Elderhostel Press Release
Marty Knowlton, Elderhostel Co-founder, Dies at 88
(March 13, 2009) Martin P. (“Marty”) Knowlton, who led a peripatetic life before co-founding Elderhostel, the worldwide non-profit lifelong learning organization, died early Thursday in Ventura, Calif. He was 88 years old.
His death was of natural causes according to David Bianco who, with Mr. Knowlton, founded Elderhostel in 1975. The organization they created changed perceptions of aging by introducing a new understanding of older adults as active, engaged learners, travelers and explorers. It changed lives in the process, ushering in an era of active learning in retirement. Since Elderhostel’s founding, more than four million people have experienced its programs.
“Marty Knowlton was an extraordinary, dynamic, unconventional man—truly one-of-a-kind in his vision of the world and of how people could make a difference. He had a unique approach to life and cared very little for the material world. For Marty, it was all about ideas and change and how to make the world a better place. I met him as a 21 year-old when I first started working at Elderhostel and I’m still here 30 years later, devoted to this movement he and David created. Marty, who couldn’t stand doing the same thing for too long, was always amazed by that!“ said James Moses, Elderhostel President and CEO.
Mr. Knowlton was serving as Director of the American Youth Hostel at the University of New Hampshire, where Mr. Bianco was Director of Residential Life, when together they created the idea for Elderhostel. Mr. Knowlton had spent the previous several years backpacking through Europe where he had studied the adult residential learning model of the Scandinavian folk school movement. He related these experiences to Mr. Bianco and as they considered the ideals of the youth hostel and folk school movement, they developed the concept of an elder hostel, which they presented to the University of New Hampshire.
With the backing of University of New Hampshire president Eugene S. Mills and a $7,500 grant from the Spaulding Potter Charitable Trust, the first Elderhostel programs—limited to participants 60 years and older—were held on five New Hampshire college campuses during the summer months of 1975. The programs were fully enrolled with 220 older adults. Mr. Knowlton became the Executive Director of the fledgling organization and garnered early endorsements from a wide range of individuals including the actress Helen Hays, novelist May Sarton, and Lillian Carter, the mother of President Jimmy Carter.
In an Associated Press article published before the first programs operated that summer, Elderhostel’s aim was described as “erasing the idea the elderly are ‘all used up.’” No one gave it any chance for success. There was absolutely no evidence in the educational literature of the day to suggest that older adults had any desire to “go back to school.” All of the continuing education classes of the time were filled with high school grads seeking to improve themselves by adding to their educational credentials.
Bill Berkeley, Elderhostel’s first President, remembers a conversation with Ted Sizer, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a nationally renowned educator, when Berkeley announced that he was leaving his position on the Commission on Educational Issues to take the helm at Elderhostel. “Ted came up to me after my announcement and asked, ‘Tell me again what this Elderhostel is all about?’ When I told him (again), he shook his head and muttered, ‘That's a really unpromising idea.’ In the years to follow, I would kid him when we ran into each other that he apparently didn't know as much about education as the Dean at the Harvard Ed School should. He would often get quite serious for a moment and say something like ‘well, you know, Elderhostel was a totally revolutionary idea. There was no evident reason to believe that it would be successful.’’’
A modest grant from the Ford Foundation in 1977 made it possible for Marty to receive a salary. Elderhostel’s first major foundation grant was from the Kellogg Foundation, which was the only foundation in the country with a major interest in continuing education back then. Launched at a time when the possibility of an active, healthy, financially secure retirement had outpaced negative public perceptions of the elderly, Elderhostel ultimately garnered generous foundation support, widespread favorable media attention and was an instant success. Enrollments grew to 2,000 in 1976, to 4,800 in 1977. Year-round programs were added in 1978, international programs in 1980, and enrollments surpassed 100,000 in 1985.
Rapid growth brought administrative and operational challenges that didn’t hold Mr. Knowlton’s interest. He wrote in 1977, “I tend to do damage by cutting administrative corners much too freely and by resisting, beyond all reason, needed administrative developments.” After Elderhostel’s not-for-profit incorporation in 1977, Mr. Knowlton, in an unusual move for a founder, removed himself voluntarily from active association with his and Bianco’s creation and turned it over to others to lead. Later on, he was invited to serve on Elderhostel’s Board of Directors.
In a tribute to Mr. Knowlton during Elderhostel’s 30th Anniversary in 2005, former Elderhostel president William Berkeley said that “Elderhostel can legitimately claim that its success totally changed the way educational institutions viewed the older adult population. Elders became a favored audience for new educational ventures. The popular image today of the older adult population as an army of vital, energetic, engaged people with much to contribute to society can, at least in part, be credited to Elderhostel and Marty.”
Mr. Knowlton was born on July 30, 1920, in Dallas, Texas. He dropped out of college to volunteer as an ambulance driver with the Free French Forces in the Middle East from 1940 until 1942, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1941. He served in the United States Army from 1942 until 1945 and was awarded the Silver Star.
Mr. Knowlton received a B.A. in History from Birmingham Southern College in 1946, an M.A. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1949 and did further graduate studies at Yale University and Boston University. Before founding Elderhostel, Knowlton taught government at the University of North Carolina, worked as an administrator at Yale, worked in Maine for the Continental Copper and Steel Corporation and the S.D. Warren Paper Company, and taught at several secondary schools in Maine and Massachusetts. In 1970 he coached Brookline (Mass.) High School to the national chess championship.
After leaving Elderhostel, Knowlton founded two other non-profit organizations, Gatekeepers to the Future, and The Center for the Study of the Future, in Ventura, Calif.
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