That’s true.  It was a couple years ago and I was meandering east through Arizona, sticking as closely as I could to the cracked pavement of the original path of classic Route 66.  Much of it has been paved over by Interstate 40 through that state, but there are still bits and pieces remaining.

This drive meant going through several small downtowns with a handful of businesses still eking out a living by catering to tourist traffic.  One looks much like the other and all are worth stopping in, but stop in them all and you’re not going to get anywhere.

I ended up in Winslow by following the Old Historic Route 66 signs that took me off I-40 west of town.  The downtown was small but looked healthy. I wasn’t in a stopping mode though, and I was nearly through it and back to I-40 when the phrase hit my brain: “Standin’ on a corner in Winslow Arizona.”

Well, Damn!  Here I am!  I circled back and started looking for the corner.  It wasn’t hard to spot, as you can see from the photos.

Winslow, a town of some 10,000 folks (0.09 per cent Pacific Islander, in case you want to know) was a pretty important shipping and trade hub in the steam locomotive era, but began declining  when the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad moved its maintenance base to Barstow, CA, when diesels came along.  Today the BNSF Railway uses it as a crew change point and there is twice-daily Amtrack service.

Route 66 kept it going OK for a while, but the final blow to a bustling downtown came in the 1970s, when it became the second to the last town in the state to be bypassed by I-40.

It rose to national fame of course in 1972, with “Take It Easy,” written by Jackson Browne and Glenn Fry.  It was The Eagles’ first single and became the band’s signature song.

As Browne later recalled it:  “I knew Glenn Frey from playing these clubs – we kept showing up at the same clubs and singing on the open-mic nights. Glenn happened to come by to say ‘hi,’ and to hang around when I was in the studio, and I showed him the beginnings of that song, and he asked if I was going to put it on my record and I said it wouldn’t be ready in time.

“He said ‘well, we’ll put it on, we’ll do it,’ ’cause he liked it.  But it wasn’t finished, and he kept after me to finish it, and finally offered to finish it himself. And after a couple of times when I declined to have him finish my song, I said, ‘all right.’ I finally thought, ‘This is ridiculous. Go ahead and finish it. Do it.’ And he finished it in spectacular fashion. And, what’s more, arranged it in a way that was far superior to what I had written.”

According to Frey, the second verse of “Take It Easy” refers to a time when Jackson Browne’s automobile malfunctioned in Winslow on the way to Sedona, requiring him to spend a long day there. The city erected a life-size bronze statue and mural commemorating the song at the Standin’ on the Corner Park in 1999.

There is one Winslow favorite son worth mentioning:  Richard Kleindienst, US Attorney General under Richard Nixon.  He grew up fluent in Navajo.

He was largely untainted by Watergate, and in fact helped get the investigation started, but pled guilty to a misdemeanor relating to Senate testimony in which he attempted to hide White House efforts to get him to drop a Justice Department antitrust action against the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation.

The judge who handed him a suspended sentence called him a man of ”highest integrity” but one who had ”a heart that is too loyal.”