The barber who turned a bypassed Arizona town into a global destination

Seligman, Arizona was, for decades, just another small stop along Route 66. That changed in 1978 when Interstate 40 opened a bypass around the town, redirecting traffic away from the businesses that had depended on passing travellers for generations. Motels, diners and shops that once thrived on Route 66 tourism watched their customers disappear almost overnight.

Angel V. Delgadillo Jr., a local barber born in Seligman on April 19, 1927, was among those watching the town decline. His parents had immigrated from Jalisco and Aguascalientes, Mexico, in 1917, and his father, a self-taught barber, had cut hair for Mexican and Native American residents through the town’s segregated years. Angel followed him into the trade, graduating from Seligman High School in 1947 and training at the American Pacific Barber College in Pasadena before returning home in 1950 to open his own shop on Route 66.

Rather than accept the town’s decline as permanent, Delgadillo organised. In 1987, he helped found the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona, a group formed specifically to protect and promote what remained of the historic highway. The association lobbied successfully for the state to officially recognise surviving Route 66 stretches as a historic route, a designation that helped Seligman and other towns along the road begin rebuilding their tourism economies.

As the BBC has reported, the model Delgadillo built in Arizona did not stay in Arizona. Similar preservation associations formed in other Route 66 states, and the idea eventually spread internationally, carried in part by the travellers who passed through Delgadillo’s barbershop and heard him describe what the highway had meant and how close it had come to being forgotten.

That barbershop became something close to a landmark in its own right, drawing visitors from the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia who came as much to meet Delgadillo as to get a haircut. His profile grew further when Pixar director John Lasseter visited Seligman while researching the 2006 film Cars; the studio has never named a definitive real-world basis for the film’s Radiator Springs, but Seligman is widely regarded as one of its inspirations, and Delgadillo’s Route 66 campaign is often linked to the film’s themes about towns left behind by the interstate system.

Delgadillo is 98 now and still spends time meeting the travellers who seek him out. He has been called the ‘Guardian Angel of Route 66’, the ‘Father of the Mother Road’ and the ‘Ambassador of Route 66’ over the years, titles that reflect a highway revival built almost entirely on one barber’s refusal to let his hometown disappear. Route 66 now draws millions of visitors annually, with Seligman among its best-known stops.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons/by Zeddammer