I was watching John Ford’s “Grapes of Wrath” again this weekend. Two different questions:
a) The Joad family cross from Arizona into California using US Hwy 66, now I-40. If you look at a map, between Kingman, AZ and Needles, CA, I-40—and presumably US 66 before it—takes a big dogleg. There are some secondary roads, however, that provide a much more direct route.
Q: Why the dogleg?
b) In two different scenes, the Joads are stopped at border crossings between states—once going into Arizona, and once going into California. In the first one, there’s no indication why. They “officer” just slaps some sticker on the truck, and tells them to keep moving. In the second, it’s clearly an agricultural checkpoint.
Q: In the old days, were checkpoints between states that common, and was it mainly for agriculture, or did everyone have to stop and “show their papers?”
You can thank the Black Mountains for that. However, US66 went through those mountains, through the town of Oatman, and I40 bypasses a great deal of US66’s route between Kingman and Barstow
Take a look on Google Maps and you’ll see the reason for the dogleg. There is a rather steep line of mountains along the direct route. 40 jogs south to go around them. They also needed to hit a town along the way, and Needles was all that was there.
Most of the checkpoints were/are agricultural in nature, but there were some set up to try to get a handle on the Okies.
Route 66 had a lot of different configurations over the years. From this siteI found this about Kingman.
As for the border checkpoints, I can remember being on vacation in the 1950s and being stopped at state borders and asked whether we were bringing any fruits or vegetables into the state. Stenbeck took a little license, but it was fact-based.
I remember the checkpoint going into Mississippi from Arkansas at the Greenville Bridge operated up into the 70s. It was due to the Boll Weevil, I think.
Interstate ports of entry have been “going in and out of style” to some degree ever since the invention of the automobile. In the majority of cases, they require only commercial truckers to stop, so vacationers pay little attention. With respect to commercial trucks, the ports may screen for agricultural pests, or they may be enforcing various safety regulations or cargo restrictions.
In some cases, the state stops everybody. California was indeed long notorious for this–they grow a lot of unique crops in California and are especially vulnerable to imported pests. In other cases states have stopped everybody, for a period of time, due to more local and specific concerns such as the aforementioned boll weevil.
Some superficial googling indicates that the California checkpoints are falling into disuse, due more to budget cuts than anything else.
Personal experience bears this out as well. It’s been a couple of years since I was stopped at the Truckee inspection station on 80, or at Meyers on 50.
However, they claim to have inspected over 29 million vehicles - 22.1 million private and 7.3 million commercial vehicles - in 2008, so they’re apparently open…sometime. Just not when I’m going through. Or maybe they’ve only been interested in people coming from Oregon and the station on 5 is always open? <shrug>
In 20 years of living here, I’ve only been actually questioned once when re-entering the state. Normally, if a station is staffed, they just wave California drivers through.
