The HPPR Radio Readers Book Club 2026 Spring Read: 100 Years on the Mother Road came to a close with a panel discussion held on Historic Route 66 in Amarillo at ChapterHouse Books on Saturday, May 2, 2026.
The discussion featured (from left) moderator Kathleen Holt (Cimarron KS); Rachel Jackson (member of the Cherokee Nation and distant cousin to Will Rogers); Sally Shattuck (Ashland, KS); Lauren Pronger (ChapterHouse Books, Amarillo); Miriam Scott (Amarillo, TX) and co-host Lynn Boitano (Edmond, OK).Glenda Shepherd (Yucca Corners Farm, Stanton Co, KS) was unable to attend the finale event but served as a book leader for the series.
Books explored in the discussion included Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck; The American Dream: A Journey on Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Men, and the Perfect Breakfast Burrito by Shing Yin Khor; and Never Met a Man I Didn't Like: The Life and Writings of Will Rogers by Will Rogers, Joseph H. Carter, with intro by Jim Rogers.
Sponsors for the event included Morgan Williamson Law and the J F Maddox Foundation.
During the month that followed, listeners shared memories of Route 66 such as the following piece taken from a Radio Readers BookByte by Ks Reflector columnist Max McCoy.
In the meantime, as you recall your own memories of the road, enjoy the recorded book discussion in its entirety.
On warm nights when my bedroom window was open, I could hear the endless stream of vehicles on Route 66. We lived in a small house at the east edge of Baxter Springs and across the street from my window was a pasture and on nights when there wasn’t any wind the sound of escape — the rushing of tires, the shifting of gears, the bellowing exhaust of trucks hauling goods to Oklahoma or Missouri — swept across the field with the night breeze.
During the summer I would spend those nights reading, John Steinbeck and Harper Lee and the Saturday Evening Post and stacks of comic books, all to the sound of the highway, until the sun crowned the trees at the far end of the pasture. That was when I was reminded of how small my world actually was, a city of a few thousand clustered around the most iconic road in America.
It seemed as if I were trapped on an island in the stream of commerce, adventure and danger that was Route 66. I was filled with anxiety. I both longed for and feared the day that I too would be swept along to an unknown shore in the unfolding of time. Interstate 44 had bypassed the town years before, leaving Baxter a backwater, but if you were bound for where the sun rises, or where it sets, the only way out of town was 66.
This year is the centennial of Route 66 and I’ve been thinking of the highway, which already seemed ancient when I was growing up, and how it shaped me. Described as “an agent of social transformation” by the National Park Service, the 2,400-mile long route began in Chicago and ended at the Santa Monica Pier.
The highway crosses just 13 miles of Kansas, cutting across the extreme southeastern corner of the state on its way from Missouri to Oklahoma. Just three Kansas towns were on the route: Galena, Riverton and Baxter Springs.
The Kansas section of Route 66 is less than 1% of its total length, but to my childhood self it represented the whole world.
