Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [30]
The night before I toured Pontiac, I visited a restaurant and ordered the broasted chicken. I only had it to see what broasted was. I soon discovered it meant broiled and roasted, or what most people would call burned. Maybe I should have known better when I saw the menu. It had pictures of the food, which is always a dead giveaway (unless you’re in Japan, where the food is invariably fantastic, even though the restaurants often have wax replicas of their dishes in the window). If you’re on Route 66 and you stop at a place where the menu has pictures of the grub, you’d be well advised to carry on until you find somewhere better. Unfortunately, along Route 66, there aren’t too many better places. I know it sounds deeply snobbish, and I probably shouldn’t say it, but the amount of fat and sugar and junk eaten in Middle America is scary. That’s why everyone’s getting obese.
However, there’s a silver lining to every cloud. In this case, we have the inventor of one of the staples of unhealthy fast-food cuisine – the Cozy Dog – to thank for also creating one of the greatest artists associated with Route 66 – Robert Waldmire. Route 66 attracted a lot of poets, writers, painters, wanderers and all sorts of scallywags who were just in love with the road and made it their whole life. Bob was one of them. He was due to paint a mural in Pontiac in 2009, but he died before he could carry out the commission. Now a bunch of artists are going to get together and paint one in his memory.
Bob grew up watching the Route 66 traffic pass by his parents’ restaurant in Springfield, Illinois (which was where his father, Ed, came up with the Cozy Dog, of which more later). In 1962 Ed took the whole family on a road trip along the 66 to California. Bob, who was already an accomplished artist at school, was hugely inspired by what he saw and fell in love with everything to do with the Mother Road – the motels, diners and truck stops, and particularly the Arizona and New Mexico deserts. He decided he wanted to spend his time travelling the route, but first he went off to university, where he spotted a fellow student’s illustration of the local town. Wishing to do something similar for his hometown, Bob had a brainwave: he would get local merchants to pay him to include their businesses in his poster.
Bob appears to have been completely different from his father. He was a hippy type, a big, bearded vegetarian who ate ‘not dogs’ rather than hot dogs. His illustrations are very like those of Robert Crumb, very intricate and detailed, with little buildings in the plan of a town, all seen from above. He’d include all the details, like telegraph poles and street signs. They’re very, very good.
His first poster was a great success, both critically and commercially. Bob made even more money from selling it to local residents than he’d made from getting the businesses to pay up front to be included in it, so he set off to visit college towns, repeating the formula as he travelled. This one idea changed his life for ever. Provided he lived relatively cheaply, he could travel back and forth across America supported entirely by his illustrations. Best of all, it meant that Bob, who hated the cold, could spend winters in his beloved desert, drawing the buildings, towns and landmarks of Route 66. These drawings became famous icons of the road themselves, as did the orange 1972 VW campervan in which he travelled. When Pixar made Cars, they based Fillmore, the VW bus character, loosely on Bob Waldmire.
Some of Bob’s best work was his set of four large and highly intricate state posters of Route 66 winding through California, Illinois, New Mexico and Arizona. Filled with hundreds of drawings of scenic vistas, sketches of the wildlife and historical attractions, they also