100 years of Route 66

The Kitchen Sisters Present

The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia

Society & Culture

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2026

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

John Steinbeck called it “The Mother Road.” Songwriter Bobby Troup said it was where to go to get your kicks. Mickey Mantle swore, “If it hadn’t been for Highway 66 I never would have been a Yankee.”

The Kitchen Sisters spent the summer of 1984 traveling every inch of this storied highway — “The Main Street of America” — as it was closing, recording just about everything that moved between Chicago and LA and made a series of epic radio documentaries to commemorate the legendary road and what it meant to the nation. If I remember right we paid about $1.20 a gallon as we motored east to west.

In the summer of 1985 the road was officially removed from the United States Highway system and NPR’s All Things Considered aired our series of stories about the life and history of Route 66 filled with interviews with dozens and dozens of Americans whose lives intersected with The Mother Road, along with field recordings, archival audio, music and sound.

As Route 66 turns 100 we dipped into our archive to share these poignant and lively time capsules for your next road trip and your summer listening pleasure.

Our narrator is actor David Selby.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Radio Topia. Welcome to The Kitchen Sisters present.
0:04.0	From PRX. We're the Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson, and Nikki Silva.
0:09.5	Right now, there are some amazing news stories coming out of Ear Hustle, our fellow Radiotopia show,
0:15.0	and the podcast about the daily realities of prison life. There's one episode called My Favorite Color, where we hear the
0:22.6	conversation between a father and daughter who haven't seen each other in 26 years. In another,
0:28.9	we meet a guy who, at the age of 13, got a tattoo job on his face that would influence the course
0:35.7	of his life. There's a story about what it's like to be
0:38.6	betrayed by a dog, and another that explains how to hug someone when hugging itself is against the
0:45.4	rules. These are the kinds of surprising stories you hear on Ear Hustle. They're raw, they're deep and
0:51.1	often very funny, and what Ira Glass called decidedly untrachic.
0:56.9	Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
0:59.4	Also check out their live show.
1:01.4	Details are at Ear HustleSq.com slash tour.
1:17.6	From the first days we started working together, Davia and I drove around, a lot. Two gals in a 1972 Green Dotson roaming the Tri-County area, like Buzz and Todd, minus the Corvette,
1:26.6	through Santa Cruz, Monterey, and San
1:29.0	Benito counties in California. We were doing oral histories and recording everybody
1:34.1	who moved. Cowboys and fishermen, farm workers, Italian grandmothers. This was in the day of
1:41.1	cassettes. And as we drove around, we always talked about how great it would be to
1:45.1	document the roads and side roads we were traveling so people could just pop in a cassette and listen to
1:50.8	the people around them as they drove on through. We never quite pulled off that cassette idea on a large
1:56.2	scale, but when Davia moved east for a while, we decided to try the idea out on Route 66.
2:02.6	She'd be driving a lot. So that was the start.
	...

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