Ma-and-pa

Road nostalgia was carried to full flower in the press and television reports on the end of 66. These became virtually a genre in themselves: the Lament for Route 66. Sixty-six, we were told, was being bypassed. The road of the Okies and of the migration to California, with its lovely little Ma-and-Pa diners, its motor courts and teepee motels, was being killed by the cold, impersonal Interstates.

If you go into one of those fifty-year-old Ma-and-Pa diners like the Yankee Doodle in New Haven, the walls are covered with signs saving things like “Please don’t put your knapsack on the counter”—more anthropological evidence that people used to put their knapsacks on the counter a lot.

Jim, on the other hand, was a great crusader for the integrity of roadside diners. Ma-and-Pa diners were the best – the backbone of the road, and thus the spine of the North American landscape – however, Husky’s presence right across the continent impressed him.