A journey up or down Route 66 in McLean County this weekend is one which travels through time.
Yes, those 2,448 miles of highway stretching from Chicago to Santa Monica, California are 100 years old, and birthday bashes are planned from Chenoa to McLean. On Saturday and Sunday, road-trippers are invited to Cruise through the Century, with themed celebrations spanning the 1920s to the 1980s.
For Normal, that means leaning hard into the 1950s. The town is throwing a retro roadside picnic at One Normal Plaza with diner food, roller skating, America’s pastime with the Prairie Chickens Vintage Baseball Club and rockabilly music by Union Avenue.
And at nearby Sprague’s Super Service—a vintage gas pump and gift shop serving as a Normal’s primary Route 66 stop among travelers—Saturday also marks the coming out party for a new mural that fits right in with the theme.
William, Joseph and Ben Diaz were putting finishing touches on the mural last week, coordinated by the Town of Normal’s Cultural Arts Department and the McLean County Museum of History for Sprague’s.
A Route 66 Centennial Grant from the state of Illinois paid for the piece.
The mural pulls from a couple eras, referencing both the Art Deco period of the 1920s and ‘30s and the postwar Nifty Fifties.
“We wanted to create a pretend assignment where we’re creating a billboard for Route 66 that would pull people into town to see what Normal had to offer,” said Joseph Diaz, who led the design effort on the project.
His father William, Bill for short, has done a lot of the detail work. Joseph said he’s the strongest painter in the family business.
The Diazes settled on dinner and a movie as the theme.
“So, of course, going to Normal you can’t go without going to Steak N Shake,” Joseph Diaz said.
The 92-year-old burger chain opened its first location in Normal. And the Art Deco reference is to the historic Normal Theater. Painted across the mural in large lettering is the ad slogan: “Enjoy a Normal night out.”
Pun intended.
The power of public art
Bill Diaz launched Diaz Sign Art launched in 1979. It’s operated out of the same shop in Pontiac nearly that long. It’s tall enough to pull in a semi-truck, which Joseph Diaz said are a majority of their business. They generate graphic logos on a computer, but paint pinstriping by hand.
“So we can pull these big trucks in, which also lends itself well to painting medium sized murals in house,” he said.
Murals are more of a side hustle. A pretty big one, as it turns out. Being in Central Illinois, that means a lot of imagery referencing Abraham Lincoln—and Route 66. Diaz said Pontiac has been all-in on Route 66 since well before communities along the Mother Road started planning for the centennial.
“The moment we got the Route 66 Association to open their museum in our town, our town’s really embraced it,” he said.
Livingston County’s county seat has a population of just over 10,000 people.
“It’s not as big as Normal, but we do have quite a bit to offer,” Diaz said. “I’d say up until COVID, we were riding the wave with getting tourists to stop in our town.”
One place people stop is at a huge mural of the Route 66 shield, painted by Diaz Sign Art.
“That particular mural has gotten a lot of exposure and a lot of attention,” Diaz said. “It’s been on the cover of Sports Illustrated. It was on a Super Bowl commercial at one point in time. Illinois Tourism uses it in a lot of their ads.”
And that’s when Pontiac discovered the power of public art. In 2009, they agreed to invite the Walldogs to add 18 more murals to the tally in Downtown Pontiac. The collective of artists, which the Diazes are a part of, embark on a town for four days and fill its blank walls with murals.
“Three hundred-plus mural artists all show up and paint 10-15 murals in a week,” he said. “And then they all leave, and the town’s left with all these amazing, beautiful murals all over town."
Until the Walldogs make it to Bloomington or Normal, the Twin Cities is adding one mural at a time, the most recent a Normal mural about Normal.
Cruisin' through the Century has events Saturday and Sunday in Chenoa, Lexington, Towanda, Normal, Bloomington, Shirley and McLean. See the full schedule at Visit BN.org.
