We spent two dollars at the church rummage sale. For this, we got a few old postcards (blank, all from places I’ve been), a book called How to Travel Without Being Rich by Norman D. Ford, and two portfolios of Kodakchrome colored prints called See Your West.
The folios were a Standard Oil promotion from the mid-1940s. Each week you would drive your magnificent curvaceous automobile to the Chevron or Standard Oil station in pursuit of the latest edition of these full color suitable for framing prints. If you didn’t want to frame them, you could add them into a spiral bound folder. Once you had all of them, you’d have a coffee table like book — gorgeous graphics along with informative details accompany each plate. At the front of the book, the copy suggests you might want to go on a road trip to collect the lot of them as they were never the same at your local fuel station as at the one in the next county or the next state, and hey, you’ll need gas to get there. At the back of one of the books, there’s a perforated application for a Standard Oil credit card. (You thought content marketing was some kind of new thing? No, silly. Not even using amateurs to do it for chump change is new.)
The big name photographer in the collection is Ansel Adams, but there were others who were important for their time, including Ray Atkeson who shot ski photos in the days before chair lifts, Mike Roberts, a pioneer in early color postcard production, and half a dozen top commercial magazine photographers of the time. There’s one woman contributor, Esther Henderson, an early regular with Arizona Highways magazine.
Each photo has an accompanying essay written by a prominent journalist of the day — here is Joseph Henry Jackson who was the editor of Sunset Magazine in the 20s, and the still well known food writer M.F.K. Fisher, and Don Blanding, who wrote extensively about Hawaii during the 30s and 40s, and whoa, is that historical novelist Irving Stone? It must, at the time, have been quite the plum assignment — a deep pockets oil company putting together this beautiful collection of essays and photographs. “What? You’ll pay what for 1200 words on why I love Glacier National Park? When do you need it?” The writers seem to have more prestige than the photographers; while the shutterbugs get named credits and the technical specifications for the image, the writers have their scrawled handwritten signatures reproduced underneath the essays.
I have a weakness for vintage travel ephemera. I own a few old atlases, a handful of early Baedeker’s guidebooks, a stack of back issues of National Geographic from the late 1800s. I buy postcards at garage sales and send them out to my imaginary internet friends. With postcards, I have a wide latitude and will buy them from the 1970s and earlier, everything else I like to be from no later than the Golden Age of Travel (the mid-50s). This time, I made an exception for “How to Travel Without Being Rich” (1966) because the opening pages made me laugh like a crazy person right there in the church basement, and that was worth the whopping 30 cent price tag.
“… if you’re already turned off by the thought of looking at the world from the isolated interior of a sightseeing bus… or you recoil at the concept of joining a marching battalion of postcard writing tourists blindly following a guide from country to country, then Overlanding presents a highly exciting alternative.”
…thus far, you will travel like a tourist. Once you get abroad, you will find in every large city at least one English speaking travel agency, usually an English speaking travel information bureau, and in many cases your hotel manager will also speak English. These people will help and direct you exactly as if you were a tourist.”
“There are two ways to travel — like a tourist, who spends a lot, or like a traveler, who knows all the ways to reach his destination economically, comfortable, while seeing the most.”
It turns out your tourist vs. traveler screed is older than many of the people I know who insist that no, they’re not tourists, don’t be calling them tourists, tourist is a dirty word. I’m stunned every time it comes up, and yet Norman D. Ford was doing it in 1966 (What year were you born, dear reader?). Two ways to travel: The wrong way and my way! Postcard writing tourists are bad, and don’t worry, the joke’s on the tourism office — you’ll look like a tourist to them, but you know better, you are better, after all.
I found Norman D. Ford’s obituary — he died in 2009. He was a cycling advocate, he was very well traveled, and he published 60 books for Harian Publications, an imprint that produced an array of get rich quick, travel cheap, and shortcuts to health books — a content farm for the days before the internet. I found an archived newspaper ad that suggests you could send in your manuscript and a check or money order to Harian in exchange for… it was too hard to read the scanned image to know for sure. Other references to Harian are few; they folded in 1980. It looks like Norman was a hack in the old school manner, a successful and prolific one at that. He also seems to have been quite the character, he founded the Globetrotters Club and was a great adventurer. He blamed new competition for ending his career as a travel writer, but perhaps he just wasn’t very good and Lonely Planet ate his lunch without even trying.
The numbers in his How to Travel book are wildly out of date, of course, and banking and communications have changed radically since the first edition. Geopolitics are different too, as you might expect — you should probably skip Afghanistan for now. But disappointingly, you can get the exact same superior attitude and two dimensional advice today. I’ve encountered multiple current versions of this book, and I don’t like the anti-tourist philosophy any better today than I’d have liked it in 1966.
I prefer the imaginary company of the people who decided they wanted to collect these pretty color plates, perhaps as a substitute for making their own expensive photographs. Stacked inside one of the spiral bound folders there were also the pages of a 1951 Standard Oil calendar — more pretty landscape pictures — and two menus from what must have been a grand stay at the Mission Inn in Riverside, California. I imagine a stylish couple driving a car with a monster grill, maybe something two-tone, red and white, down the California highway. It was January, 1948, the date is typed in the specials box in the menu. The lunch buffet was 1.25, the top sirloin — the most expensive thing on the menu — was 3.25.
Norman D. Ford, the author of How to Travel Without Being Rich would not have approved; he thought grand hotels and restaurant meals were for tourists and he did not approve of tourists. The Mission Inn was much more gracious. Typed in that box with the daily specials, a bit of Welsh poetry:
Hail, guest, we ask not what thou art;
If friend we greet thee, hand and heart;
If stranger , such no longer be;
If foe our love shall conquer thee.
What a wonderfully welcoming little blurb of poetry! I admit, I’m also glad to see that I’m not the only one that makes up stories about the people who owned and collected miscellaneous paper bits from previous times.
Great finds.
Nice, isn’t it? I’m still hunting for the attribution — I’ll add it once I’ve got it located.
Ah, the old tourist vs. traveler debate. I feel there is no right way to travel and people should just go with what makes them happy.
Old indeed — that’s the bit that surprised me, how OLD it is. 1966! Is this the first reference in writing? I do wonder.
I recently re-read A Room With a View, written in 1908. The tourist vs traveler debate is at least that old. I should probably revisit Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad as well. I don’t know if he hits on this particular topic, but he has plenty to say about the tourism industry in the late 19th century.
Thanks for this post. I am my father’s daughter – an unrepentant tourist!
Norman was a wonderful man. He was such a kind soul, loved traveling, loved family and didn’t live rich. He married my grandmother in 1984 and when he passed in 2009 his asked were buried beside hers where he wished to lay. As a kid, I remember visiting for weeks at a time during summer and holidays. I was the oldest grandkids so I received “special treatmemt”. He allowed me in his office and would let me type on his typewriter and then computer, when he upgraded. I sure do miss them both!