A chat with Quinta Scott

A little over three decades years ago, photographer Quinta Scott was learning how to use a recently purchased but unwieldy Speed Graphic camera. After shooting a photo at the historic Eads Bridge in St. Louis for a book, she made the fateful decision to also shoot photographs along the city’s Route 66 alignment of Watson Road.

Months after capturing images of the 66 Park Inn, Casa Grande Motel and other historic motels in west St. Louis, the idea of a Route 66 book popped into Scott’s head.

“No one thought it was a good idea,” Scott recalled during a phone interview from her home in Waterloo, Ill., near St. Louis. “My husband thought it was crazy. But I knew it was a good idea, and the only other one who thought that was Susan Croce Kelly.”

That idea eventually led to two books: 1988’s “Route 66: The Highway and Its People” (with text written by Croce Kelly) and 2000’s “Along Route 66,” the latter which concentrates on the architecture and history of businesses on the road. Much of the research for the two books occurred in the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, years before Michael Wallis’ “Route 66: The Mother Road” shot to the best-seller list in 1992 and reignited interest in Route 66.

Scott and her former book partner’s research also proved valuable to historians. She and Croce Kelly traveled Route 66 in five- and seven-day chunks to photograph longtime businesses and knock on doors to find more about them. They decided to mostly focus on businesses that were established from 1926 (when U.S. 66 was born) to 1956 (when the interstate highway system was established).

“We got there just in time,” Scott recalled of those interviews. “We were talking to people who were about to retire or just retired. These were the people who invented the roadside business, starting in the Depression.”

Scott said a crucial point in the research occurred in Lebanon, Mo., when they encountered Joy Spears Fischel of the Joy Motel, formerly Camp Joy (“That was the beginning of the motel … it started as a campground”), and Jessie Hudson, co-founder of the still-operating Munger Moss Motel.

Going to Oklahoma also was crucial.

“We thought there was nothing left in Oklahoma because everybody left, like in ‘The Grapes of Wrath,'” Scott said. “But people like Leon Little didn’t go to California; they established a roadside business.”

Leon Little and his wife Ann established a gas station on Route 66 near Hinton Junction, Okla., and the couple proved to be valuable historical resources for Croce Kelly and Scott. The Littles even saw a film crew shooting footage on Route 66 for the Oscar-winning “The Grapes of Wrath,” Scott said, including the scene where Grandpa dies at the west end of the Pony Bridge near Bridgeport.

Scott’s work led to more than 2,000 images on black-and-white negatives (many of them unpublished), about 100 hours of taped interviews with longtime Route 66 businesspeople, and handful of color photographs. She said she’s considering bequeathing her collection to archives at University of Missouri-St. Louis or Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville.

But, for now, Scott’s “The Mississippi: A Visual Biography” should be hitting bookstores in a matter of weeks. Scott also maintains two blogs, Quinta Scott’s Weblog and Along Route 66.

After that, she is considering a third Route 66 book. This one would be about how energy extraction — from coal-mining to oil wells to solar-energy plants — has affected the Mother Road’s landscape through the decades. If the book happens, it would necessitate another trip on the Main Street of America — including to the Sooner State.

“I love Oklahoma … People think Oklahoma is to be gotten through, but it makes my heart go pitty-pat,” she said. “And I love New Mexico … all of New Mexico.”

(Quinta Scott is holding a holiday sale for her Route 66 photographs at AlongRoute66.com through Friday. If you buy two 8-by-10-inch black-and-white prints for $47 each, you get the third free.)