David Clark, a foremost expert on Route 66 in the Chicago area, dies

David Clark, for decades the premier expert on Route 66 in Chicagoland known as the Windy City Road Warrior, died Tuesday, according to his stepson.

Clark was scheduled Thursday night to lead a Zoom videoconference, “Myths on 66: Misinformation on the Mother Road.”

On Friday afternoon, Charles Aldarondo stated in a Facebook post that Clark, his stepfather, had died:

Tributes began to come in shortly after that. Among them:

Clark led tours of Route 66 in Chicago and wrote several books, including “Exploring Route 66 in Chicagoland” and “Route 66 in Chicago” (Amazon links).

More recently, he’d been presiding over live Zoom videoconferences about Route 66 in Chicago and other topics regarding the Windy City.

After the death of his wife, Carol, in 2015, he began writing his memoirs, “Zeno’s Motel and Paradox on Route 66,” in serialized form. He was especially candid about his and his late spouse’s battles with alcohol.

He wrote in an email:

“Publishing this story is a large part of my own continuing recovery, and I certainly hope it may help others with similar things to overcome. And for everyone who has not had to deal with this – perhaps it will help those folks understand the how and why of addiction and recovery.”

According to his own bio, Clark was born near Chicago in northwest Indiana. He explained how he became a Route 66 aficionado:

I moved to Chicago in 1980 and by 1982 I was working as a parking garage manager on Adams Street (westbound 66). I met my future wife, Carol, who worked in the bank in the same building, and on our first night out after work we went to several watering holes along Adams. Ours was a Route 66 romance, even though we did not know it at the time!
Carol was a native Chicagoan, and when we fell on hard times in the early 1990s and could not afford to travel for vacation, we decided to start exploring Chicago as if we were tourists. What better way to save money on vacation than spending time in your home town, acting like a visitor? Thanks to our love of the Chicago Historical Society, the Chicago Architecture Foundation, and the Art Institute, we became well-versed in area history.
It was at the Chicago Historical Society that we bought Michael Wallis’s great book, Route 66: The Mother Road, and Route 66: The Highway and Its People by Susan Croce Kelly and Quinta Scott. Both were released around 1992, which was the 66th anniversary of the Mother Road and the other original US Highways. But with all our varied interests, the books remained on the shelf while life went on.
In December 1998 we moved into our current home, a unit in a loft conversion condominium building located on Adams Street in the West Loop Community area of Chicago, in a neighborhood known as Greek Town. We noted with interest that a sign outside the building indicated that Adams was Historic US 66.
So now we were living on the Mother Road! Over the next sixteen months, I started looking into the books I had already owned for six years, and I did some web searches to find information. Swa Frantzen’s marvelous website, www.historic66.com gave us the directions we needed to take our first road trip in March 2000, on St. Patrick’s day weekend.
Many more trips followed, and as of May 2003 we could say that we had driven all of the road from Chicago to Los Angeles.

He began writing for The Federation News, a quarterly publication of the National Historic Route 66 Federation, and he published his first book, the seminal “Exploring Route 66 in Chicagoland,” in 2006.

Clark stated on his website a future project was a guidebook to U.S. 32 and U.S. 34, the latter which he declared as “one of the country’s great unsung highways.” It is unclear whether he finished that volume.

If I get information about funeral or memorial details, I’ll post them here.

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