In Arizona, a fading Route 66 motel hides a story of the Navajo Code Talkers

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — The El Pueblo Motor Inn, or what’s left of it anyway, sits vacant behind a chain-link fence along Route 66, its stucco walls clad in weathered sheets of construction tarp.

At first glance, the nearly 90-year-old motel appears to be another crumbling relic from the famed highway’s early years as a bustling thoroughfare for hundreds of thousands of Americans traveling between Los Angeles and Chicago.

But this isn’t just a fading Route 66 roadside attraction.

Six years after El Pueblo motel opened its doors, with the country plunged into World War II following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the motel’s proprietor, Philip Johnston, devised a plan to enlist Navajo men into the U.S. Marines Corps. Their mission: create a secret code based on Diné Bizaad, the unwritten