A sneak peek of the Route 66 Interpretive Center

The new Route 66 Interpretive Center in the old Armory building in Chandler, Okla., doesn’t open to the public until 11 a.m. Saturday, and I’ll be out of town because of a prior engagement.

However, Howard Dickman, chairman of the Old Armory Restorers group, showed me around the building a couple of days ago.

The Armory contains several rooms for multiple purposes. But the heart of it is the Route 66 Interpretive Center, which contains high-tech, interactive displays meant to give you the feeling of being on the road in a car or staying in one of the Mother Road’s vintage motel rooms. The interactive displays were designed by Hans Butzer of TAP Architecture, who also designed the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum.

Here is a interactive display in which you sit in genuine Ford Model A seats dating from the 1920s or ’30s. An interactive touchscreen allows users to control what they want to see on a big video screen overhead. As you can see from the construction equipment, workers were still laboring to get everything together for the Saturday opening.

There also are interactive video screens in which you are seated in a 1940s Jeep and a 1960s Ford Mercury.

You also can get the feeling of being in a vintage Route 66 motel room. Here are one of the beds (sans sheets) in which you can recline, watch the screen and get the feeling of kicking back after a long day of traveling. Again, you can see a touchscreen near the bed that controls the video.

A bank of seven DVD players controls the videos. Pop and country music from throughout the decades in which Route 66 was commissioned are played on the center’s sound system.

“We want this to interpret what Route 66 did to America,” Dickman said. He said the organizers wanted displays to be interactive so they would hold the interest of young, electronics-savvy people.

This is the theater portion of the Interpretive Center, with theater seats from the old H&S Theater in Chandler. However, the eight-minute video is still in production and won’t be ready by the Saturday opening.

In the Interpretive Center are two corrugated-metal kiosks called Travel Planners. Both contain brochures from Route 66 attractions in Oklahoma. One kiosk is for east of Chandler; the other is for west of Chandler. The Interpretive Center not only touts itself, but other Mother Road sites in the Sooner State.

Dickman said hours haven’t been solidified for the Route 66 Interpretive Center. He said the building’s operators will wait to see how big the crowds are before deciding.

The Old Armory restorers are still working the Lincoln County Oil and Interpretive Room. Still being renovated is the massive drill hall, which will be rented out for wedding receptions and other large events. The hall can easily hold hundreds of people.

Even without the Route 66 center, the Armory building is special. It was a Works Progress Administration project built in 1936-37 from hand-chiseled stone. The walls are 20 inches thick and can withstand a tornado. Hundreds, if not thousands, of National Guardsmen were sworn in there. The facility fell into disrepair after the Guard moved into a newer building, and it nearly was torn down. But in recent years, Chandler residents rallied to save and refurbish the building.