Amboy, California has been dying for fifty years. When Interstate 40 opened in 1972 and rerouted traffic seventeen miles south, it didn't slow this town down gradually — it stopped it almost overnight. The school closed. The families left. Businesses went dark. What remained was Roy’s Motel & Café, its Googie sign visible for miles across the Mojave, along with the church, the post office, and a handful of people who couldn’t bring themselves to walk away.

The kids in the 1961 Amboy yearbook grew up in a town that believed in itself. Their parents pumped gas and cooked food and fixed engines for the steady stream of Americans driving Route 66 to California. Within a decade of that yearbook being printed, most of them were gone. The interstate had made Amboy irrelevant, and America had moved on.

In 2005 a restaurateur from San Bernardino named Albert Okura bought the entire town on a promise — he told the widow who sold it to him that he wouldn't tear it down. He kept that promise for seventeen years, right up until he died. His son Kyle is the one finishing the job. Ken Large, who manages the place day to day, has spent years rebuilding its infrastructure piece by piece and improvising solutions to problems that have defeated many who came before him.