Special Collections and Archives blog

Digitizing the Mother Road

This summer, Cline Library Special Collections and Archives (SCA) welcomed back former student assistant Adya Alcalde for a special project supporting SCA’s planned 2026 exhibit to mark the 100 year anniversary of Route 66. Alcalde previously helped process the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona records with archivists Sam Meier and Sean Evans.

Thanks to generous funding from the Association, SCA was able to hire Adya to complete scanning of the Association’s newsletters in addition to digitizing scrapbooks, photographs, correspondence, Fun Run posters, and more. SCA caught up with Alcalde at the end of her digitization project to hear what treasures she found this summer.

Adya Alcalde digitizing scrapbook materials using SCA’s new DT Atom digitization platform, September 6, 2024. Photograph by Sam Meier.

SCA: Which item you selected for digitization is your personal favorite?

AA: It was my particular pleasure to digitize John E. Curran’s letter to Jerry Richard, which described his memories of the Mother Road as he passed over it in 1937. Curran’s letter spoke not only to the economic hardship endemic to the Great Depression—describing a bygone era with stark clarity—but also described the sense of perseverance I have come to understand as endemic to Route 66 and its communities themselves. 

“It might have been Americas Main Street or the Mother Road but to me it will always be the HIGHWAY WITH A HEART.”

John E. Curran, undated letter to Jerry Richards

By showcasing the variety of jobs available in the late 1930s, the transience of life upon the road, and perhaps most notably, the supreme and dependable kindness of strangers, the letter encapsulated everything I had hoped to record about Route 66 and the Association in my selections. 

SCA: What material was the most difficult to capture digitally, and why?

AA: Part of my summer role was to digitize the 14 scrapbooks in the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona’s records on the DT Atom, a new piece of digitization equipment the department was still installing during my last semester as a student assistant. Learning how to operate the camera, which required a recalibration of shutter speed, exposure, and white balance each time I began a new session, proved challenging at first, but ultimately immensely rewarding. The images I captured were so sharp they could be enlarged to show the dusty or ink-stained fingerprints of Vince Salmon and Linda Hawn (who compiled the scrapbooks) recorded on the sticky side of the tape they used to attach articles to the paper, the halftone dots which made up the images in newspapers, and the uneven distribution of ballpoint pen ink.

A high-resolution scan of a newspaper clipping from one of the Association’s scrapbooks, enlarged to show the halftone dots from the printing process. September 6, 2024. Photo by Sam Meier.

As I worked on the scrapbooks, I also quickly discovered their bulkiness had much to do with Vince Salmon’s penchant for maintaining and enclosing full copies of magazines, newsletters, correspondence, and other materials (trail mix bags, packets of flower seeds) within them. Any piece of material which could not be photographed laying flat (which made up a significant portion of the scrapbooks) proved difficult to capture. My work to record them included unfolding complex arrangements of slowly disintegrating newspaper (with Salmon’s handwritten notes of “fold down” or “unfold side” or “rest of article on back” in various places over them), folding napkins backward from where they’d been stapled so I could photograph the handwritten notes on the side facing the scrapbook paper, and being eternally grateful for the DT Atom’s foot pedal, which functioned as a de facto shutter button when both my hands were occupied holding back pages of the Miss Route 66 Pageant brochures. 

SCA: Looking ahead, how do you think these digitized materials could help tell the story of the Mother Road as we approach its centennial in 2026?

AA: Though the materials I’ve worked to digitize this summer display a wide array of activities, they all serve to represent the diversity of stories tied to Route 66. The materials in this collection document roadside attractions (Meteor City’s longest map of Route 66) and establishments (Seligman, Arizona’s “Havasu” Harvey House) which have long disappeared from the map: brought down by wind, rain, economic downturns, lack of business, or (on occasion) railroad executives disinterested in maintaining hundred year old assets. The ephemerality of these establishments and the people who ran them is stemmed by their preservation here, where razed buildings, departed executive vice presidents, and past eras live on in reproductions of photographs, personal testimonies, and fraying newsprint. 

Angel Delgadillo and members of the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona paint the world’s longest map of Route 66 at Meteor Crater, Arizona, 2002.
NAU.PH.2017.51.047.004. Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona records.

The letters thanking Association members for returning lost wallets, the happy birthday messages typed in Association newsletters, and all the terrific photos of Jerry Richard playing with leftover props from the Universal Soldier set in Cool Springs effectively elevate Route 66 from patched slabs of asphalt to its stature as the force that engendered (global!) cultural change for nearly 100 years.

These materials provide means to consult with the history of the road. They also highlight the vitality of the people that established, traveled upon, daydreamed about, and preserved it.

I believe these materials serve as a testament to the enthusiasm, fondness, and dedication Route 66 has asked of me as a nascent historian of the road. It’s my hope they do the same for the many others able to enjoy them now. 

Adya’s selections from the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona records are now available online via the Colorado Plateau Digital Collections. Please contact Special Collections and Archives with any questions.

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