Rund Abdelfatah
speaker
598 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 19 Jul
Rund Abdelfatah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Cy Avery had his highway.
But at that moment, it was still just an idea.
A line on a map.
A disconnected jumble of gravel roads, paved paths, and landscapes in need of a bushwhacking.
And to make it more than that, to make it the thriving Main Street Cy Avery envisioned, would take a miracle.
That's after the break.
My great-uncle, my grandfather's brother, who was a very laconic Ozarker, he said, you know, when your grandparents got married, he said, I took them over to Joplin to take a train for their honeymoon.
And he drove him over there on old 66, which is new 66.
And he said on the way over there, and I've since pinpointed the place, he said there was a paved section of highway because the states were also putting down test sections around the country.
And he said there was about a mile of concrete.
He said, I took him to the train and then I came back and I drove back and forth and back and forth and back and forth on that concrete because I'd never driven on anything that smooth or that fine.
I just, to think about this guy, you know, in an old Model T saying, I got to go back and do that again.
That was so cool.
In 1926, when Route 66 was officially signed into existence, along with the rest of the U.S.
's first interstate highway system, it didn't yet exist in real life, at least not as a connected, fully paved road.
The highway engineers were working on it, but the road still felt sleepy.
The small Oklahoma towns it ran through weren't seeing much more traffic than usual.
Cy Avery wanted fanfare, and he knew it was going to take some good old-fashioned showmanship.
Within weeks of coming up with the number and getting the quick approval from the other states to go ahead, Avery was invited back to Springfield by one of his buddies, another good roads man named John Woodruff, who was one of the civic leaders in town.
And Woodruff had built this huge, wonderful hotel on the edge of what would become Route 66.
Showing 321–340 of 598 · page 17 of 30
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