I locked the office, drove to the county clerk with the 1956 register in my lap, and confirmed the thing Joe set up years ago, and the regional director in his nice suit never took a picture of my sign again.
The famous name on page 88, Room 7, July 1956, belonged to a man every American knows, a music legend who stayed the night on his way west when the Blue Swallow was brand new. And the note beside it, written to the man who owned the motel before us, was the beginning of a story Joe finished on paper.
My husband used that register and that famous night to get the Blue Swallow placed on the National Register of Historic Places as a Route 66 landmark, recorded years ago with a preservation easement, which means the motel and Joes neon sign are legally protected and cannot be demolished for a highway corridor.
Joe turned that sign on every night at dusk for fifty years, and he knew what this little motor court meant to Route 66, so he documented it, the famous guest and all, and got it listed and protected, and the clerk had the recorded designation right there in the book.
A National Register landmark with a preservation easement is not a lot a hotel chain clears for an interchange. Their whole corridor had to bend around the one property they could not touch.
When the director came back, I did not argue. I handed him a copy of the National Register listing and the easement and I said, tacky, you called it. This tacky little motel is a protected national landmark, and so is Joes sign, and a music legend slept in Room 7 in 1956, which is more than your highway hotel will ever be able to say. Build your corridor around us. The tourists from Germany and Japan will still be taking pictures of my sign long after nobody remembers yours.
He read it and left. The hotel went in at the far end of the strip, and the Blue Swallow sits protected on Route 66, twelve rooms and twelve little garages, exactly as Joe kept it.
Coming down by next summer, he had said. It did not come down. I turn Joes neon on every night at dusk, the way he did for fifty years, and the travelers still pull over, and page 88 is still folded down in the 1956 register, the night a legend slept here and, without knowing it, helped Joe save the place forever.