Meet the 98-year-old barber who refused to let Route 66 die

In 1978, the town of Seligman, Arizona watched its lifeline disappear overnight. Interstate 40 opened a new route that bypassed the small town entirely, and the steady stream of travellers who once stopped for gas, food and a chat along Route 66 simply vanished. Shops closed, motels emptied and residents feared their town would fade into the desert like so many others along the old highway.

One man decided that was not going to happen. Angel V. Delgadillo Jr., born in Seligman on April 19, 1927, was a barber by trade, a profession he inherited from his father, a self-taught barber who had immigrated from Jalisco, Mexico, in 1917 and cut hair for Mexican and Native American residents in the then-segregated town. Angel graduated from Seligman High School in 1947, trained at the American Pacific Barber College in Pasadena, California, and completed his apprenticeship in Williams, Arizona, before returning home in 1950 to open his own shop in his father’s former pool hall on Route 66.

When the interstate cut Seligman off in 1978, Delgadillo did not simply wait for business to recover. In 1987, he helped establish the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona, an organisation built specifically to protect and promote the surviving stretches of the highway. The association’s lobbying convinced the state of Arizona to officially recognise those stretches as a historic route, a move that inspired similar preservation groups in other Route 66 states and eventually overseas.

As reported by the BBC, Delgadillo’s barbershop slowly became something more than a place for a haircut. It turned into an unofficial welcome centre where travellers from the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia stopped to hear him talk about the road’s golden era and its near-collapse after the interstate arrived. Those conversations, repeated with visitor after visitor over decades, turned Delgadillo into one of the most recognisable ambassadors of what road enthusiasts call the ‘Mother Road’.

The ripple effects reached far beyond Arizona. While researching Pixar’s 2006 film Cars, director John Lasseter travelled along Route 66 and spent time with Delgadillo in Seligman. Pixar has never named a single real-world template for the film’s fictional town of Radiator Springs, but Seligman is widely regarded as one of its key inspirations, and Delgadillo’s decades-long fight to save Route 66 is often credited with shaping the film’s message about small towns left behind by new highways.

Now 98, Delgadillo still greets travellers who make the trip to Seligman specifically to meet him. Over the years he has picked up nicknames including the ‘Guardian Angel of Route 66’, the ‘Father of the Mother Road’ and the ‘Ambassador of Route 66’. Route 66 today draws millions of visitors annually, and Seligman’s survival stands as proof of what the BBC’s reporting frames as a simple idea: one determined person can keep a piece of history from disappearing.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons/by Zeddammer