Neon played a major role in creating Route 66’s “Mother Road” mythology. In the era before the interstate-highway system, drivers from Chicago to Los Angeles passed hotels, coffee shops, auto dealerships and countless other businesses, absorbing colorful neon signs along the way. As highway driving became ubiquitous, Route 66 traffic atrophied, and an American icon withered.
Thankfully, car-culture and history buffs (and, presumably, some sign lovers) have joined forces to restore Route 66 businesses – with signs playing a key role. One such victory occurred in Carthage, MO, where sisters Deborah Harvey and Priscilla Bledsaw purchased the Boots Court Motel in 2011 and made heavy renovations that were subsidized in part by a Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program grant established by the National Park Service.
They reopened a five-room annex that had been added to the hotel in 1946 the following year, and, with proceeds from renting those rooms, could finally afford to have the architectural neon on the building’s façade remade. With 200 Route 66 and neon aficionados in attendance, a relighting ceremony took place in early April.
The sisters hired David Hutson, owner of St. Louis-based Neon Time, to fabricate the neon. About neon signs’ beauty, he told the Joplin Globe, “Neon has a kinetic feel. It’s very much alive, and has a certain seductive allure of that era. It’s inevitable that people, not just Americans, stop along the route in search of the American brand.”