I first met St. Louis indirectly, through the work of Thomas Wolfe, who wrote about St. Louis in Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and in a later novella, "Lost Boy."

Wolfe’s mother had separated from his alcoholic father around the time of the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. Moving to St. Louis to make a life for her children, Mrs. Wolfe opened a boarding house on Fairmont (later, Cates) Avenue to house visitors to the World’s Fair. (In Look Homeward, Angel, he transposed its site to his native Asheville, North Carolina.) Wolfe’s memories of St. Louis were vivid: "the smell of tar; the hot and caulky dryness of the old cracked ties, the boards of backyard fences and the coarse and sultry grass."

In "Lost Boy," two teenagers are out on their own on Route 66: "We rode the whole way down into the business section of St. Louis.... We…walked up and down, down to Union Station...and clear over to the river...both of us half scared to death at what we’d done and wondering what mamma would say if she found out. Two skinny little kids...getting the thrill of a life time."

My next impression of St. Louis had come from "Meet Me in St. Louis," the 1944 MGM musical with Judy Garland, star of The Wizard of Oz. The song which titled the film ("Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis") helped put St. Louis on the map; but it was river trade and railroads which made St. Louis.

"A city was planted by a river," wrote English journalist Mick Brown, evoking St. Louis, before Route 66.

"Industry and commerce flourished; the teeming masses settled hard by the factories; the wealthy built their homes on the hill. The center of town became the hub of commercial enterprise, social activity, entertainment. But time, and the tyranny of the motor car, had rendered the old topography meaningless. The city had been gripped by some irresistible centrifugal force that had flung everything to the outer perimeters."

"Route 66 is certainly a two-way road," says Michael Wallis, author of the best-selling book, Route 66: America’s Mother Road. "For most of us road warriors, we find the preferred direction of travel to be West…. Route 66 is more than just a span of years and concrete: it’s what happened there before we connected the dots and put this road together in 1926. That’s very, very important--to know it’s such an old path, before it was Route 66 in many stretches."