Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [107]
In the summer of 1988, Angel’s brother Juan, who managed a hamburger restaurant that had served almost no customers for a decade, needed to hire extra staff to cope with all the tourists who were now flocking to Seligman. Since then, the number of visitors has increased every year. Angel told me he was on his fiftieth guest book, but he’d noticed one curious wee characteristic in those books: Europeans and Asians vastly outnumbered Americans. I asked him why he thought that was.
‘The United States is like the new kid on the block. We’re only two hundred and thirty years old. European countries, they’re centuries old and they understand the value of history. They know where they come from. They know preservation. When they read about us and see that we, the people, helped to save a piece of history, they want to come.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ I said.
‘And we take it for granted. We live here, right?’
‘Well, you’ve done a grand job, Angel.’
‘It is beautiful to be here and witness the happy, happy people that come to travel Route 66. It’s beautiful. That’s a big pay for me. They don’t have to spend a dime, but they are so happy that we have preserved.’
He told me lots more about his life – how he followed in the footsteps of his father, who bought the barber chair in which I was sitting on 10 April 1926 for $194. In those days, Angel’s father’s pool hall and barber shop business was one block further south – on the path that Route 66 took through Seligman from 1926 to 1933. When the road was moved north, to its current position, Angel’s dad was bypassed and went bust. He seriously considered joining the stream of Okies heading west: ‘We were all but loaded to go to California, a Model-T Ford pulling a trailer and eleven of us, but music stopped us,’ said Angel.
His brother Juan played in the Hank Becker Orchestra in Seligman. Another brother, Joe, played banjo. They’d receive five dollars each to play at a dance. ‘But ten dollars wasn’t enough to feed eleven of us,’ said Angel, ‘so we were going to California to pick apples, pick whatever they let us.’ However, when Hank Becker heard the family had loaded their belongings on to a trailer, he found jobs for Juan and Joe in Santa Fe, which allowed the rest of the family to stay in Seligman. Later, Juan started his own orchestra with Joe and ten other musicians. According to an unwritten family law, each of the nine Delgadillo children joined the band when they were old enough. ‘I was the last one to audition and I played the drum from when I was twelve years old,’ said Angel. Playing at local events such as high school graduations, the band eventually became the Delgadillo Orchestra. When his brothers Juan, Joe and Augustine went to war, Angel moved on to the trombone and tenor sax, supporting the rest of the family by keeping the band going.
The remaining members of the family still play together today, rehearsing every week. One of Angel’s daughters, Myrna, manages a store in Seligman, and the other, Clarissa, works in the barber shop with her husband, Maurizio, and Angel’s sister-in-law. It is a proper family business, a throwback to when Route 66 ran through the real America.
Angel is a remarkable man. With an impressive talent for remembering dates, his conversation is peppered with the precise times of every key event in his life. When I listened to the way he had held his town together, and looked after his family, I wanted to be his grandson – even though he’s only twenty-odd years older than me. He was named Angel for a reason.
‘Billy, we have so much fun here and we make a living. Both of those things matter,’ he said. ‘But you also want to understand that the world is not what it was fifty-six years ago. The world moves so fast, we have so many distractions. I’m not against McDonald’s, I’m not against Wal-Mart. We need them. But