Under the Radar in Seligman, Arizona
When you have a restaurant with a name like The Roadkill Cafe, you might expect some people to take you seriously.
Debbie Mejia and her husband Bruce watched in disbelief as a guest sauntered into their restaurant with a dead coyote in his arms. Although the Roadkill Cafe in Seligman, Arizona, may hint that the menu is full of unfortunate animals that fell victim to cars on Route 66, the cafe doesn’t actually sell roadkill.
“We had a guest come through the front door holding a dead, run over - probably several times - coyote and actually asked if we could cook it,” Debbie said. “We all laughed and took pictures, but no, we couldn’t cook it. But, yes, people do come in with dead animals sometimes asking if we can cook it for them.”
Northern Arizona is famous for its panoramic vistas and impossibly romantic landscapes. It is a magical part of America, made even more irresistible due to its almost 100 year connection to historic Route 66. Arizona boasts of over 619 miles of America’s Main Street but there is a special 17-mile section that tops them all.
Just after sleepy Ash Fork, the old highway turns into Crookton Road as it meanders toward quirky Seligman, carrying motorists through rolling hills and mesmerizing plateaus. But the scenic value of the journey is only the start. The real magic is waiting for you as you roll into town.
Originally known by the old west sounding name of Prescott Junction, due to its location as a railroad stop on the Santa Fe mainline junction, Seligman would be renamed in 1862, its new moniker in honor of Jesse Seligman, one of the founders of J. & W. Seligman & Co. of New York, a company who helped finance the railroad lines in the area.
When Route 66 was built in 1926, Seligman became a popular spot for travelers, even after 1933 when Route 66 bypassed Seligman's Main Street to run along Chino Street. That didn’t stop the hordes of roadtrippers. At one point, more than 500,000 out-of-state cars passed through the Arizona portion of Route 66 in 1937.
Seligman capitalized on the popularity and teemed with neon signs, roadside attractions, pithy tourist motels and home-cooking cafes.
However, in the 1980s, Seligman nearly became a ghost town as a new Interstate bypassed the community and left it on the verge of death for nearly 10 years. Among the many citizens and fans who wanted to save the dusty little Arizona Mother Road stop was the Pope family, transplants who changed the landscape of modern-day Seligman.
Drive through the town of Seligman today, and you’ll see a restaurant draped in red with a sunshine yellow sign beckons with the dubiously curious name of The Roadkill Cafe. A giant elk statue bugles at the entrance, and inside, thousands of signed dollar bills line the rustic walls and celiing.
Behind the counter, Debbie Mejia, nee’ Pope, and her husband Bruce may just offer you dishes like the Funky Skunk, The Bird That Smacked the Curb and the Mystery Meat. Though the menu sounds like a bad day on a highway, visitors from around the U.S. and the globe trot to this restaurant in droves to sample the “roadkill” cuisine.
Along the same road, a giant neon sign advertises the Historic Route 66 Motel and nearby, the Route 66 General Store and RV Park carries everything a traveler may need - everything from fresh apples to shampoo to Route 66 souvenirs.
If your car breaks down, Route 66 Automotive and Towing will come to your rescue. In each of these Seligman businesses, a member of the Pope family is waiting with a smile. Though the Pope family originally hailed from Massachussets and California, they’ve created one of the most recognizable Mother Road empires along the 2,448 mile historic road.
Say hello to the Pope family.
A Long Way From Home In June 1963, Jim and Jean Pope loaded up their four small children and drove from Massachusettes to California to visit their parents with the idea of moving to west. Jim was tired of working for other people, and he wanted the chance to start his own business, and California seemed like it had more opportunity.
Like thousands of other travelers in the 1960s, the family drove Route 66 to the California coast, with sunshine dreams in their eyes. At one point, they stopped in a dusty little Arizona town to stay the night at the Navajo Motel.
The Navajo Motel was among the Americana-themed family businesses that thrived along the Mother Road. With its big red sign and bold white lettering, The Navajo Motel was built by the Layman family in 1950. It was one of those motels every kid loved - not only did it have an old west and Native American feel, it had a swimming pool too.
“We stopped in Seligman on the seventh day of that 1963 vacation and on the eighth day, we arrived at my nana and grandpa’s house in Westminster, California,” said Debbie.
“Being as young as I was, I don’t remember much about that trip but I do remember my mom worrying about my nana being upset with her because my brother Jim Boy stayed in one of the motel swimming pools for too long and, as a result, was very sunburned. Of course, my mom wanted to make a good impression on her mother-in-law and my brother being as red as a lobster made her worry.”
Seligman, Arizona, was a popular place for travelers to stop in the 1960s. Nestled between mountains in the east, desert in the west and the Grand Canyon to the north, Seligman had always been a traveler’s pitstop
Seligman was originally a Havasupai settlement, but developed into a stop along the historic Beale's Wagon Road. When Beale’s became the Mojave Road, one early routes that brought American pioneers to California after the Civil War, Seligman was one of many stagecoach stations.
“My grandparents had moved to California before I was born and my parents wanted to go out and see if they also wanted to live there,” said Debbie, the youngest of Jim and Jean's four children. “So, we took a trip in 1963 from Lynn, (it’s a town) Massachusetts to Westminister, California. Of course, [back] then, they only had Route 66. What's so bizarre about our story is that we were meant to be here. We stopped here in June of 1963 in this small, cute little town of Seligman and we stayed at the Navajo Motel. Twenty years later, we bought that motel.”
Debbie Mejia was born October 10, 1959 in Lynn, Massachusetts, the youngest of Jim and Jean Pope’s four children. Her grandparents ived in Westminster, Calif., and in 1963, the Pope family took 4-year-old Debbie and her siblings Bill, Dee and Jim out to the west coast for a visit.
“Of course, my parents fell in love with the California sunny weather. We had family there. So a year later in 1964, we moved to California and I grew up in Orange County, California,” Debbie said.
On that fateful trip in 1963 when Popes stayed in the Navajo Motel in Seligman overnight, Seligman was a hopping little town that raked in the visitors with it’s Route 66 attractions and spirit. Jim and Jean Pope didn’t picture themselves living there at the time. Instead, they invested in food trucks in California way before food trucks were popular.
“That's what I got for my graduation present in 1978 in California. I got my own catering truck. I wanted to be a part of the family business. That's what my brothers and my sisters did with my family, so I wanted to be a part of it too,”
Debbie served hamburgers, hotdogs, burritos and all kinds of breakfast meals, and she loved it. Her family members all had catering trucks, but in the 1980s, the competition was picking up.
“We were in the Vernon/Los Angeles area, and it was getting competitive,” Debbie said. “We had five trucks, and all of us had one. But dad wanted us all to go into another business together, a business that would work for all of us.”
Debbie’s parents first considered buying a ski resort in the northern California/Nevada area, but they worried about how to survive the off-season slumps. Then, Debbie’s brother-in-law saw a classified ad in the Orange County Register.
“The notice was about how the OK Saloon and the Navajo Motel and the other businesses were for sale,” Debbie said. “My parents and my sister and her husband ventured back to Seligman to see it, and they just fell in love with it.”
In 1983, the family decided. Everyone - except for Debbie’s brother Jim who married a California girl who refused to move - was moving to Seligman to take over the Navajo Motel, the OK Saloon and the grocery store.
From food trucks in Orange County, California, to the Roadkill Cafe in Seligman, the Pope family’s journey to “the place they were meant to be” was a winding one. Today, the Pope family owns not only the Navajo Motel (now named the Historic Route 66 Motel) but also the OK Saloon, the Historic Route 66 General Store and Route 66 Automotive and Towing, as well as a campground and storage facility.
“In 1983, we the Pope family purchased The Navajo Motel. In 1987, my dad and my sister Dee Dee designed the beautiful neon sign we have today and that’s when the name was changed from the Navajo Motel to the Historic Route 66 Motel,” said Debbie.
“We not only bought the Motel from the Layman family ,we bought all of our commercial properties here on Route 66 in Seligman from them plus property behind the businesses which our family have all built our homes on. We call it ‘Popeville.’ “
Debbie and her three siblings moved as adults with their parents to Seligman, and today, their children and grandchildren are as much a part of the businesses as they are. They experienced the culture shock of moving to a “cowboy town” together, learned to manage an aging hotel together and built a small empire together.
“It’s truly a family business,” said Debbie. “I love it here. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. Seligman is our home.”
Debbie just didn’t count on how big of a shock moving to the small town would actually be.
Culture Shock
In 1983, Jim and Jean Pope bought the OK Saloon in Seligman, AZ along with several other businesses. Debbie was 23 with two young children when her parents announced the move to Arizona. Her son Michael was 6 months old and her daughter Heather was 2. Shortly after moving to Seligman, Debbie’s first husband moved back to California and the two divorced.
“So here I was \with my mom and dad and the two little babies, you know. It was different from California, and the shock factor hit me. There were no red lights in this town. There were no franchises, there were no McDonald's. There was no just running to the grocery store,” Debbie said.
The Diamond-A ranch north of Seligman is made up of over a million acres with no back fence as it leads into the Grand Canyon. When Debbie first moved to Seligman, she was fascinated with cowboy life.
“I loved listening to their stories as they sat in the saloon while I was bartending. I love the way they dressed and I was lucky enough to make some of them my friends who would sometimes take me horseback riding and out to the camps,” Debbie said.
Seligman was also the halfway stop for the railroad between Needles, California and Gallup. New Mexico. This meant the railroad crew traveling west and the crew traveling east would stop in Seligman. Crews would then switch trains and head back to their original location.
“Usually the crew would have some kind of layover in Seligman so hanging out at the local saloon playing pool and shuffleboard is what they did,” Debbie said. “All this was very fascinating to me and with this whole new way of life, I truly thought I would love living in a small town. But being only 23 years old, I was home sick in less than a year. I was a city girl from Southern California and I terribly missed the beach and my childhood best friend Trish, who lived next door and who I was best friends with since I was 5.”
Although she moved back to California for a very short time, she realized it wasn’t home anymore.
“I came home back to Seligman where my whole family was,” she said.
Debbie’s brother Bill and his family moved into a little apartment at the back of the Navajo Motel, and her parents lived in a little house right behind the motel. Debbie and her two babies moved into the house with her parents while her sister Dee ran the motel.
“In the motel, we have living quarters so she lived there,” Debbie said. “We were pretty much on top of each other.
The original Navajo Motel was a little dated, dusty with cowboy paraphernalia, so the Pope family worked to update it. They also updated the little store that sold moccasins and sodas into a full-service grocery and hardware store.
“We changed the rooms at the motel, but we stayed busy. Seligman was a railroad town for the Santa Fe Burlington Railroad,” Debbie said. “We had a lot of railroaders here until ‘85 when the railroad left. That was only two years after we were here.”
Survival of Seligman
Though hundreds of thousands of cars passed through Seligman to get to and from the west coast, the opening of Interstate 40 in 1978 threatened to kill Seligman's economy. The new highway ran just a mile south of town, but that one mile could have been an ocean for all the cars that bypassed the once-thriving Route 66 stop.
Then the Santa Fe Railroad closed in the mid-1980s, and the double blows nearly killed the community.
In 1987, the people of Seligman took matters in their own hands. The residents, including Angel Delgadillo, convinced the State of Arizona to make Route 66 a historic highway and asked that exit signs on the new highway highlight Seligman as the “Birthplace of Historic Route 66.” In fact, Delgadillo’s efforts to save the small town became one of the inspirations for Pixar’s animated movie “Cars,” and Seligman served as the inspiration for Radiator Springs, a little Route 66 town that had to fight for its survival after being by-passed by the interstate.
“I ran the businesses, but my parents went to the meetings and things like that. It was pretty much a handful of those people who were business owners and they all decided that they were going to get together and be on board this,” Debbie said. “They started going to the association meetings in Kingman, which is 75 miles west of us.”
Angel Delgadillo, affectionately known as the “guardian angel” of Route 66, was a product of Seligman’s Route 66 history. His parents, Juan and Mary, opened the Snow Cap Drive-In on Route 66 in 1953, though at the time they didn’t realize it would become a famous tourist attraction.
Angel grew up in the quirky backdrop of neon signs and Americana souvenirs, and in an effort to save his town, he and his brother Juan helped create the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona in 1987. Despite being named as the “Guardian Angel of Route 66,” the Delgadillos didn’t save Seligman on their own. Other residents and business owners like the Popes helped.
A New Era The Pope family also owns the Route 66 General Store, and Debbie’s son Michael acts as shopkeeper these days. Her brother Bill still takes care of the tow truck and service station and his daughter Nicole runs the motel.
The OK Saloon, filled with rowdy cowboys from neighboring ranches and the former railroad workers, was transformed into the Roadkill Cafe.
Soon, the Roadkill Cafe was a “must-stop” for anyone traveling Route 66. Its reputation became famous based on its extensive menu with quirky and quaint named dishes. Diners can choose from irreverently named meals, such as Rigor Mortis Tortoise (a breakfast skillet), Roadside Revenge (steak and eggs), One-Eyed Dog Hit in the Fog (Texas-style French toast) and the Dead Meat Treat (Denver Omelette).
Service was good and the food portions, typical of American diners, were crazy huge. The cafe even has a souvenir store where visitors can buy mementos. The diner is also plastered from walls to ceilings with dollar bills, and visitors can contribute their own signed memorial bill.
From the looks of it, thousands have.
“A lot of people traveling visit again and again, and they always want to see their dollars,” Debbie said. “Back in the day, the cowboys would leave a dollar in advance when they got paid.”
On any given day, hordes of Route 66 devotees/pilgrims from all over the world armed with cameras, especially the Harley Davidson riding types, take selfies aimed at the stuffed elk propped up outside the Roadkill Cafe's entrance.
Plenty of celebrities have stopped in as well. The stars of the shows “Pawn Stars,” Storage Wars and Orange County Choppers have all made appearances, as have other recognizable names.
“Ozzy Ozboune and the baseball player Darryl Strawberry have been in,” Debbie said. “There’s been a lot of celebrities, and they’ve always been down to earth. John Ellway played pool with a bunch of customers. He also signed a bunch of Beanie Babies.”
Along the way, Debbie fell in love.
Growing the Family In 1991, an Arizona Department of Transportation supervisor named Bruce Mejia was surveying around Interstate 40 and the new Historic Route 66 when he found himself in Seligman and met a pretty woman named Debbie at the then-OK Saloon. He grew up on Route 66 in Ash Fork and was a true Route 66 resident.
“We were playing shuffleboard together,” Bruce said. “I’d been in the OK Saloon before. I coached little league girls’ softball, and Debbie’s daughter Heather was on the team. I asked her if she wanted to go get a Coke. So, we drove around, and just went and had a soda and stuff. The rest is history.”
The two began getting friendly. One afternoon, Heather came home from school with a question for her mother.
“Mom, are you dating my baseball coach?” Heather said.
“I asked her if that would be a problem. Heather was real little, and she wasn't too happy when she came home and thought that that was the reason she got to play on the team,” Debbie said.
But the love affair lasted, and the two married on November 26, 1994.
For Heather, growing up in Seligman was picture perfect. She played softball and camped with friends in the wild places around town. The kids threw bonfire parties on the weekend. She also worked at the general store.
“Grandma made sure we know how to work. She'd make us count change. We all knew how to do all that,” said Heather. “My kid is the same way. He's been working here since he was 8. He goes to school at North Arizona University now, but he comes in the summer and he started busing tables when he was 8.”
Debbie’s son Michael also pitched in as a kid. Before he took over the general store, he cooked at the Roadkill Cafe.
“I just loved cooking with grandma. We learned so much from her because it was her way or the highway,” Michael said.
Heather was always a homebody. After graduating high school in 1999, she moved to Prescott, Ariz. for college. She stayed in the dorms there for two days before coming home and commuting to college every day.
“My grandparents helped me get a house right next door to my mom. I actually loved Seligman. I met my husband and I moved to Phoenix for a year and I hated life,” she said. “He said, ‘Do you want to come back home?’ And I said yes because I'm scared of everything. Seligman doesn’t have anything to be scared of and Phoenix has lots of stuff to be scared of.”
Heather and her husband Mike Ramirez returned home. Mike started his own heating and cooling business while Heather keeps the books for Pope Enterprises.
The family was back together again.
A Family Tradition The Roadkill Cafe started small, but has expanded over the years as its popularity grows. All the Pope businesses continue to grow, as does the family itself.
“We are in our fourth generation of family in these businesses,” Debbie said. “That’s counting my brother's kids, my grandkids and my brother's grandkids. They'll come in and they'll bus tables, and the littlest ones are in my gift shop where they go around and ask people if they'd like a sample of candy. I used to give them the duster, but once we started letting people taste the candies, my little grandson decided that's what he wants to do.”
Debbie has lost count of all the family members. Most of them stayed in Seligman, but a few have ventured out into the world to start their own careers and businesses.
“There's tons of grandkids. I couldn't even tell you. I'd have to write that down. But everybody's involved in the family business,” Debbie said. “My dad passed in 2004 and we lost mom in 2016. But they got to see this kind of small empire they built.”
True to the spirit of Route 66, The Roadkill Cafe welcomes all, even in the harshest of time. Northern Arizona frequently gets hit by snow storms during the winter months that can close highways and leave travelers stranded.
“When somebody is stuck in a small town they realize small town people are very warm and welcoming,” Debbie said.
“This past Thanksgiving weekend in 2019, there was a terrible storm here that closed the highways Only a few of my Roadkill employees could make it into work, but I had to open because people stuck all night were hungry and cold.”
Some people were stuck in snow while others ran out of gas by trying to stay warm.
“They needed a place to get warm. Myself and my husband Bruce, one of my waitresses and a prep cook were the only ones who could make it to the Roadkill to open our doors and help people get out of the weather,” Debbie said.
“We didn’t make a lot of money that day in the Roadkill due to the limited staff but we dang sure made a lot of friends on that cold day.”
For the Pope/Mejia family, staying together and offering that hospitality are what has made them so successful on Route 66.
“Having my family together makes life nice,” Debbie said. “We know that things will keep on going into the next generation and keep on growing. This is our home and our community.”
As for the The Roadkill Cafe, wild animals still make their way through the door at times.
“On Sunday night after going to bed, I received a phone call from our Roadkill evening supervisor. Our cook was taking out the trash and a skunk ran in the restaurant and was hiding behind our piano in the dining room,” Debbie said.
“The Roadkill was closed, thank goodness, so Bruce and I went over and coaxed the little fella out without incident - and no smell.”
And, no, they didn’t cook up the little skunk either.