Samantha Brown's Places to Love

-I'm traveling a destination that offers an incredible road-trip adventure.

But not just any road trip, the road trip, that long and winding American icon that beckons us all.

It travels through eight states, starting in Chicago and ending in California.

And since I don't have the time to go the whole way, I'm gonna focus on the first state, which will give me the full experience in the short time I have.

It's the place where the "Mother Road" journey began and, for me, begins.

I'm in the state of Illinois, driving its share of the famous Route 66.

I'm Samantha Brown, and I've traveled all over this world, and I'm always looking to find the destinations, the experiences, and, most importantly, the people who make us feel like we're really a part of a place.

That's why I have a love of travel and why these are my places to love.

"Samantha Brown's Places to Love" is made possible by... [ Birds chirping ] -Oceania Cruises is a proud sponsor of public TV and "Samantha Brown's Places to Love."

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Oceania Cruises offers gourmet dining and curated travel experiences aboard boutique, hotel-style ships that carry no more than 1,250 guests.

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[ Engine starts, revs ] I'm beginning my Illinois road trip along the famous Route 66... in jail.

This is Old Joliet Prison, about 40 miles southwest of Chicago.

It's now a destination for non-felons, and my guide this morning, Dennis Wolff, actually used to be its warden.

-I really wanted this facility as an assignment, and I really wanted to stay as long as I possibly could.

-Why?

-I loved the architecture.

It was, like, crazy, but I just wanted to be part of it.

-The community saved the empty prison from destruction after years of advocacy.

-There was a real drive to, "Let's just take it all down and start from whatever."

And I said, "No, you can't do that.

Historically, you just can't do it."

-Local volunteers gave 20,000 hours of free time to keep this unique asset standing.

So, Dennis, the reason why I'm here is because Joliet Prison is the very first scene of one of the greatest films of all times, "The Blues Brothers."

And you were actually the warden... -Yes.

-...of this prison during the filming of that movie.

And did you actually personally get to work with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi as they created this?

-Their key phrase was -- I'd ask them about something and they'd say, "I don't know."

And I'd ask John Landis what he was thinking about, and he says, "I'm not sure."

-[ Laughs ] -And I'd think, "Well, what the hell is going on here?

What do you mean you don't know and 'I'm not sure'?"

-I have to be sure!

-I got to know what's going on.

But they were -- You know, it was all congenial.

It all fit.

-Right.

-Well, they were on a mission from God.

-They definitely were.

Yeah.

-And speaking of a mission, it's time to be on my way.

But I won't be going it alone.

We'll be spending four days discovering Illinois on Route 66.

Two women... moms... but no kids.

This is going to be great.

Now, of course, Route 66 begins in Chicago, and it winds on down to L.A., or Santa Monica.

But we've been to Chicago, Christina and I, many times, so we wanted to start in Joliet just because we wanted to be out of the city and into it right away.

-Oh, super-excited, yeah.

-Headed out on the road.

Christina and I have been on the road with one another for, I mean, close to what, 17 years?

-17 years.

-Crazy.

Christina is my longtime stylist, and we have fearlessly traveled the world together.

But road trips are different, and so to get our bearings at the start of the trip, we're stopping in at the Polk-a-Dot Diner to meet a man who knows this road forwards and backwards.

-I'm John Weiss.

I'm the author of the only guidebook of Route 66 of Illinois.

I'm also the chairman of the preservation committee for the Route 66 Association of Illinois.

-So, we have actually made it to page 25 of your guidebook.

I had no idea how confusing Route 66 is.

-I-55 was slowly replacing Route 66, and, eventually, it did here in Illinois.

After that, it was completely decommissioned and taken off all maps nationwide.

-This is why your guidebook is so important, because it's like turn-by-turn navigation and choose your own adventure all at once, right?

So, Route 66 started in Illinois?

-Yep.

Well, it started -- The whole thing was all laid out already, but the idea was to end up having it paved all the way to California.

So Illinois was the first state to finally be paved.

-When did people like you realize, "Wait a minute.

We need to save what we have.

This is a part of our past"?

-We noticed all these tourists coming, and they wanted to see these old gas stations, but they were deteriorating.

So we formed an organization and decided to save what we could and promote what we could.

It was 60% of our travelers are from other countries, and, of course, I met a lot of them throughout the 30 years I've been doing this.

And I said, "Why?"

-Why are you here?

-"Why do you come halfway around the world?"

"We want to see Americana."

-Wow.

-Well, what is Americana?

They don't even know what they're looking for themselves.

-Uh-huh.

-And so we've tried to create, in Illinois, Americana as it really was.

-You have a whole new generation of people who want to understand what this road was, because of the nostalgia, the small, the local, like a place called the Polk-a-Dot Drive In.

I mean, it doesn't get any better than this.

When people come to Route 66, what do you hope they enjoy?

-I know they're gonna stop at a lot of our preservation projects -Pull over!

Pull over!

[ Tires screech ] -I know a memory is gonna be made over there, and they're there because of us.

If we didn't do that, there'd be nothing to see.

They don't want to see the new stuff.

They want to see the old stuff.

Route 66 is a way to go from one spot to another, and each place has got people.

You put the people and places together, now, when you two are on the road, that's what you've got to do.

You've got to stop at a place, but don't just look at it and take a picture.

Talk to a local.

They'll talk back to you, and you're gonna have a great time.

-Route 66 in Illinois is kind of unique.

Before it was Route 66, it was called the Pontiac Trail, named after Chief Pontiac, and it went from Chicago, where the Chief Pontiac Building is, to St. Louis, where Chief Pontiac is buried.

So the chief is kind of our connection and what ties all this together.

I'm Tim Dye, the executive director of the Pontiac-Oakland Museum in Pontiac, Illinois.

It all stemmed back to when I was 16.

I got a 1968 GTO.

And I've been in love with Pontiacs ever since.

-I'm really hating my minivan right now.

-My wife says I'm narrow-minded.

I say focused.

-Gosh, they've got buggies, too?

A Pontiac buggy?

-It started in 1893 with the Pontiac Buggy Company, and then the Pontiac car in 1926.

We have two Pontiac buggies and one sleigh.

-1890s.

The only one known to exist.

Tim and his wife own 30 Pontiacs, with another 50 being donated.

-We have nearly every shop manual, every owner's manuals, parts books, dealer technical bulletins, color chips, press-release kits, showroom brochures, magazine by year, of course, heavy on Pontiac content.

And that's why this museum is so important, because there needs to be a place that all these things can be cataloged and cared for and shared with the public.

-While in Pontiac, Christina and I visited another place where the past is cared for -- Bob Waldmire's Land Yacht.

Waldmire was a disciple of Route 66 and his famous artwork can be seen, bought, and experienced no matter what part of it you're on.

And I have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot more of Bob's work on this trip.

-What's that?

-It's a sauna.

[ Both laugh ] -We're starting Day 2 of our Route 66 road trip through Illinois with our most important task of the day -- the stocking up of road-trip snacks.

Coming in at 30,000 square feet, Wally's does not disappoint.

That is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

Okay, you start on that end.

I'll start on this end.

-Garlic beef.

-Honey-jalapeo.

-Grab two of those.

-Teriyaki beef.

-Korean beef?

-One more?

What's it gonna be?

Should we do, like, a surprise flavor?

-I think so.

Chocolate.

-In between devouring way too much beef jerky, Christina and I discover more of Route 66, Illinois.

-This was the edge of town in the '20s and '30s.

There were actually six places you could get gasoline in this three-block area, and they all stayed in business.

So that will tell you how busy that little two-lane road was.

I'm Terri Ryburn, and I have my doctorate in history.

I wrote my dissertation about Route 66, "Route 66, 1926 to the Present: The Road as Local History."

Hello.

Welcome.

-Hello.

How are you?

-Fine.

How are you doing?

-Good.

-Wonderful.

Welcome to Normal, Illinois.

Sprague's Super Service was built in 1930 by local contractor named William W. Sprague.

Now, at that time, Cities Service already had a standardized building, which was essentially a rectangle of cinder blocks.

But this man built what he wanted, and what he wanted was a Tudor Revival-style building.

-Terri always loved Sprague's and unexpectedly purchased it when it went on sale.

-So, I made a very low offer and I didn't think the woman who was selling it would accept it.

Well, she did accept it, so, oops, I accidentally bought a building.

-It's now a gift shop selling all local arts and crafts.

But please don't try to fill up your gas tank.

-Those are replicas.

-Wow.

-The pumps were taken out in the mid-'70s.

-So, these are the postcards I keep seeing.

-Oh, Bob Waldmire.

Are you familiar with him?

-Well, we saw his yacht.

-Oh, yes.

I knew Bob very well.

-You knew him?

-Yeah, I was actually on that land yacht once.

-Really?

-Can you tell the stories or do we not remember them?

-Well, I'll just say that there was an offer of some medicinal herbs.

-[ Laughs ] Time to be on our way again with just a few purchases for Christina.

-Souvenirs for the kids.

-Hi.

-Hi.

How are you?

-I'm good.

How are you?

-Excellent.

We were driving by, and, all of a sudden, there was trees.

And I realized, "Oh, these are maple trees."

-Yeah.

-And then we saw maple-syrup sign.

-Yeah.

It is unusual for there to be a big grove of maple trees in Illinois.

-Okay.

Then I wasn't crazy.

-No, no, not at all.

-Yeah.

-But Funks Grove is a native timber.

It was here long before the settlers ever arrived.

So, pure maple syrup has been sold here since the 1890s.

-Which I just realized completely predates Route 66, and everything we've been seeing has been because of Route 66.

-Right.

-Funks is the largest producer of maple syrup in Illinois and is about the furthest south and west you can be to make maple syrup.

-Mmm!

-So, that's our pure maple syrup.

-Oh!

Oh, that is so, so good.

Whoa!

-I'm glad you like it.

-You spell syrup with an "I"?

-With an "I."

That's right.

When Webster wrote his first dictionary, he had both spellings, and the "I" spelling was defined as the product made by boiling sap, and the "Y" spelling was defined as the product made by adding sugar to fruit juice.

But the woman who owned this property, Hazel Funk -- she put it in a perpetual trust.

She wanted it spelled with an "I," because as far as she was concerned, that was the correct spelling.

-Yeah.

Funks Maple Sirup has been family-owned by the Funks and still made on their property since the very beginning.

What do you love about being on Route 66?

-Already this year, we've had people from Germany and Italy and just everywhere.

And when we first started getting these travelers, I was like, "I wonder why.

You know, why are they coming over?"

And most of them said it's because they can drive so far between towns, whereas in Europe, everything is very close together.

So they love the openness of it and they love seeing the midsection of the United States that they would never see otherwise.

-The nostalgia of Route 66 is mostly for the '30s to the '60s, but Christina and I are making a pit stop in McLean, Illinois, where it's the '80s.

Got an extra man!

-Perfect score!

-I'm John Yates.

I'm the owner of Arcadia, America's Playable Arcade Museum, and I own 1,700 arcade games.

Most of the games in here are between 1979 and 1995.

That's when the real golden age of video games was, in my opinion.

I'm trying to focus on having the most popular, most well-known games in here so that they'll -- the best chance of connecting with people's nostalgia when they walk in.

-Yeah, look at that, look at that, look at that.

John's dream is to make McLean, Illinois, an arcade mecca, where every building in the downtown area has an arcade-related attraction.

-I've bought almost the entire downtown here, and as long as God gives me breath, my plan is to just continue adding and adding and that's family-oriented.

That's what I want to have here.

-Oh!

[ Both laugh ] -Route 66 through Illinois takes you through some of the most important history of our country.

-You really can't understand America without understanding Abraham Lincoln's impact on America.

He changed the future of the presidency.

He reshaped what it meant to be an American citizen.

And he did that through seminal documents, like the Emancipation Proclamation and, of course, the 13th Amendment.

I'm Christina Shutt, and I'm the executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

I'm the proud descendant of enslaved women going back to 1791, and so, for me, it's more than just about telling the story of Abraham Lincoln.

It's really about telling the story of my family and how the decisions of Abraham Lincoln shaped and gave freedom to my family.

-One of the things you learn through the museum is that Abraham Lincoln was not as beloved a president as he is today.

America was an extremely divided nation, and that division carried through to his own cabinet, which you can witness in the re-creation of his cabinet room.

-He's reading the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet members.

In many ways, these men's opinions represent kind of different factions within the United States.

Some people thought that the emancipation didn't go far enough.

They thought that it should go further.

There were others that thought it went way too far, it was an overreach of executive powers.

-I find it really interesting that some of the men here felt that, yes, enslaved people should be freed, but they should leave.

-Oh, yeah, colonization was a very popular idea at the time.

In fact, Abraham Lincoln was someone who believed in colonization, and it's only really after he sees the bravery of Black soldiers fighting literally for their lives.

And it's things like that that begin to change his mind and to shift from supporting colonization to supporting the idea of, "What does it look like to build a United States?"

-Mm-hmm.

-Museums really help shape who we want to be as a community by telling us who we were in the past.

-So, we're traveling Route 66 right now, and it's all about freedom.

It's all about going where the day takes us, going and talking to mom and pops and every shop we want to, but that was a very different experience a long time ago for any Black travelers.

-Yes, it was.

The mom and pops were still important, but that was also during the time of Jim Crow.

And so Black travelers had to be very strategic in their travels.

And so in order to make it to a mom and pop that actually would service them, they had to use a resource like "The Negro Motorist Green Book."

-Dr. Stacy Grundy's background is in public health, and she is one of the three founders of this essential museum.

-"The Green Book" actually was used nationwide, as well, and toward the end -- I think the last edition was published in the 1960s, and so it actually had international destinations.

-A part of this story you're telling is also the success, right?

There was a lot of resilience and a lot of business ownership from Black Americans owning their own businesses.

-Yes.

There were so many diverse Black businesses during that time, and I think it was because of Jim Crow and because communities need services.

-Mm-hmm.

-So, because this is a story that not many people are familiar with, we always open up with our Windows to History.

It's like, "This is what was happening during that time," just letting them know where they come from, who they come from.

And while Route 66 definitely is a road of opportunity, the way travelers maneuvered depending on the color of their skin was very different.

What we really hope is that everyone will be able to find their story in the road.

-Cozy Dog started here in Springfield in 1946.

This restaurant right here opened in 1949.

And I grew up in the restaurant.

Me and my brothers did.

All my kids did.

My mom and dad worked side by side developing this thing.

Now we've become a go-to spot.

I'm Buzz Waldmire, and I'm the owner of the Cozy Dog Drive In, in Springfield, Illinois.

Retired owner.

I've been relegated to dishwasher and table wiper, which is fine with me.

-Your sign says, "Better than corn dogs."

-Mm-hmm.

-Why is that?

-Basically, they're made fresh when you order them.

Anything that's made fresh is better than frozen.

Most corn dogs -- they're pre-made, thrown back in a fryer to reheat.

The other thing a lot of fast-food businesses do -- they put a lot of sugar.

There's very little sugar in these.

-Okay.

What's so nice is, you got that flavor of the hot dog, the softness of the corn, but there's a slight crust.

It's a little crunch while you bite in.

The Cozy Dog was created by Buzz's father, Ed Waldmire, in 1946.

He developed the special batter, as well as the unique way of frying the dogs vertically with his invention, the Cozy Irons.

But his father isn't the only famous one in the family.

Bob Waldmire, whose artwork we've seen all over Route 66, was Buzz's older brother.

He passed away in 2009, but what a legacy he left.

When did your brother fall in love with this route?

-Yeah, I would say in 19-- The late '80s.

My brother always wanted to support the downtrodden.

So, he saw businesses and places along Route 66 bypassed by the interstates.

Small towns began to die.

And so that's what really drew him to Route 66 was helping to promote it and bring life back to a dying highway.

-Far more than a roadside attraction, Cozy Dog is a local icon with chairs and booths filled with people who've been coming here for generations.

-I get to talk to so many people, you know, from all over the country and all over the world.

-We're from the Netherlands.

-The Netherlands?

-Yeah.

-My brother drew a postcard of the Netherlands a long time ago.

-Oh!

-Did he do a postcard of the Cozy Dog?

-He did three or four of them of the Cozy Dog.

-Oh, okay.

-Yeah, he did.

Yeah.

-I hope so.

Driving along Route 66, you start to expect the unexpected, like this mile-and-a-half stretch outside Auburn that's been paved with red bricks since 1931.

But I never expected to be driving along flat Illinois roads and, all of a sudden, coming across this.

These earthen mounds, currently a UNESCO World Heritage Site, are what remains of the most sophisticated prehistoric native civilization north of Mexico, known today as Cahokia.

-About 1,000 years ago, 10,000 to 20,000 people lived in this area.

-Whoa!

-And they constructed about 120 mounds on the landscape.

And they created all these monumental features, like Monks Mound over here and the palisade walls.

This wall here was two miles long, and it used a lot of poles, about 20,000 poles in total.

There's three different styles.

We have a platform mound, which is flat on the top, and those were used for important structures on top -- temple houses, important people, council houses, whatever.

-Do we know what happened to them?

-We know that they were here for about 150 years, and then they slowly started to leave for some reason.

-Okay.

Alright.

-We do know that the climate changed a little bit at that time.

So maybe the agriculture was failing a little bit, more competition for resources and things like that.

-So, Monks Mound really stands apart.

Is that the highest elevation?

-That's the biggest one.

It's about 100 feet tall.

-When we climb Monks Mound, what do you think we should be thinking of as we climb it?

-I think you should be thinking about what it would have been like to be here 1,000 years ago, with all these bustling things going on, and just imagine just all the people and the activity that was taking place.

-We made it to the end of our journey -- the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge.

Built in 1929, it stretches across the Mississippi to St. Louis and Missouri, the next state on Route 66.

But that's another road trip.

So, this is the end.

This is the end of Route 66 in Illinois.

-No!

-I know.

I love this bridge.

-It's beautiful.

-It's a mile long.

Could you imagine driving across this bridge?

It once was a milestone for long-distance travelers.

Today, it's pedestrian only, which means Christina and I will end our trip walking into the sunset.

Alright!

Aww!

-Route 66 takes you to places.

The places have people.

Stop, see the place, see the people.

Now you're experiencing Route 66.

-You're going to encounter gas stations, cafs.

You're going to meet interesting people.

And I hope people will stop and take the time to talk to people along the way, because it's so important to get the story behind whatever it is that they're viewing.

-I live right along Route 66 and I see a simpler, happier, more positive, optimistic view of life, I think.

-Travelers should come to Springfield because Springfield is a great place to spend time with your family, to spend time with your girlfriends on a road trip.

Springfield is a dynamic and engaging place, and we hope you'll come to visit us soon.

-With so many places being restored, historic places and little towns, like here in Pontiac, it'll just be a memory of your lifetime to do this trip in Illinois on Route 66.

-Drive slow, enjoy the journey, because the destination is not where you're going.

-Thanks for picking me up at jail.

-Oh!

[ Laughs ] Anytime.

-When the Mother Road still beckons, when she allows us to find our own path, when she connects us to a past that still needs to be cared for, that is when we share a love of travel.

And that's why driving Route 66 through Illinois winds us through so many places to love.

For more information about this and other episodes, destination guides, or links to follow me on social media, log on to placestolove.com.

"Samantha Brown's Places to Love" was made possible by... [ Birds chirping ] -Oceania Cruises is a proud sponsor of public TV and "Samantha Brown's Places to Love."

Sailing to more than 600 destinations around the globe, from Europe to Asia and Alaska to the South Pacific.

Oceania Cruises offers gourmet dining and curated travel experiences aboard boutique, hotel-style ships that carry no more than 1,250 guests.

Oceania Cruises.

Your world, your way.