Searching for The Route 66 Storyteller…

        

  EXCERPT from Searching for 66 by Tom Teague: 

  […I tuned my car radio to the Santa Rosa station. After a conventional newsbrief at 5, it featured a most unusual show by a most unusual man: ‘The Old Route 66 Hour’ with Ron Chavez. I reached town in just a few minutes, but entranced, kept driving back and forth along the main drag until the whole hour had passed.Ron Chavez, I learned, owned the Club Café on 66 in Santa Rosa. I’d bypassed it for breakfast that morning, though the large, circular painting of a smiling fat man above the door had seemed attractively tacky. I’d thought about going there for supper; soon there was no question.The show’s announcer served as disc jockey and interviewer. 

He played “Kawliga,” then invited Ron to talk about his café.“The Club Café is for real,” Ron said sincerely and with the lightest trace of a Spanish accent. “Fifty-one years in the same location. But we’ve been bypassed. A huge freeway zooms right past us. Radio’s the only way we can tell you about our sourdough biscuits. We know their starter is at least twenty years old – it may be fifty – and they are a real treat. Fresh, hot sourdough biscuits with honey is a true experience. (Did he pause ever so briefly to let listeners smack their lips?)It’s the goldrush days again. It’s the daring mountain man. It’s you at the Club Café munching sourdough biscuits.” The DJ played “Wabash Cannonball.” Ron talked about his gravy: “A French chef has complimented it. We’ve never had somebody tell us it was not good.” Helen Reddy sang a tune; Ron bragged about his salsa. After “Streets of El Paso,” the announcer posed a question.“Tell us, Ron – what makes Club Café chile so right, so delicious, so doggone special?” “Customers have told me horror stories about how it’s cooked elsewhere,” came the soft tones. “But when we set out to make chile, we started analyzing it. My grandma can make you a bowl of chile that is just something heavenly. A lot of people can say that, though. But what are you going to do when you make it in hundreds of gallons? This is where the test comes in. Yeah. You have to make it different. There’s a different chemistry involved in the cooking. So we worked on it and evolved it and created it.”Another brief pause for lipsmacking. “When we set out to feed people, Mike, we set our standards high. Well, the only standard you can set when you’re feeding people is to satisfy their appetites. What you get at the Club Café represents chile cooked with a lot of love, a lot of care. And we want to make sure when you eat the chile that it satisfies your appetite.”

“One bowl of red chile,” I said to the waitress right after the show. Ron wasn’t at the café that night, but by the cash register I found a business card with his home phone number on it. Back at my motel, I called him. From those first moments on the phone and throughout the nine hours of conversation Ron and I would eventually have, the talk flowed full, fast and smooth – like there would never be enough time for it all.…Next morning I came down to the café early for breakfast. The Club has no plastic mansards, no backlit menus, no trim that was stamped out on a press, or peeled out of a mould. The café’s sign used to be neon, but is now white block letters. Flush above the windows which run the building’s length and breadth, a Navajo-style rendering of a road runner is repeated several times. Interrupting the design above the entrance, on a seven-foot wooden circle is a head-and-shoulders painting of the Fat Man – a double-chinned, no-neck fellow with a receding hairline, almond eyes, well-padded cheeks, and an enigmatic wedge of a smile. He may or may not have just eaten – I couldn’t tell. But he was thinking about it and he was happy. After biscuits with chile-flecked gravy, so was I.…

“Who is the Fat Man?” I asked.  “The Fat Man is more famous than the rest of us put together,” Ron said, extending a palm grandly toward the sign. “He used to be on twenty-six billboards! But he’s strictly a figment of the original owner’s imagination. Phil Craig wanted to create an image. He wanted to have this man with a white napkin spread across with his arms sticking up, getting ready to dig into a big, big steak.” Ron tucked in an imaginary napkin and held up invisible utensils, a constant choreographer of his speech. Craig never did get the look he was after, Ron said, but he did create a look which no one’s since been able to duplicate: a smile at least as mysterious as the Mona Lisa’s – and seen by millions more in person. The Fat Man isn’t Ron, as some people think, but he could well be a Chavez.  “I never had an inkling what impact the Fat Man had on people, though, until Lady Bird Johnson introduced highway beautification.” Ron said. “I got letters from all over the country – You can’t imagine! – for me to send that face at any cost collect. That’s when I realized how important he was.”

From that realization grew a movement which, said Ron, saved not only the Fat Man, but all billboards along all American highways. …“I went out there and they were chopping on my boards. They were actually chopping on them. And I thought, “Here’s an old, old tradition about to disappear.” So being a fighter and having nothing to lose, I protested – I filed an injunction to stop it. At the time, I had no idea how I would stop it permanently. But Route 66 would have lost a lot of its flavor without the Fat Man.”  That simple, lone act of protest soon put Ron in the national forefront of people protesting highway “beautification.” He wrote letters, called congressmen, and traveled to hearings as far away as Washington, DC. Fellow Santa Rosa merchants even sponsored his trip to the final, decisive hearing in Dallas. One of the few private citizens there amidst batteries of government officials and sign company lawyers, Ron gave testimony which turned the tide.Back at the café, my host jabbed his index fingers down and brought them together for emphasis. “And all I did was tell the story of Route 66…of people,” he said. “Everybody was allowed fifteen minutes, but all I spoke was five. I concentrated. I said, ‘Look, we’re just folks out here in little bitty towns. Insignificant to the big picture. But we’re folks. And it’s a way of life.’ “I said, ‘Let me give you the history of my people. We were farmers in the little village of Puerto de Luna. Along came the trucks that would haul produce and goods across the country, so it was no longer profitable for us to raise crops on those little farms.  “In the meantime, Route 66 was established and a tourist business developed and we got into it. We moved to Santa Rosa and became dishwashers and cooks. We weren’t even owners yet – we came in through the bottom.

“Then the interstate came – and another major upheaval. Done by somebody else making the decision. No consideration as to what it was going to do to the economic system of the people, to the traditions. You take 66 away and bypass us and the only way we have to tell people about us is the billboards. Now you want to remove them, too!”  The triumph flashed brand new across Ron’s face. “That brought the house down,” he said. “I told them, ‘Look what you’re doing to us! You’re going to dry up the little towns which add flavor to anybody’s travels. Do you want us all to move to the cities and live like rats? Or are we going to sustain a rural people?” “And I never once used the restaurant. Never once did I mention it. I touched on us as a people, as a way of life, as a tradition. And would you believe that they still haven’t taken action on the billboards? It’s still in suspense!”Ron leaned back, arms propped on the booth’s cushions, and relaxed in victory remembered.  “I started getting calls from all over the country to go speak on this because no one had thought of that approach,” he said. “But I didn’t take them up. I didn’t want to be away from my business that long. I told them to just pick up the same theme. I told them if they can’t tell their own story, then I certainly am not.”

A hard judgment, seemingly, but the only owners who’ve survived along 66, Ron said, are the workers and the fighters.

“I started out at the Club as a shoeshine boy out front,” he said. “Came in as a dishwasher, a bus boy, and learned how to cook. Then I left the scene. I was in California eighteen years. When I came back, I came back with new eyes and a fresh mind. I had to promote. Before, when 66 went by, you didn’t have to do that. You would just open the doors and – bingo! – you were full.

“That’s when I came up with the radio show idea. Route 66 really was a cross section. And when you count who crossed it, then you have the whole country. So I talked about the highway on my show. And by golly, it worked. It started to work. People started coming and finding us again. Most of them were old customers – they’d just got disoriented.”

As a hedge against the interstate’s onslaught, Ron has built a new restaurant, the Red Rooster, just off the superhighway’s eastern exit ramp to Santa Rosa. Operating on the “Summer makes it and winter takes it” principle, he’s in the black. But Ron thinks the Clubs future will always be perilous and even the Red Rooster may not survive. As the noon crowd came in, he explained why he has such doubt. It’s a problem which he calls the “Blanding of America.”

“They tell me if this restaurant were anywhere else, you couldn’t get into the place,” he said. “A man told me if I moved this restaurant to New Orleans, I would be a wealthy man. Bt I’m not there and I don’t want to be there. I came back here and I have a very good life here.“But I think this one-of-a-kind restaurant is disappearing fast. It’s too labor intensive. The average cook in my organization has been here over eight years. I have to give my people good direction. I have to find ways to get them to take pride in their position. They have to love pleasing people with food. They have to take pride in those plates.”

He sighed. “They built a Pizza Hut in Santa Rosa not long ago. That’s a sign. They all have absentee owners. They’re faceless. They have no personality. You just see some little gal there with a cute hat and a name tag. That’s it. And that’s what you’re gonna see across country.”I speculated there might be an innate need for places like the Club.“I certainly hope you’re right, Tom,” Ron said. “But you just survive – you have to thrive. I’m riding on the seat of my pants now. It gets thinner and thinner and I can’t ell you how much longer we’ll be able to exist.  “See we’re not educated people here. We don’t have a business tradition. We don’t have a large inheritance. This is our life. You see the la-a-ast of it, the last … of needing to have it. When that vanishes, so will Route 66. The minute they put a McDonald’s in this town, that’s gonna be the punch. You can kiss my ass good-by.”  I’d never seen a man face a gloomy prospect like that with such gusto.“I’m in my own envelope here,” Ron explained. “In the good old days, if you didn’t have a desire to go to California, you weren’t a good New Mexican. So I went and managed a meat department in a grocery store in Monterey for eighteen years.”“But I wanted to come ho-ome,” he said, bringing the word safely in with a wave of his fist.  “I realized that when I started to write. I was trying to write about people and places back here and it wasn’t working. So I came home.“I like the semi-desert. I know there’s more beautiful wooded lands and things like that. But I like the semi-desert. I like to go out on the llana – the plains. I like to give people tours of it and show them things they wouldn’t notice on their own. It’s one of the driest and flattest areas in the country, but the contrasts make it beautiful. Knowing that your family’s been here for four or five centuries helps, too.”  I mentioned that on my own tour the day before, I had seen a large cross on a distant mesa. Ron was amazed.“That’s part of the mystique of my tours!” he said. “When I was a little kid, I walked up the hill to that cross. It’s huge and it’s white and I have never found anybody who knows why it’s there. So on my tours, I’ve manufactured stories.”I said I’d love to go on one of those tours and hear a few of those stories. Ron had a full afternoon of appointments, but asked me to come back at 6 for dinner – he’d do the ordering – and then we’d go on a Chavez Special Tour of the New Mexican back country.   Dinner, for which I arrived punctually, featured salsa and green chile for appetizers, a chile relleno, a tamale, an enchilada with shredded – not ground – meat and carne adovada, which is pork marinated in pure red chile. For dessert, there were sopapillas and apple pie ala mode sprinkled with cinnamon. I lost ten pounds during my search for 66, but certainly none of them at the Club Café.  On our way to Puerto de Luna after dinner, the late sun darkened one side of the road while giving the other side its most brilliant colors of the day. Land of contrasts, Ron said, land of enchantment. He pointed out rock streams – flows of boulders down mesa sides which might take a thousand years to reach the bottom. Yet Ron can tell when they move. He pointed out a broad spread of mesquite being strangled by the sand which its foliage caught from the wind piled up. “That’ll be a desert someday unless they take the mesquite out.” Ron said. Driving on, he explained how junipers survive on otherwise barren slopes by trapping rainfall in natural rock cisterns.  We poked the car through the same herd of cows as the day before and got into Puerto de Luna just as the sun was setting. Standing at a corner of a 200-year-old adobe, Ron showed me how the bricks had fused together over the generations.“Someday, I plan to retire from the Club Café and write a novel about this area,” he said, propping an arm on the moldering adobe. …“You know something?” he finally said, “They call America a melting pot. But I see it more as a mosaic. We fit together some, like a puzzle. But we’re still separate peoples with our own edges. That’s what makes this country beautiful. That’s what makes us strong.”  Route 66 in its earliest form was also a mosaic – a motley, ill-fitting gathering of contiguous bits of road, trail, path and avenue. But just as concrete bound it together, 66 became the glue which bound the larger mosaic called America. Now that glue is cracking. … In Ron’s future book, one seat-of-the-pants survivor tells the story of another. But who will come along when Ron’s an old man and tell his story? Who will survive the Blanding of America?

———————- 

Afternote:  Ron Chavez’s Club Café did not survive the blanding of America. McDonald’s came into town, just as Ron had predicted, and that was the end of his way of life. Disillusioned, depressed and displaced, he left Santa Rosa and landed in the mountains above Taos where his desperate Spirit was revived. Reconnecting with the land, he rose from the ashes of blandness like a beautiful Phoenix, brilliant and bold and flying high again. He’s now working on his writing full-time, and his book of poetry and short stories is about to be published.