David M. Knudson, founder of the trailblazing National Historic Route 66 Federation during the mid-1990s, died on Aug. 31 in Yucaipa, California. He was 86.
Knudson’s death was announced by his son on Friday.
A memorial service will be on Sept. 26 at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Yucaipa.
His obituary states he was born in Nebraska and adopted by a family in Michigan. At college, he studied advertising and commercial art and eventually moved to Los Angeles to be a commercial artist. One of his hobbies was driving sports cars.
By the mid-1970s, he co–founded the advertising firm Walker, Knudson and Campbell.
But the Route 66 connection began in the mid-1960s:
In October 1963, before any of this, he and a college friend drove a red Triumph TR4 from Detroit to Los Angeles, taking Route 66 across the country with almost no money. It was adventure and necessity combined. Thirty-one years later, after my grandfather died in April 1994, he and Mary Lou drove that same road again in my grandfather’s Ford Tempo. What they found devastated him. The highway he’d driven on as a young man was disappearing–bypassed, torn up, forgotten. They spent two weeks photographing what was left. By the time they got to Los Angeles, they’d decided to do something about it. He sold his shares in the advertising company. They were going to save Route 66.
In 1995, he founded the National Historic Route 66 Federation. Nobody was thinking nationally about Route 66 then. There were scattered state groups, but nobody was saying: we need to protect the whole thing. He was. He believed it mattered.
What followed was decades of work. He helped push the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Act through Congress in 1999. He wrote “The Mother Road: Route 66.” He sat on the advisory council for the National Park Service’s preservation program. For ten years, he hosted the Steinbeck Award banquet–honoring the people who’d actually kept Route 66 alive. He published Jerry McClanahan’s EZ 66 Guide, now in its sixth printing and known as the “Route 66 Bible.” Through the Federation’s magazine and website, he became a resource for anyone who cared about the road. Travelers, historians, hundreds of Route 66 businesses. Tens of thousands of people found their way because of what he built.
It’s impossible to overstate Knudson’s influence on Route 66 during its early renaissance era. What’s not mentioned is Knudson was a major player in the nascent but now-defunct Route 66 e-group — later on Yahoo — during the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was a place where Route 66 enthusiasts — including myself — passed along news of the road, gave advice and mobilized preservation efforts.
The Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program he shepherded still exists today, and other organizations have taken up its mantle to help preserve Route 66 sites.
The National Historic Route 66 Federation’s influence began to wane with the increasingly poor health and the death of Knudson’s second wife, Mary Lou, in 2008 and with the rise of social media.
Knudons leaves behind son Andrew, a stepsister, a stepbrother, eight grandchildren and four great–grandchildren.
In lieu of flowers, Knudson’s family requests supporting a local Route 66 preservation campaign or writing a letter to Congress via the National Trust for Historic Preservation.