SELIGMAN, Arizona — They came suddenly and in numbers, cars and trucks weighed down with their owners’ worldly possessions. Angel Delgadillo was a boy when those hundreds of thousands of Dust Bowl refugees drove through his tiny hometown on Route 66, heading for California and the promise of work on farms so fertile, it was said, that fruit fell from the trees.
He and his friends used to run to a nearby building at night and wait for the passing vehicles’ headlights to cast their shadows on the white stucco wall. They danced and watched their shadows change as the cars neared.
“And as a car left,” he remembered, “our shadows went with them.”
Delgadillo’s entire life, all 98 years, has played out along what John Steinbeck called “the mother road, the road of flight.” He and his eight siblings grew up on the route; he went to barber college in the Route 66 town of Pasadena, California, and then apprenticed for two years at a barber shop in another route town 43 miles east of his home — Williams, Arizona — before returning to Seligman to run his parents’ pool hall and barbershop.
As Route 66 aficionados look to the historic roadway’s 100th anniversary next year, most agree there would probably not be a centennial to celebrate if not for Delgadillo.
“They’re right,” he said with a smile, sitting in his barbershop chair on a Friday in June.
An estimated 9,000 cars once passed through Seligman every 24 hours, Delgadillo said, until Interstate 40 bypassed it and other towns along Arizona’s Route 66 corridor. The time, he recalled, was around 2:30 p.m. on Sept. 22, 1978.
“When you lose something so important, your livelihood, how can you forget that moment?” he said. “Listen to me: We knew we were gonna get bypassed, but we did not know how devastating it was going to be. The world just forgot about us. County officials didn’t know about us. State officials, highway officials, the feds — it was like they told us, Angel, if you can swim out of it, swim out of it. If you can’t, drown.”
Businesses shuttered. People left. Delgadillo, his wife Vilma and four children considered doing the same.
Seligman was heading to its grave.
“It was a very, very sad moment,” he said. “First, it was so sad. Then I got so angry.”
Then he did something about it.
Enlisting the help of his older brother Juan, who built the Seligman institution Delgadillo’s Snow Cap, and others, he formed the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona in February 1987. They wrote letters to state highway officials telling them to step in and preserve the route. At first, they were ignored.
“But, you know what,” he said, “those big boys in Phoenix didn’t know who they were up against.”
By November that same year, the state’s transportation department designated 83 miles of Route 66, from Seligman west to Kingman, as a historic road. Delgadillo’s association kept up its pressure, eventually convincing the state to add more miles.
Today, the entire expanse is recognized by the state as a historic road, and Arizona boasts the longest remaining stretch of uninterrupted Route 66 in the country, starting at the California border and ending nearly 160 miles east near Ash Fork.
“To fight the government, you lose. Go to city hall and try to convince them, you lose,” Delgadillo said. “We had to fight our state government and we succeeded. We the people.”
Delgadillo soon fielded phone calls from would-be preservationists in the other seven states the route traverses. They wanted to know how they could protect their portions of the road.
Form your association, he told them.
Delgadillo’s efforts have earned Seligman the title of the “birthplace of historic Route 66,” and Delgadillo, the “guardian angel of Route 66.” He retired from cutting hair a few years ago; the barbershop inside the Route 66 gift shop that bears his and his wife Vilma’s names is now something of a shrine to his and his family’s legacy.
Route 66 travelers from all over the world make a pilgrimage to Seligman to see him. More often than not these days, they see a life-sized cardboard cutout of his likeness instead. When he does stop in, like on that Friday in June, he’s quickly surrounded by people wanting to have their pictures taken with him.
“It’s as though they have known me forever,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s overwhelming. They’re so thankful. It is mind boggling.”
In retirement, he continues to help celebrate his beloved town and route. He started building birdhouses constructed using 100-year-old lumber from his grandparents’ Seligman restaurant that once stood on Route 66 before it was torn down.
Each birdhouse is numbered. Last week, he finished number 268. He has enough wood for another 30.
They sell for $100.66 at the gift shop. The proceeds are being donated to help Seligman construct Route 66 welcome signs at either end of town ahead of next year’s centennial.
