Historic Route 66 - Roy's Motel & Café - Amboy, California, USA. - National Scenic Byways on Waymarking.com

Roy's Motel and Café was a motel, café, gas station and auto repair shop, defunct for many years but now restored. Located on the National Trails Highway of Historic Route 66, Amboy, San Bernardino, California.

"Roy's is located on Historic Route 66 in Amboy, California. The town of Amboy itself is in the Mojave desert. The site of Roy's has become an icon for a lonely desert gas stop due to the multiple appearances of Roy's in movies. Amboy has it all: airport, garage, cafe, school, church, graveyard, even a volcanic crater. Yet all but the post office is not operating anymore." Text Source: (visit link)

"In 1938, founder Roy Crowl opened Roy's as a gas and service station along the legendary U.S. Highway 66, in Amboy. At the time, Route 66 was "The Mother Road" and "Main Street of America" - the primary east-west highway artery crossing the nation from Chicago through the Southwest to Los Angeles. The construction of Roy's was one consequence of a Route 66 realignment through Mountain Springs Summit, bypassing Goffs to directly connect Needles and Essex, and continuing west to Amboy.

In the 1940s, Crowl teamed up with his son-in-law, Herman "Buster" Burris. They expanded the business, as Roy's Motel and Café, to include a café, an auto repair garage, and an auto court of small cabins for overnight rental by Route 66 travelers. Buster Burris himself almost singlehandedly created the town's infrastructure, some of which remains semi-functioning today. Burris even brought power to Amboy and Roy's all the way from Barstow by erecting his own poles and wires alongside Route 66 using an old Studebaker pickup truck.

Postwar business boomed as families discovered the joys of motor travel after the World War II years of tire and gasoline rationing and new cars not being manufactured. Roy Crowl and Burris kept Roy's Garage and Café operating 24 hours a day - seven days a week; so busy was Roy's that Burris took out classified ads in newspapers across the country in the hope of recruiting help.

By the opening of the 1950s, Roy's complex employed up to 70 people; the town's entire population then was 700.

Some very significant and lasting aesthetic changes came to Roy's Motel and Café in 1959: with the February 1 erection of the infamous towering neon "Roy's boomerang logo" sign visible for miles approaching Amboy; and with the construction of the motel's new Mid-Century Modern Style - MCM "inclined roof flying over a glassed wedge" guest reception and office "theme building." They all were a vital beacon milepost and "modernist refuge" for more than a decade." Text Source: (visit link)

Program: America's Byways Website: [Web Link] Official Name: Historic route 66.

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