Get Your Kicks On Route 66
They grew up in the 1950s, the heyday of diners, jukeboxes and Route 66, so when their kids were grown, Laura and Jim Galto decided to indulge in a little nostalgia.
Soon it became a lot of nostalgia.
Over the course of a dozen years, the Galtos' house in Glen Ellyn filled with mementoes. They bought some, including statues of Elvis, gumball machines and antique gas pumps, and they made others, including a Route 66 insignia painted on the driveway, curtains that look like piano keyboards and, perhaps cleverest of all, a modern-day refrigerator they made over to look like an old-fashioned Coca-Cola machine.
"People ask if we really live with all this or if it's just our museum," Laura Galto said, referring to the checkerboard tile on the walls, couches that look like the tail ends of 1950s cars and all manner of vintage signs.
"We live here," she said, "and we love it."
Soon to move into a grandparents' suite in the home of one of their sons, the Galtos are putting the house on the market in January. Before their collections are all carted off to other places, they offered Crain's readers a look with nearly everything still in place. A few items, like the full-sized Bob of Bob's Big Boy fame, have already been moved, but without lessening the overall effect.
Most of the memorabilia will be gone before showings of the house begin, because "we know it makes the house look smaller," Laura Galto said. Among the items that stay are the 54 rose bushes the couple planted and tended for many years.
The house, a three-bedroom, roughly 1,400-square-footer on almost half an acre on Bemis Road, will be priced at $490,000. It's listed with Jane Hootman of Quaid and Rooney at Keller Williams Premiere Properties.
There's an old diner table and Coke coolers both real and imitated in the kitchen, a jukebox and two couches that resemble the tailfins of 1950s cruisers in the living room and in between, a tribute to Jim Galto's mom, Mama G, whose Arizona restaurant used to send lunches over to the Chicago Cubs training camp.
"We love the 1950s," Laura Galto said. Although just kids during the era, they have fond memories of its 45 records and diners, in particular an old drive-through diner in Glen Ellyn where they went on dates.
It was later a Bob's Big Boy, the chain whose memorably chubby, checker-pants-wearing mascot got this whole collection going. Around 2013, Jim Galto spotted a full-size Bob statue on the internet and bought it to put in front of their house.
One thing led to another. "We started collecting the things we grew up with," Laura Galto said, and in no time their house became a mini-museum.
A retired highway superintendent for DuPage County, Jim Galto painted the driveway to look like a two-lane stretch of Route 66. The fabled highway, which began at Michigan Avenue and Adams Street, "winds its way from Chicago to L.A., 2,000 miles all the way," according to the 1946 song about the road that is celebrating its centennial in 2026.
The highway, which was decommissioned in 1985, passes about seven miles south of this house, on Ogden Avenue.
While the Galtos have layered cultural history onto the house, it's also a piece of their family history.
In the 1930s, Laura Galto's grandparents, who lived in Chicago, bought some land in Glen Ellyn and on weekends they and some of their children would come out to work on a cluster of houses they all moved into in the late 30s and early 40s, she said. This house is the one her grandparents lived in.
Much of the land was sold off for development of newer homes and in 1977 the family moved this house from a central spot on the land to a new foundation. When the Galtos moved back from Arizona in 1983, they moved in. When it sells next year, that will be the first time since the house was built eight decades ago that it won't be in the hands of the same family.
While their four boys were growing up in the house, "I was more into the country-style decorating," Laura Galto said. She and her husband were working, too — she at the College of DuPage and he at the county highway department. The collecting took off only after the nest was empty and the couple were retired.
A longtime crafter, she made the upper curtains that look like piano keyboards and painted the 50s-style argyle pattern on the walls.
The Elvis statue in the living room is the smaller of two in their collection. A taller one lived outside, along with the Big Boy statue. That Elvis has left the building.
They bought the tailfin couches — the red one is a 1956 Chevy and the green one is a 1959 Cadillac — but Jim Galto took them to a new level when he wired their tail lights with working bulbs. On the Cadillac, seen below, they reproduced Elvis's autograph.
The photo below shows the glass block diner counter the couple built and a door, seen to the right in the photo, that they painted to look like the phone booth a diner would have had back then.
Seen at left is the door to the pantry, which they fashioned of glass and diamond plate to look like a stock room door from the era. Most of this is fixed-in-place work that stays with the property, although the figurines and old radios and such do not.
With its mix of checkerboard tile, red Coke machine and chrome diner table and chairs, the décor of the kitchen evokes not only the actual 1950s, but the renderings of that period seen in the 1970s, in the movie "American Graffiti" and the television sitcom "Happy Days."
The kitchen was a bit cramped when originally built for "my grandparents, who were very frugal," Laura Galto said. Removing a wall between the kitchen and living room gave it a more modern, open layout.
On some walls not seen in these photos, the couple painted complete diner menus, with items named first for their kids and later for their grandkids.
The Galto house isn't just a showcase of their collection and craft. It's a home whose comforts include a TV room with a wood-beamed ceiling and a vintage pinball machine. It has windows on three sides and opens onto a deck that also wraps around three sides.
The primary bedroom is on the main floor as well, a big double room spanning about 22 feet that originally would have been two separate bedrooms. There are two more bedrooms upstairs and in the basement are a rec room, workshop and bathroom.
Knotty wood paneling, another look right out of the 1950s, may seem original to the house but is another detail the Galtos brought in to complete the nostalgic feeling of the house. They've also painted a Bible verse ("Love is patient, love is kind") and musical notes on the stairs.
The 50s-inspired decor continues out to the garage, whose door Laura Galto painted with another diner scene.
Beyond the garage is the deep back yard where four kids tumbled around in their childhood.
"We're going to miss living with this all around us," she said, but they both feel it's time. The asking price for the property was set to allow for the future buyers' cost to redecorate if the 50s don't seem as nifty to them.
Story by Dennis Rodkin | Crain's Chicago Business
Photography by Ryan Ocasio
