The Dixie Truckers Home in McLean, Illinois, off Interstate 55 and alongside what used to be Route 66, may not be the first American truckstop. But it’s definitely one of the oldest — and one of the most revered among aficionados of the old cross-country highway.

Opened in 1928, just two years after Route 66, the Dixie Truckers Home survived the federal highway’s decommissioning in the early 1980s and continues to serve as a home away from home for long-haul truckers and other road warriors and travelers.

If there’s a downside, it’s this: The original owners sold the Dixie a few years back and the new owners seem more interested in making the place a comfortable one for modern travelers than in preserving the old ambience (though they have opened up a Route 66 memorabilia room.)

That said, the Dixie is still worth a stop, if only to breathe in the diesel fumes from the idling big rigs and to reflect on how many drivers over the nearly 80 years have enjoyed a quiet moment here before hitting the road again.

Just one piece of advice: Think twice before ordering a fruit cup to go at the Dixie Truckers Home. It’s big and and it’s a bargain. But it throws the staff for a loop.

When the Route 66 Team visited this week, we watched as a hapless bus driver, who had filled up a 16-oz Styrofoam cup with fruit from the buffet, tried to pay for the item.

The trouble: The Dixie’s staff, apparently used to ringing up hamburgers, chicken-fried steaks and other artery-clogging fare, had difficulty understanding what the driver had served herself — and then had no clue how to ring it up on the computer terminal/cash register at the central checkout counter.

In the end, it took two Dixie employees about seven minutes to figure what the bus driver — whose passengers were boarded and were waiting to get to Kansas City — owed.

The grand total: $1.91 with tax.

As the Route 66 Team traveled from Los Angeles to Chicago, celebrating Route 66 and the allure of the open road, we drove past a lot of reminders of the carnage that automobile travel entails.

Yeah, we’re talking roadkill.

Here’s a handful of the poor critters we came across during our the 2,500-mile journey.

You won’t find Times Beach on any up-to-date map of Missouri. And all references to it have been taken off signs on Interstate 44, the major east-west highway that replaced old Route 66 in this part of the country.

But 25 years ago, Times Beach, located about 25 miles west of St. Louis, was Missouri’s best known — the right word is notorious — city after the waters of the nearby Meramec River rose more than 20 feet above flood level, inundating homes to near ceiling level and spreading an oil that the city had sprayed on its unpaved roads.

Unfortunately, that oil, applied to keep the dust down, wiped Times Beach off the map.

The city contractor had used waste oil contaminated with a toxic chemical called dioxin. Even before the flood in late 1982, researchers were scrambling to figure out why animals in town had been dying mysteriously. But by the time the lab results came back identifying the culprit, the waters of the Merrimac had tuned what might have been a manageable clean-up into a full-scale environmental disaster.

Two days before Christmas 1982, the 800 residents of Time Beach received a letter from authorities: “If you are in town, it is advisable for you to leave and if you are out of town do not go back.”

In 1983, the federal government purchased the whole town. Over the next two decades, in fits and starts, the buildings were razed, the contaminated soil incinerated and the debris piled up and buried in what became known as the “town mound” (left).

Today, Times Beach is a memory. In its place is a 410-acre park run by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources that’s known as the Route 66 State Park. Though it bears the old highway’s name and features both the old Route 66 bridge across the Meramec and some portions of the original road, the park itself is essentially a nature preserve, with the town’s old street’s now serving as hiking and biking trails. The visitor center, located in a roadhouse inn, has memorabilia celebrating both the old highway that ran trough town and the 1982 flood that destroyed it.

A quarter of a century after one of the most notorious environmental catastrophes in U.S. history, there are encouraging signs. The Department of Natural Resources says the area is now home to healthy deer and turkey populations and other animal and birds have been sighted here.

And the town mound? It’s still there, covered in grass, but easy enough for the visitor to spot, eerily reminiscent of the Indian burial sites that dot the state.

On the outside, Steve’s Sundry, Books & Magazines on South Harvard Avenue in Tulsa’s midtown neighborhood, doesn’t look like much. But just as you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, don’t write off Steve’s because of its modest curb appeal and its location in an aging strip mall.

Step inside, and you quickly discover why, in an age of Amazon.com, Borders, Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million, locals love this quirky, 60-year-old independent bookstore.

It’s called Steve’s Sundry, Books & magazines, so it’s best to take things one by one.  

First, the sundries. Steve’s stocks all kinds of items you wouldn’t expect to find in a bookstore, including denture powder and a variety of products for the feet.  “As long as it’s legal and our customers want it, we’ll sell find it and sell it,” says Joanie Stephenson, the wife of Steve Jr., the founder’s son. The foot-care products — some of them hard to get — are there, Joanie says, because someone once asked for them and Steve’s obliged. Then area podiatrists found out and began specifically referring customers to the store.

Also in the sundry category, the old-fashioned soda fountain in the back of the store, which serves shakes and simple sandwiches all day.  Hence the store’s motto: “Whether it’s Shakes or Shakespeare, Steve’s is the Place.”  

“I swing by probably once every couple of weeks,” says 29-year-old Brian Wayland (left), a Tulsa social worker, who was having a shake blended up by Darren Whiteside, a Steve’s employee, when the Route 66 Team visited.

“They make a better shake than Braum’s (a regional ice cream chain) and there’s hardly ever a line.”  

The books lean heavily toward local authors, and books on Oklahoma history, and Steve’s hosts signings weekly for these niche authors. “Shoot,” Joanie says, “if somebody takes the time and the blood, sweat and tears to write a book, we’re happy to sponsor an author event.” 

That support for struggling authors has earned Steve’s the love of some not-so-struggling scribes, including Elmore Leonard, David Baldacci and Garrison Keillor, who have all made a point of doing signings here when they’re in Tulsa. 

And the magazines? Steve’s carries over 4,000 titles, giving it — according to Joanie — the best selection in Tulsa. 

All photos taken in Tulsa, Oklahoma on May 22 and May 23, 2007
 

Carlton Pearson doesn’t believe in hell. And he’s pretty uncertain about heaven as well. Which wouldn’t be all that exceptional, really — except Pearson is an ordained Pentecostal minister and a former protégé of Oral Roberts, the Tulsa-based televangelist. So when the Route 66 Team passed through Tulsa this week, we spent an hour with Pearson in his offices on the 29th floor of a downtown skyscraper. 

Pearson, 54, wasnt always so unsure about core doctrinal issues. In the 1980s and 1990s, he ran Higher Dimensions Family Church, a Tulsa-based megachurch that hewed to a much more unforgiving and traditional view of the afterlife.

He also served on Oral Roberts Universitys board of regents and was one of the first African-Americans to be a regular guest on mainstream religious TV programs.

But Pearson tells Reuters that while he was a successful conservative evangelical, he was an unhappy man. “I was hating, hurting and hitting and being mean,” he says today. “That’s the way you function in that religion.”

Then, Pearson had what he characterizes as an epiphany and he began preaching something new: God, he told anyone who would listen, had already forgiven everyone Christians, Jews, Muslims, Mormon, Hindus, Buddhists — for their sins. No one — not even Adolf Hitler or the devil himself needed to worry about eternal damnation.

I dont think theres an eternal consequence for doing wrong, he explains today. There are immediate ones. Pearson also backed off the idea that the Bible was the word of God. I take it seriously, he says. But I dont take it literally. I dont believe it is the inspired word of God. I believe it is the inspired word of man about God.

The response from the general public was remarkably positive. “I got tens of thousands of letters,” he says, “from gays, Hindus, Muslims, Catholics, Jews and atheists. Some of the most profound letters about God came from the atheists.”

But this gospel of inclusion, as it came to be known, wasn’t so popular closer to home. Pearson’s fellow Pentecostal bishops and other conservative Christians denounced him as a heretic. His congregation melted away. Weekly offerings tumbled. The bank foreclosed on his church.

Today, Pearsons new church — New Dimensions Worship Center — has a fraction of the members of his old one and is forced to borrow space for its services from an Episcopal church in downtown Tulsa.

Im 54 years old and Im somebodys foster child, he jokes.

But Pearson is unbowed. He continues to preach his gospel of inclusion and make pronouncements about the concept of hell that are likely to raise the hackles of his one-time friends in evangelical community.

He bristles, for instance, at the idea that God is a vengeful being who holds grudges for 6,000 years — not only because it flies in the face of his belief in a merciful God but because it also creates a rationalization for vengeance and punishment here on earth.

“When you worship an angry God,” he says, “you make anger good. That’s what creates a Saddam Hussein or a George Bush.”

The flipside of Pearson’s hell-doubting theology, however, is that he sounds awfully skeptical about the existence of heaven. “We don’t know what happens after this life,” he says. “But we presume something good happens. So we’ve come up with these thrones and gates and virgins  … But the closest to God you’ll probably ever get is you.” 

Reuters Correspondent and Route 66 Team member James Kelleher, left, turned 44 years old on Monday, the day the team drove from Oklahoma City to Tulsa. He was in a funk about the milestone the whole day.
 
To cheer him up, they joined the team’s hosts in Tulsa, Phil and Miranda, spent Monday night at two of the city’s hotspots: McNellie’s and the Soundpony, a tavern conveniently located alongside Cain’s Ballroom, a landmark musical venue in Tulsa.
 
When the Soundpony’s bartender, right, learned James was celebrating a birthday (and after he corroborated the claim by scrutinizing James’ Illinois licence), he made James what he claimed was a traditional Soundpony birthday libation: blueberry liqueur served in a hollowed out hotdog.
 
After donning the protective Soundpony hotdog headgear, James threw back one half of the hollowed-out hotdog. Nick was recording the whole event for posterity, so an anonymous fellow Soundpony patron stepped up to the plate and downed the other half. Both men then ate their hotdogs. 
 
James lived to blog another day, though he did wake up with what he claimed was a hotdog-induced headache. The anonymous patron, who did not have the benefit of the protective headgear, was not heard from again.
 
All photos taken in Tulsa, Oklahoma on May 21, 2007.

As we travel through America along the path of old Route 66, theres a lot we see that we dont have time to write about. We thought we could at least share some of what stands out, impresses or amuses us on our journey, so readers can see more than just the blogs we write at the end of each days traveling. Here’s a small selection of shots from our trip from Oklahoma City to Tulsa.

Clockwise from upper left, Bricktown is a revitalized neighborhood of restaurants and bars in downtown Oklahoma City; Hastan Blackshear, 62, has worked at a parking lot in Bricktown for 11 years and witnessed the neighborhoods transformation; the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum is run by the National Park Service and David Albert, a 27-year-old from Rhode Island, is one of the employees; Cains Ballroom is a venerable and storied musical venue in Tulsa. First opened in 1924, it has had everyone from Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys to Asleep at the Wheel to the Sex Pistols appear on its stage. Brad Harris, the ballrooms production manager, gave us a late night tour of the place; mementos attached to a fence outside the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, located on the former site Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The April 19, 1995 bomb attack on the building, which killed 168 people, including 19 children, remains one of the worst attacks on U.S. soil; A Tulsa home that our hosts in the city, Phil and Miranda, told us had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Second half, clockwise from left: Joel and Alfredo enjoying a break outside the Bricktown restaurant where they work;  Betsy McLaughlin and Michael Moser were our lunch servers at the Bricktown Brewery. The place is proud of its ribs, but Betsy and Michael steered us toward the chicken pot pie and the chicken fried steak. We werent disappointed. James had the brewerys red brick ale with his meal; A shot of one end of the outdoor memorial, a haunting tribute to the victims that draws 300,000 visitors a year, according to the National Park service; A public art project in downtown Oklahoma City that celebrates the buffalo, which once roamed wild here; Tulsa is considered one of Oklahoma’s more progressive and liberal places. But its still in the Bible Belt.

On Sunday, we visited First Baptist Church in Moore, Oklahoma. Moore, located a few miles south of Oklahoma City, is perhaps best known for its tornadoes; indeed, the one that ripped through here on May 3, 1999, was one of the strongest ever recorded and was part of a system twisters that killed 40 people in central Oklahoma.

First Baptist is a megachurch. The congregation is counted in the thousands and the 250,000-square-foot church building itself, located on 75 acres, includes a spectacular two-story sanctuary as well as gymnasium with two basketball courts and an events annex that can seat 1,000.  

Walking around the facility, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that Moore is a wealthy suburban enclave. Yet the median family income here was about $47,000  in 2000 , according to the U.S. Census, below the national median of $50,046. This is not Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, the affluent home of Rick Warren, the author of “The Purpose Driven Life.”

The worshippers who call First Baptist home are average Americans. Like so many Americans they don’t believe the mainstream media is in their corner. They say modern television shows undermine the lessons they try to teach their children and they complain that news organizations like Reuters don’t report fairly on the issues they hold dear. 

Yet when we asked to spend the day visiting the church, First Baptist gave us the run of the place. During a five-hour visit, we watched two services, interviewed dozens of worshippers, sat in on a variety of classes and groups, and came away with a greater understanding of the central role faith plays in the lives of Americans like the ones here at the First Baptist Church. Hear the Church band here

More posts from First Baptist tour:
Undecided in Oklahoma City, but an interest in Sen. Brownback
Church goers: Bushs heart in the right place
Mulling the presidential candidates
 

A key part of First Baptist’s community outreach program is its weeknight English as a Second Language program and its Sunday Bible study class for Spanish speakers. Doug Loafman, 49, and his wife, Lucinda (left), 48, public school teachers, are the volunteer coordinators for both.
 
The Loafman’s joined First Baptist when they moved to Oklahoma City from Texas a few years back. Like most of their fellow congregants at First Baptist, the Loafmans lean heavily toward the Republican Party. They put a high value on what they call “character” — something they say they see in President George W. Bush but see less of in the current crop of presidential candidates, both Democrat and Republican.
 
The notable exception? The couple expressed an interest in Senator Sam Brownback, a longshot Republican candidate from Kansas, who opposes abortion and same-sex marriages and said, when announcing his candidacy earlier this year, that “we need to embrace our nation’s motto, ‘In God we trust,’ and not be ashamed of it.”
 
As a result of the work they do with non-natives, the Loafman’s are supporter of immigrant rights.  “We’re more liberal on the immigration issue. We know them as people and they’re honest people. Yes, many of them are illegal. But we have to find a way to make them legal … We’re 12 million people too late.”
 
According to the Baptist Convention of Oklahoma, Hispanics are the fastest-growing group in the church.

The pull that Route 66 exerts on the popular imagination isn’t felt only in the United States. Far from it. According to the staff at the National Route 66 Museum in Elk City, Oklahoma, most of the visitors they see coming through their doors hail from abroad. 
 
On Saturday, it was a stopping point for a cross-country rally sponsored by a Jaguar Club from Europe. 

In all, 66 cars — all shipped to the United States by boat — had entered the rally. The two-person teams in each car had paid 6,000 euros each (about $8,000) for the excursion, which began in May 9 in New York, where their cars arrived by boat, and will end on May 30 in Los Angeles.

Jean Van Der Elt, 60, and his wife Isabella, 43, from Ghent, Belgium, were making the coast-to-coast trek in in their red 1956 Jaguar 140 XK — one of three Jaguars the Van Der Elt’s own. 
 
So far, the 66 cars in the rally hadn’t had suffered any serious mechanical breakdowns during the jaunt — “just the kind of things you expect with an old car,” Jean said.
 
“There’s always something,” Jean said. “Overheating. Carburetion.It’s a little warmer here than in Belgium.”