Published Article Archive: Route 66 Federation News
While at Indiana University in the late 1970s, I expected that my career would be centered on creative writing. However, as John Lennon wrote, "Life is what happens while you are making other plans." I left college without a degree and drifted through life as a car dealership porter, a parking garage manager, a car salesmen, a door-to-door canvasser, and a postal worker. Then, in March 2000, I took a trip down old Route 66 from Chicago to St. Louis with my wife, Carol, and our canine family member, Jolie. That trip began an obsession with the old roads that has not abated.
After that first trip, I began voraciously reading everything I could find about Route 66. I was impressed by the high quality of writing by such word smiths as Michael Wallis, Tom Teague, Bob Moore, and Jim Ross. However, a few of the articles I saw in periodicals were of significantly lesser quality. With the Mother Road as my inspiration, I decided that I could certainly do a better job of writing than some of what I was reading. I set to work on my opus--a 5000-word article which I called "Links of History."
With naive chutzpah, I sent my prose concerto off to David Knudson at the National Historic Route 66 Federation. To my delight, David told me that he thought it was a wonderful article. To my horror, he also said, "too bad I can't use it." It was about 3000 words too long.
I re-worked the article with additional content and turned it into three shorter pieces, each about 2000 words long. I sent the first of these back to David, and he decided to publish it in the Summer 2002 issue of the Federation News. He then published the others in the Fall 2002 and Winter 2003 issues, and over the next five years I have been lucky enough to have an article published in every subsequent issue of the Fed News. As of this writing in January 2008, that makes 22 articles published by David Knudson.
David Knudson's kindness in giving me this forum has now been compounded, since he has agreed to allow me to reproduce those articles here, scanned from the Fed News as originally laid out and edited by David. I will add the articles in the order they were originally published at the rate of about one per month. If you enjoy what you see here, please take the time to visit the website of the National Historic Route 66 Federation, please consider becoming a member of the Federation, and finally please consider buying the back issues of this fine publication. Happy New Year 2008!
