Sugar Alliance honors ‘Mother Road’
August 10, 2015 |06:30 PM
American Sugar Alliance Executive Director Vickie Myers and her daughter Grace pose on the motorcycle that was available for pictures as part of the “Get Your Kicks On Route 66” dinner and dance last week at the International Sweetener Symposium in Santa Ana Pueblo, N.M. (Jerry Hagstrom/The Hagstrom Report)
The American Sugar Alliance paid homage to the “Main Street of America” last week with a “Get Your Kicks on Route 66” dinner and dance, part of the International Sweetener Symposium held in Santa Ana Pueblo, N.M.
The dinner buffet was composed of foods from stops along Route 66, which was established in 1926 as one of the country’s first highways.
The road, abandoned as a thoroughfare once the interstate system was completed, connected Chicago to Santa Monica, Calif., by way of rural towns in Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, covering more than 2,000 miles.
In 1938, it become the first highway to be completely paved from beginning to end.
Route 66 became known as the “Mother Road” after the publication of John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” which documented the travails of poor tenant farmers from Oklahoma migrating west along the road during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, hoping to find employment in California’s fertile fields.
