‘Guardian Angel of Route 66’: the barber who wouldn’t let his town vanish

Route 66 was supposed to be finished by 1978. That was the year Interstate 40 bypassed Seligman, Arizona, sending traffic around the small town instead of through it, and taking the town’s tourism economy down with it. Businesses that had run for decades on Route 66 travellers suddenly had none, and Seligman looked set to join the list of towns the interstate era had quietly erased.

Angel V. Delgadillo Jr. was not willing to let that happen. Born in Seligman on April 19, 1927, to a family that had immigrated from Jalisco and Aguascalientes, Mexico, in 1917, Delgadillo grew up around his father’s barbershop, which served Mexican and Native American residents of the then-segregated town. He followed the same path, graduating from Seligman High School in 1947, training at the American Pacific Barber College in Pasadena, California, and returning to Seligman in 1950 to open his own shop on Route 66 in his father’s former pool hall.

After the interstate bypass hit in 1978, Delgadillo spent nearly a decade pushing to keep Route 66 relevant. In 1987, that push became the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona, a group he helped establish specifically to protect and promote the surviving stretches of the highway. The association convinced the state to formally recognise those stretches as a historic route, a decision that is widely credited with sparking Route 66’s broader revival and inspiring similar preservation groups in other states and countries.

As the BBC has reported, Delgadillo’s own barbershop became a key part of that revival. Travellers from the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia began stopping in Seligman specifically to meet him and hear him describe the highway’s rise, its near-collapse, and its slow comeback, turning the shop into an unofficial welcome centre for the town.

That personal history eventually found its way to Hollywood. Pixar director John Lasseter travelled Route 66 and spent time with Delgadillo in Seligman while researching the 2006 film Cars. Pixar has never named a single real-world basis for the film’s Radiator Springs, but Seligman is widely seen as one of its inspirations, and Delgadillo’s fight to save Route 66 is often linked to the film’s message about towns left behind by new highways.

Now 98, Delgadillo still greets the travellers who make the trip to see him, holding titles including the ‘Guardian Angel of Route 66’, the ‘Father of the Mother Road’ and the ‘Ambassador of Route 66’. Millions of people visit Route 66 every year today, and Seligman remains one of its most recognisable stops, a legacy built almost entirely on one barber’s refusal to give up on his hometown.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons/by Zeddammer