Windy City Road Warrior Presentations

If you are looking for interesting presentations for your museum, library, social group, or any other type of organization, please consider tapping into the informational and visual resources available from Windy City Road Warrior.com!

Our standard PowerPoint presentation begins with a video montage of contemporary Route 66 scenes. Next, a short discussion of the history of road building in the United States notes that many of our current highways (including Route 66) follow trails first blazed by Native American footpaths, 19th century canals, and railroad trunk lines. We explore why Route 66 "winds from Chicago to L.A.," and we look at the historic biography of the local thoroughfares that carried the highway's traffic in the Chicago area.

The final section of the standard presentation is a "virtual tour" of Route 66 today. Through Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, the images show the vibrant life still lived along the highway corridor, despite the fact of Route 66's "official" de-commissioning in the 1980s. Amidst the decay caused by the interstates, thrifty and industrious business owners and highway enthusiasts continue to breath life and longevity into America's Main Street, the Mother Road, Route 66.

Our standard presentation usually includes a short discussion of the highway history local to the particular venue. Our presentation at the Des Plaines Public Library included mention of U.S. Highways 12, 14, and 45, and our Joliet Historical Museum dates have touched on Highways 6 and 30. The content can also be customized to concentrate on specific sections of the highway corridor, such as in our presentation at the Chicago Architecture Foundation that focused on Route 66 through Chicago's west side neighborhood, North Lawndale.

Standard Presentation Details

Our PowerPoint presentations are normally designed to last 45-60 minutes and involve as much audience interaction as practical. We encourage and prefer time to be set aside at the end of the presentation for Q & A and discussion. We provide the PowerPoint files and can use our own laptop computer, but other audio/video equipment must be provided by the venue.

Customized Presentations

With sufficient lead-time, we can customize our presentation to the specifications of the customer. Our resources are NOT restricted to Route 66; rather, they include information that can be used to create programs for any specific segment of highway and transportation history relating to Chicago, or to Illinois, or to the corridors of transportation and commerce for which the city and state serve as hubs. We stand ready to meet any challenge within the scope of our archival resources.

For venues that cannot support PowerPoint presentations, our materials can be adjusted to use handouts and poster-sized visual aids in a lecture format.