Not bad. A guy and his girlfriend on a motorcycle was just here about twenty minutes ago."), tourism in general ("We get a lot more people from Europe and Asia, than Americans"), and if he lives in town (he does, in a room inside of the café). And then I ask Kevin the question: is Amboy a ghost town? His answer: "I live here and I'm alive. So, this town ain't dead yet." But for how long?

A look at Juan Pollo founder Albert Okura’s success, big dreams

In 2005 Albert Okura, founder of Juan Pollo restaurants, purchased the small town of Amboy for $425,000 from Bessie Burris. Okura is in the process of restoring the town. (Photo by John Valenzuela — staff photographer)

By Jim Steinberg
The San Bernardino Sun

AMBOY >> It’s 111 degrees in the Mojave Desert, and Albert Okura effortlessly unloads large boxes of drinks and snacks from the back of a van. It’s taken him three hours to drive here in a wildly decorated vehicle topped with a toy motorcycle mounted by a plastic chicken.

Nearby, there are several groups of European foreign visitors at the gas station or inside its adjacent convenience market. Okura could be overheard telling one cluster, “I own this town.”

It’s true. All part of a destiny.

The word destiny is important for Okura, 63, who is marking his 30th year in business as founder of the Juan Pollo restaurant chain, based in San Bernardino but with 28 outlets in Southern California.

Some day, that destiny will include overtaking KFC, in terms of number of chickens sold, he said.

LESSONS LEARNED

Okura is marking this anniversary with a self-published book, “Albert Okura The Chicken Man with a 50 Year Plan.”

“Intellectuals don’t like the book,” he said, “but people who have started their own business do.”

The book is designed, he said, to give “life lessons” to people across the planet who want to get into the restaurant business.

There’s another reason for the book, Okura said.

With outlets in San Bernardino, Los Angeles, Riverside and Orange counties, Okura (who walks briskly and frequently wears running shoes) said,“I’m looking for someone smarter than me” to guide the chain’s future growth.

He’s also looking for an inventor who can bring sophisticated computer technology into the rotisserie chicken cookers to standardize the labor-intensive cooking effort required to turn out the kind of moist, tender and flavorful product Okura said customers have come to expect.

He’s also looking for someone with money to invest in the firm.

“That’s one of the reasons for the book.” Okura said. “So people would understand my philosophy and want to join me.”

The athletic-looking Okura, with an upper torso like a college track team member, said, “I’ve taken the company as far as I can.”

‘WONDERFUL MISSIONS’

Okura owns the original McDonald’s restaurant site in San Bernardino, which is both his corporate headquarters and a museum, and has a small Route 66 Museum adjacent to his San Bernardino restaurant on 5th Street, which at one time was Route 66.

Inside, there are relics that harken to the early days of fast food, and it’s a destination for tourists from around the world.

And then there’s the preserved ghost town of Amboy, west of Needles and east of Ludlow on Route 66.

Owning Amboy is exactly the kind of unconventional endeavor for which Okura has become known.

“Okura goes off on these wonderful missions not tied to the bottom line,” said former San Bernardino Mayor Pat Morris.

“Amboy is a complete hole in the ground...a money pit,” Morris said. “He thought it would be interesting to own a town on historic Route 66 even if it is as dead as doornails. He is interested in the history of the Route and the history of the city...the guy is a giver...he has ways of uniquely giving that are his own.”

DESTINY

When Okura first heard Amboy was for sale in 2003, he hadn’t heard of it.

But a friend told him he needed to buy it and when he saw it, he agreed.

In 1976, when Okura bought his first house, in Torrance, his real estate agent told him that he regretted not buying raw land decades before.

From that moment on, Okura said he believed buying a town would be his “destiny.”

For now the “destiny” of Amboy includes its two dirt landing strips, its 26-unit motel, an abandoned 1950s-era Packard in the parking lot. Roy’s Motel and Café is a Route 66 landmark.

Founded in 1859, the once gold- and silver-driven community met its demise with the completion of Interstate 40 in 1984.

Along with its landing strips and motel, it’s got a church, a functioning post office, four gas pumps and a variety of scattered buildings.

Like many communities across The Mother Road, Amboy had come to rely on tourism. Then the interstate sucked away its lifeblood.

But Okura sees a strengthening interest in Route 66 — domestically as well as internationally, and believes tourism may become a driver.

A DEAL ON A TOWN

Initial efforts to buy Amboy for a $1 million-plus price tag fell through, but he was successful in 2005 for a mere $425,000.

“You see, it was my destiny,” he said, putting emphasis on the “was.”

Amboy hasn’t changed dramatically since Okura purchased it. But delivering a water system has been more complex — and costly — than anticipated. Okura believes he’s close to a working system that could supply water for future town growth.

One of the difficulties has been to find good technicians willing to travel to the remote Mojave location.

The gas station has re-opened, although pumps only work for regular gasoline. Bathrooms have been reopened and inside the station are drinks, snacks and a place to cool off.

There’s still work to do with the water system, but ultimately Okura would like to see a cafe operator come in and reopen the iconic Roy’s Cafe, although he says it would be difficult to make a profit.

“It would have to be a family operation to be successful,” he said.

The same is true for reviving the motel, he said.

Amboy is hot in the summer and cold in the winter, he said. “It’s more about the Amboy charm and the open country.”

The night skies are beautiful, he said. “For people who like the desert, it’s ideal.”

NATURAL-BORN ATTENTION-GETTER

Although he’s no Harvard MBA, Okura is quick to recognize creative people and harness their talents. And he understands how to tap the power of traditional and social media to champion his Juan Pollo brand.

As an example of his showmanship, his numerous vehicles with wildly colorful cartoon characters painted on the sides are fixtures in the region.

But even this eruption of color doesn’t generate the buzz Okura seeks.

So he puts plastic motorcycles on top of some vehicles — using plastic chickens as riders.

On a recent drive on the 15 Freeway, a laborer in the passenger seat of a flatbed truck was seen using a smart phone to photograph Okura’s van as he drove it in the southbound lane near Barstow.

“You should see mothers pointing this vehicle out to their kids,” he said.

Years ago, Okura said, he had a very expensive, high-performance truck. And when he drove that along area freeways, “nobody cared.”

Bad news, too, has brought him attention.

Okura boasts that San Bernardino’s bankruptcy has brought him a lot of media attention, especially among international media outlets.

For most of those, including a television piece that aired across Italy, Okura said he strikes a positive note about how he’s going to focus on his business and prosper, while others, he said, complain about a municipal government that drove the city into financial ruin.

REALIZING HIS DREAMS

Another “destiny” in his life is overtaking Kentucky Fried Chicken.

“That will probably take about 50 years,” said Okura, a Chino resident.

That means, he said, he must live until he’s 113.

Medical science is advancing rapidly, he said, and after all, his father is 98.

Who knows....

Judi Penman, president and CEO of the San Bernardino Area Chamber of Commerce, said of Okura: He “has more than just one dream, and he fulfills them. He is an honorable man with many talents. He digs in and accomplishes things.”

Motel operator driven to keep Route 66 culture alive and kicking

Long a fixture on Route 66, the Wigwam Motel in San Bernardino glows in the evening light as customers come and go in January. Route 66 continues to attract motorists and tourists from around the world who want to experience the legendary nostalgia of its roadside attractions. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)

by HUGO MARTÍN
Los Angeles Times

Kumar Patel grew up along Route 66, a highway long celebrated in literature, song and film. He was not impressed.

On his first long road trip, about six years ago, he found himself bored by the route's decaying monuments, mom-and-pop diners and dusty museums.

"I hated it," he said. "But I didn't understand it."

The journey to understanding started soon after that trip, when his mother started having health problems. She had been running the family's Wigwam Motel, a clutch of 20 tepee-shaped rooms on Route 66 in San Bernardino. She could no longer run it alone.

So at 26, Patel took over, giving up a career in accounting to run an aging tourist trap that struggled to cover its costs.

Now, as a 32-year-old entrepreneur, he stands out among the typical Route 66 merchants, who promote such roadside curiosities as a Paul Bunyon monument, a blue whale statue and the Petrified Forest National Park. Such sites now are operated and visited mostly by white, middle-aged travelers, whose numbers are dwindling.

Unless Patel and other Route 66 business owners can attract a younger and more diverse crowd, one that matches the evolving demographics of America, the shops and oddball attractions along the route will shut down for good.

"If it doesn't happen, we are not going to keep all of this alive," said Kevin Hansel, the caretaker of another struggling Route 66 business, Roy's Motel and Cafe in Amboy. "It will be history."

That history started in the 1920s, when the road was built to handle a surge in automobile ownership and a push by business owners to link the small towns and merchants of the Midwest to big cities. Route 66 became the nation's main east-west artery.

In his novel "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck called it the "mother road" because it beckoned and delivered the refugees from the Dust Bowl exodus to jobs in California in the 1930s. Bobby Troup penned his biggest hit song, "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66," in 1946.

But by the 1950s, the narrow, slow-moving route was replaced in pieces by multilane, interstate freeways, designed for high-speed travel. Federal workers removed the freeway markers and decommissioned Route 66 in 1985, effectively killing business for the jukebox-blasting diners and neon-rimmed motels.

Today, with the future of the Wigwam at stake, Patel has immersed himself in that history, driving Route 66 himself, stopping to chat with his fellow shopkeepers and travelers. He set out on a search for insight into how to promote his business but ended up with a more personal appreciation of the route's culture.

"That's what grew on me: The people who shared with me their stories of the road," he said.

When the Wigwam Motel went on sale in 2003 for nearly $1 million, Patel's father, an Indian immigrant who ran another small hotel in San Bernardino, saw it as a good investment. It has yet to pay off.

Like many Route 66 businesses, the Wigwam struggles to squeeze out enough money to pay for improvements. It took five years to save up to renovate the pool area. Last year, Patel was finally able to afford a full-time maid for the motel. Before then, Patel and his mother cleaned and changed sheets while selling souvenirs and booking rooms.

"We still run it on a thin line," he said.

With the Wigwam's success tied to Route 66, Patel has become a tireless promoter of its culture. He sees that as a way to keep the history of Route 66 alive and fill his motel rooms.

He set out recently on a drive to show off some of its peculiar attractions along California's stretch of the 2,400-mile highway that runs from Chicago to Santa Monica. He started from a rundown roadside hotel in Needles, in the Mojave Desert near the Arizona border.

Stars twinkled in the darkness. The only sound was the hum of big rigs bouncing off the blacktop. The best way to experience the road, he said, is by driving east to west. It's the way the Dust Bowl refugees saw it and later Midwesterners, heading for vacations in Los Angeles.

"On Route 66 you find real people, real food," Patel said.

He rattled off history and trivia as the car zipped past telephone poles on National Trails Highway — the name now given to the portion of Route 66 that runs through much of the Mojave Desert.

A downed palo verde tree about half a mile outside of Amboy is called the "Shoe Tree" because it toppled under the weight of hundreds of shoes tossed on the branches by visitors. It's a tradition that locals say was started by an arguing couple and continues today.

"The purists love this stuff because they don't want to see things that are renewed," Patel said. "They want to see the original stuff."

Take tiny Amboy (population 17), once a bustling pit stop. Today, the only commerce happens at Roy's Motel and Cafe. The cafe sells only soft drinks and snacks. The motel is closed because of a lack of water. The drop-off in business no longer makes it practical to ship in water by train. The ground has long been saturated with salt, making well water undrinkable.

Kevin Hansel, the caretaker, dreams of the day someone drills a well deep enough to reach drinkable water.

"Once we get the water, we can open the restaurant and the bungalows," he said.

As Patel visited, about a dozen Volkswagen vans pulled in under the cafe's giant boomerang-shaped sign. The VW road warriors were meeting at Roy's before driving east to Lake Havasu.

Among them was retired welder Joe Stack, 71, of Costa Mesa. He has been taking this road trip for 10 years. When Stack's daughter was a girl, she rode shotgun in his van.

But she is now 22 and not interested in the retro architecture of Route 66.

"Young kids don't want to come out here," he said, squinting in the morning sun. "Young kids are on a computer wearing their thumbs out."

::

Route 66 travelers today have a median age of 55 and 97% are white, according to a 2011 study by David Listokin, a Rutgers University economics professor. Only 11% of the travelers on the road are ages 20 to 39, according to the study.

A few months ago, Listokin read the highlights of his study to a group of Route 66 business owners who met at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim to discuss the road's future. Patel was there — among the few people in the room under age 40.

Patel stood at the front of the brightly colored Magic Kingdom Ballroom, urging his fellow Route 66 merchants to reach out to young travelers, the way he has done.

He hosted hip-hop, end-of-summer festivals at the Wigwam Motel, with DJs and strobe lights. During a recent Christmas, he threw a doughnut party and decorated the tepee-shaped motel rooms to look like Christmas trees. He's volunteered his motel as a stop for a classic car show to raise money to restore a historic gas station in Rancho Cucamonga.

His work has won him the respect of older Route 66 advocates.

"We absolutely need that kind of thing that he is doing," said Linda Fitzpatrick, 73, who is leading a campaign to restore the Needles Theater, a 1930s-era Masonic temple that was converted to a movie house.

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Back on the road, just outside Barstow, Patel pulled up to an attraction known as "Bottle Tree Ranch."

The forest of metal trees, adorned with colored bottles, was built by Elmer Long, a 67-year-old retired cement worker who, with his long white beard and floppy hat, looks like a '49er-era gold prospector.

During the busy summer months, he said, his bottle trees draw as many as 1,000 visitors a day. But most of the visitors are international travelers. Each day, visitors leave Long a few dollars in a tip can.

"To them, the U.S. is a magical place," he said, as traffic rushes past his ramshackle home.

The sky began to dim as Patel pulled up to the Wigwam Motel. His mother, who still helps Patel with the business, told him that two motel guests — young ones — were finishing a long road trip.

At the door of one of the tepees, Patel introduced himself to Emily Mills, 28, and her sister Anna, 25, from North Carolina. Emily Mills was starting a new job managing a Culver City restaurant. For the move west, the sisters decided on a Route 66 road trip.

They hit all the big stops, including the Cadillac Ranch, west of Amarillo, Texas, where junk Cadillacs have been thrust nose first into the earth. A few miles south of the ranch, the sisters stopped to see the statue of a giant pair of legs, more than 20 feet tall.

The Mills sisters also spent the night in another Wigwam Motel, in Holbrook, Ariz. — one of seven built across the country by architect Frank Redford. Only two Wigwams remain on Route 66.

"We wanted to tell our friends we slept in a wigwam and saw a giant pair of legs," Emily Mills said as the sun set behind her tepee.

Guests like the Mills sisters are a good sign for the Wigwam, Patel said. Most Route 66 travelers zip through San Bernardino to reach the end of the route in Santa Monica, 78 miles away.

Patel can't yet say when — or if — the Wigwam will ever become the moneymaker Patel's father envisioned. But now he's grown attached to the road, and sees himself as more than just a motel operator. Patel has become a curator of the Route 66 legend, a proud member of its cast of characters.