Route 66 Diner Owners Share What They Love About The All-American Nostalgic Road Trip

  Roy Maynard

People don’t visit Route 66 to change America; they come to be changed by it.

Janice Mollet doesn’t know how many people come through the restored Valentine Diner at the National Route 66 Museum in Elk City, Oklahoma. But her friend and fellow museum volunteer Sharon Brown pointed to a box of hundreds of push pins sitting on a shelf near wall maps of the U.S. and the world.

Mollet and Brown greet every summer visitor to this obligatory stop along Route 66, the Mother Road, and they invite each visitor to put in a pin — not necessarily to mark where they’re from, but to mark how far they’ve come in search of America.

“By the end of the summer, every one of those pins will be in those maps,” Brown said. “People come from everywhere.”

There’s never been a better time for American families to get on the road. So gather up the family. Drive past a few cornfields and hay meadows this summer. It’s good for the soul — and good for the country.

Your trip doesn’t have to be down Route 66, but it could be. Oh, and leave the politics behind. On that early summer Friday that Mollet and Brown were running the diner, President Donald Trump’s relationship with billionaire Elon Musk was blowing up. But along the broken stretch of Route 66 that runs between Oklahoma City and Amarillo, the escalating feud counted for absolutely nothing. The women held court in the converted and relocated 1950s diner just as if it were 1958 and Dwight D. Eisenhower were still president. The working Wurlitzer jukebox, which features The Four Tops, Pat Boone, and other classics, still only costs a quarter.

The building is a prefab steel diner made by a Kansas company. It began its life as Porter House Café in a nearby town, closing just eight years later.

“The diners cost $5,000,” the Oklahoma Historical Society explains. “Those who purchased and operated Valentine Diners agreed to place 10% of their daily gross income in a lock box at the diner’s front door to make payments over a period of time. Each month, a Valentine Company representative — the only person with a key to the lockbox — would stop by train, open the box, and send the collected payments to the manufacturer.”

The diner was acquired and restored by the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum, opening at the new location in 2003. Now it only sells candy and soda, but it’s a can’t-miss stop for cheesy tourist photos.

Brown considered what brings people to this small Midwest town of just over 11,000. She knows Elk City’s currently not on the way from anywhere to anywhere else — at least, not since the interstates were built. But once, the town was an important stop on the national highway that linked Chicago to Santa Monica. Some of Route 66’s former glory remains in the preserved, restored, and sometimes faked artifacts of the era.

“People come here looking for the kitsch — for the Americana,” Brown said. “Some arrive here with lists of the things they want to see and places they want to go, like they’ve been planning it for years. And they seem so happy to be here.”

Mollet has made the trip on Route 66 from her home in Oklahoma to its end in Santa Monica, California. But she’s never been the other way: from Elk City to Chicago. She said she’d like to do that next year, when Route 66 celebrates its centennial. The magic of Route 66 isn’t lost, not even on her.