Arthur Frommer died yesterday at the age of 95. Best-known at the author of Europe on 5 Dollars a Day, and founder of the Frommer travel guides, he was also the only person who ever called me out of the blue to offer me a job.
It was in the late ’90s. I had met Arthur once, when he spoke at the Barnes & Noble in Plantation to talk about his new magazine Budget Travel. I ended up writing a column about the evening, in which I said: “What Dr. Spock was to child rearing in the ’50s, and Masters and Johnson were to sex, Arthur Frommer was to travel.” Shortly after, a travel writer at the LA Times, who heard him speak in Los Angeles, told me Arthur used that line in his introduction.
So one afternoon, while I was sitting at my desk in the Sun-Sentinel newsroom, the phone rang and Arthur was on the other end. He said that he was stepping down as editor of Budget Travel and wanted to know if I would be interested in the job. Everything about the offer was appealing – editor of a glossy travel magazine in the media capital of America – except the nature of the publication. As its name suggests, Budget Travel was a practical magazine of tips and information, far from the evocative travel writing that I loved and, surprisingly, was allowed to do at the Sun-Sentinel. I told Arthur I’d think about it – Hania was intrigued by the idea of living in New York – but I eventually decided to stay in the provinces, putting out the kind of travel publication that gave me joy.
I think I made the right decision. After The Best American Travel Writing anthology debuted in 2000, the Sun-Sentinel’s name appeared in the first nine editions. Its last appearance came in 2008, the year I got laid off.
On my way back from Lancaster last week, I stopped in Wayne, a pretty Main Line town I used to hitchhike to when I was a student down the road at Villanova. Back then there was a paperback bookstore on Lancaster Pike; now there’s a bookstore, Main Point Books, on the perpendicular N. Wayne Ave.
Walking in I saw something I hadn’t seen in a while: a display of all the new Best American anthologies: Essays, Short Stories, Mystery and Suspense, etc. The one that caught my eye was Food and Travel Writing. Food had always had its own anthology, as had Travel, before it was discontinued in 2022. The return of travel writing was encouraging, even if it had to hitch its wagon to food.
Opening up the anthology, I found that almost all of the stories were about food – not surprisingly, as few writers had known about travel’s rebirth. One of the travel pieces was an essay on the fate of travel writing by the former editor of the Travel series, a man who, tellingly, now writes about wine and spirits.
Next year, presumably, there will be more of a balance. True, everybody eats and not everybody travels. But eating is almost always more pleasurable than reading about eating, while reading about travel is frequently more enjoyable than travel itself.
I spent Friday night at a motel outside Lancaster and in the morning drove the backroads of Amish country. The last time I did this was two years ago, on an evening in May (before a family reunion) when everything wore a fresh coat of green; now the farms were draped in gold. There was less activity at the start of a fall day than there had been at the end of a spring one, when men rode their horse-drawn plows and barefoot girls in bonnets worked in gardens. But I did see a bearded elder stuffing leaves into a bucket with his grandson, and two boys directing a team of horses. Most everyone who saw me gave me a wave. I stopped on one empty road to take a picture of laundry hanging on a line, the clothes arranged in groups of black, white, and solid colors.
I’ve been visiting this world since I was a child – my mother grew up in Mechanicsburg – and I am always touched by its beauty: the rolling fields, the barns and silos standing tall, the large farmhouses shaded by trees, the shiny black buggies parked in drives. There is a pleasing neatness to the land that is never sullied by political signs.
Wherever, and whenever, I travel, temperatures are unseasonably chilly. In Warsaw a few Septembers ago I bought a scarf the day I arrived and wore it every day for the next four weeks. I remember complaining, at the beginning, that it was still summer. Last year we went to Philadelphia right after Thanksgiving and ended up buying new winter coats – with hoods. This year, we went to Washington, DC, at the end of April and it was surprisingly (though not really) cool and damp. I am a one-man defense against global warming.
Today I’m flying to Chicago and, it seems, my streak will be broken. Today is to be cool but Friday, the one day I’ll have time to walk around, temperatures are expected to be in the mid-60s. Not a heat wave, but for Chicago in late October pretty nice. Back when I planned the trip I half-expected a snowstorm.
I’ll be back here on Monday.
I was honored to be a guest on Ryan Murdock's excellent podcast Personal Landscapes. For a delightful hour we talked about Poland, the Cold War, travel books, travel writing, and even movies, including the usefulness of screenplays in learning a second language.
On my flight to Chicago last week I sat next to an older woman whose husband, sitting by the window, kept the shade down the entire flight. This is behavior I fail to understand; even if you’re unmoved by cloud formations, don’t you want to see the moment you “slip the surly bonds of Earth”? Even more vital for me is a view of the landing, knowing when to expect the gratifying jolt of wheels on tarmac. If I had a smaller prostate I would always book a window seat – and keep the shade up the entire flight.
Not this man. He kept working on his crossword as we taxied to the gate, which, at O’Hare, is a considerable journey. We had flown over a thousand miles and he had no interest in seeing what the landscape or weather were like in this new place. Perhaps, I thought, he has an eye condition that makes him sensitive to bright light. But then why would he book a window seat?
Finally, moved by some unprecedented spark of curiosity, he lifted the shade two inches to peer out. I leaned over greedily, demonstrably, to catch a glimpse at the great outdoors before he banned it from sight.
“Do you want him to open the shade?” the woman asked me.
“Yes,” I said, “I’ve been sitting in a tube for the last three hours.”
He obliged. A few seconds later, we arrived at the gate.