Roy Knabenshue

Augustus Roy Knabenshue (1876–1960) “Halooooo!” — one can imagine him shouting from on high, aloft in his Air Ship Pasadena, as locals gawked and marveled on the official finish line of The Great Race in 1905. He had bested the fastest racing motorcar of its day, a Pope-Toledo, in a competition that started in downtown Los Angeles and ended at the Hotel Raymond. Roy had become a legendary aviation pioneer and aeronautical engineer when he took title as the first American to successfully pilot a powered dirigible (airship) in the United States at the St. Louis Worlds Fair.

He gave South Pasadena two historical markers: The Great Race, in which a nascent air travel balloon beat the newfangled motorcar, and the establishment of the country's first paid passenger air service. From The Raymond to the Ocean! He was also one of the co-founders of the first International Air Show in America at Dominguez Hills, California, 1910. That event was pivotal in another amazing life story – Pancho Barnes, the famed 1920s aviatrix. He also influenced a young Arthur E. Raymond, son of the hotelier Walter Raymond, who developed a fascination with flight. Arthur became Vice-president of Engineering at Douglas Aircraft Corp., responsible for the pivotal, profitable DC-3 airplane. He later joined NASA and co-founded the Rand Corporation.

When Raymond was a boy in 1913, flights of Knabenshue’s airship were a daily occurrence over South Pasadena. After selling his dirigible to the U. S. Army, Knabenshue returned to the area in the 1930s as a resident of San Marino. His rented home was at the southwest corner of Mission Street and Euclid Ave.