The Pontiac (Ill.) Daily Leader was there Wednesday when Betty Estes was inducted into the Illinois Seniors Hall of Fame. She’s been a major Route 66 booster in the Pontiac region.
Asked what she was most proud of in her work with the city of Pontiac, Estes said it would have to be the Route 66 museum and the Livingston County War Museum, which her late husband, Dal, helped found almost nine years ago.
“The hall of fame has opened up our town to visitors that ordinarily wouldn’t have stopped here, and we’re talking thousands,” Estes said. The Route 66 museum draws about 1,000 visitors a month, and has been visited by people from all 50 states and from at least 30 countries. […]
“I knew that visitors were stopping at the Dixie (truck) stop,” she said about the original location for the Route 66 Hall of Fame, and she believed that if tourists and others had better space and there was more space to keep artifacts, a museum in Pontiac would be a success. Estes was tourism director and worked with then-Mayor Mike Ingles, City Administrator Robert Karls, the City Council and other city staff to convince the Illinois Route 66 Association to relocate the hall, with the city remodeling the old fire station’s first floor. The second floor has since been remodeled as well to expand the museum.
“I had no conception that it would bubble up like it did,” Estes said of the museum’s success in Pontiac. “I’m amazed, I’m pleased and it also says something about the people that come here.” She said visitors, especially those from overseas, come for the nostalgia of what Route 66 once was.
A little background: One of the reasons the Illinois Route 66 Hall of Fame and Museum moved to Pontiac was because the Dixie Truckers Home in McLean had changed hands a few years ago after decades of family ownership. It threw the future of the museum into uncertainty, so the Illinois Route 66 Association found a new home for much of its Route 66 collection.