It stopped selling gasoline in the late 1960s and closed for good in the mid 1970s. Traffic dried up and business dropped off. Just after the war, Route 66 was rerouted to bypass Odell. The building was erected in two parts: the main gas station in 1932, and the service bays in about 1940. I’d hear a grunt of acknowledgement from the back seat. “Look, boys, another old gas station,” I’d say, and keep driving. At the other end of our trip, days later on Oklahoma’s vast plain, trip fatigue was closing our eyes. The excitement was still fresh, our eyes were wide open, and we wanted to stop and look at everything. We’d been in the car an hour or so when we reached tiny Odell, Illinois, and its restored Standard service station. So I took a risk on expired film: some 1985 Kodak Verichrome Pan and 1996 Kodak Gold 200. It’s relatively compact and dead simple to use.īut it takes 620 film, which hasn’t been manufactured in 20 years. Kodak’s 1950s Brownie Hawkeye undoubtedly captured millions of vacations in the middle of the last century, probably including countless Route 66 road trips. I’ve collected them since I was a small boy and have always loved shooting them. You’d better believe I took one of my old cameras along. Nobody had heard of a “bucket list” yet, but Route 66 immediately went on mine.Īnd then it took me almost 30 years to finally make the trip. Photos of the old road, dead-ended and abandoned in places thanks to the Interstate bisecting it, hooked me hard. I was a teen then and remember reading about it. That year, the last of the US 66 shields came down. It spelled Route 66’s end as an official US highway. But by 1985, speedy Interstate highways had supplanted it along its entire corridor. Route 66 wound, as the old song goes, from Chicago to LA. An old Route 66 motel sign, captured by the Hawkeye (All pics: Jim Grey)
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