The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
News-Herald writer has spanned the globe
News-Herald’s Janet’s Podolak to reflect on three decades of travel writing at luncheon
News-Herald’s Janet’s Podolak will reflect on three decades of travel writing at a luncheon.
Hundreds of places, thousands of faces and experiences of a lifetime have been components of my 46 years with The News-Herald. Now I’m tasked with selecting favorite destinations and foods and talking about them for an audience on April 12 at the Fine Arts Association in Willoughby.
The invitation came in the summer from The Women’s Committee of the Fine Arts, a 100-plus-member group — mostly women — that has been a part of Fine Arts since its beginning in 1969. Many of them are Lake County residents, as well as subscribers to The News-Herald, where they’ve seen the stories I’ve written the past 46 years.
My presentation, which begins at 11 a.m. and is followed by lunch, is part of the group’s Second Wednesday Lunch and Lecture series. Nonmembers — men included — are welcome, but reservations are required for those staying for lunch.
I live in and raised my children in Mentor and began writing for the old Women’s pages with stories about things of interest to my gender, an idea that’s pretty dated in these times. Back then, the process of producing a newspaper involved molten metal type, called hot lead, pressed into a mold and used to press ink on paper. That process ended in the late 1970s, a time that seems very long ago.
Today, everything is computerized, and journalists must be computersavvy and prolific contributors to social media.
By the mid-’70s, I’d graduated to feature and news writing, covering everything from auto accidents to robberies, court cases to school boards and city councils. It’s somewhat amazing to me to meet readers who remember stories I’d written back in those days. One of the earliest series I did was “Courthouse Wives,” stories profiling the wives of judges and other prominent employees at the Lake County Courthouse.
Because this is Lake County, a place where people tend to remain, I’m always reconnecting to those folks, many of whom were subjects of stories I’d done. Recently, while waiting for a friend at the bar in Pastina Rustic Italian Restaurant in Mentor, I met Dwayne, a bartender I wrote about in the early ’90s who recalled a story in which he detailed the perfect martini, along with another I’d done years earlier when I covered an auto accident in his Mentor neighborhood.
He found the 1978 story, yellowed and pressed between sheets of wax paper, in his mother’s possessions after she died. “I was about 7,” he recalled. “And I was on the accident scene with my dad. We’d seen it happen and you talked to us for your story.”
I don’t actually recall either story, but those kinds of things happen to me all the time. When someone’s picture and story appear in the local newspaper, it’s something they tend to remember.
But the stories I best remember best are those I write for our Travel section and News-Herald. com, which often overlap into food stories for the Life page and the site.
The News-Herald doesn’t pick up expenses for my travel. I’m usually the guest of a visitors bureau, a city, cruise line or hotel chain, entities who want to reach out to our readers. I’ve won a lot of awards over the years, which makes me an even more desirable journalist to host. When I am able, I freelance versions of my stories to other publications. I pay gratuities, sometimes airfare, a meal or two and other things, depending on the destination. Each trip is different.
The pursuit of stories for our Travel section, which began in the mid-’80s, has taken me to seek the shy resplendent quetzal in the highlands of Panama, to ride over the Andes mountains on the roof of a train car, to venture into South Africa to see amazing wildlife, onto the rapidly melting glacial center of Greenland, by raft down the wild rivers of West Virginia, to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge and to go up the Irrawaddy River to Mandalay in Burma.
Water has been a reoccurring theme in my life, perhaps because I’m a water-sign Pisces. So I became certified for Scuba diving 20 years ago and have met the denizens of the deep in the Caribbean, off the Florida coast, in the Mediterranean, at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, in Cozumel in Mexico, on the Hawaiian islands and in the South China Sea.
I’ve swum with sharks and manatees but haven’t yet had the opportunity to swim with giant whale sharks. I also haven’t yet dived the fissure in Iceland that’s the crack between two continental plates. (It’s on my bucket list.) But the chilly dry suit dive I did to a Basque whaling ship sunk in 1565 off Labrador was a highlight not only of my diving experiences, but of my career.
The destructive power of water also has inspired a huge respect for safety during my dives and snorkeling.
The scope of its impact became clear when I helped my brother clean up his place after a hurricane struck the U.S. Virgin Islands, knocking out power for a month. And last fall’s trip to Miyagi, Japan, was sobering. That’s where a 2011 earthquake and tsunami wiped out coastal towns and claimed 16,000 lives.
I tend to have a resonance for cold places and consider it’s my Norwegian ancestry shining through. One of my neatest voyages was aboard a ferry boat along Norway’s coast south from the Soviet Union border in the Arctic to Bergen. On that trip, I visited the lands of my ancestors in the Lofoten Islands in the Arctic. The Hurtigruten ships have simple staterooms and hearty fish-based meals for passengers but also carry cars, grain and supplies to isolated ports not connected by roads along the rugged Norwegian coast.
Because cruising is a vacation style with a great degree of satisfaction by passengers, cruises are part of my schedule every year. Helping people choose a cruise that fits their personality is key, so I try to sample different ships and destinations. I took my first Rhine river cruise last year and learned from experience about many pros and cons of river cruising, which is quite a bit different from an ocean cruise.
Ships and voyages vary from luxury to basic and run the gamut in price. Some cruise ships also make it possible to bring a friend, although that person usually has to pay his or her own airfare and port
charges.
That was the case several years ago on a shortened Crystal Cruise around Italy in the Mediterranean when I invited my friend Maureen to join me. She was living in Madrid, and her airfare was minimal. We would meet in Venice. Just days before our departure, she discovered her husband had been unfaithful. She was devastated and almost canceled the trip. But I persuaded her the cruise would be restful and help restore her equanimity.
As it turned out, her dilemma became my story.
After losing my notes in Sorrento, I framed my series around Maureen’s dilemma using an Isak Dinesen quote: “The cure for everything is salt water: sweat, tears and the sea.”
When Maureen danced with the gentlemen hosts onboard, I developed the sweat angle. When she wept during our girl talks, her tears became the story focus. And when she took a dip in the sea from a tiny hole-in-the-wall spot in Dubrovnik, the sea became her cure.
The series ended with challenges met and a new courage acquired.
For years after the series ran, I encountered readers asking how she was and if she had ended her marriage. The truth is, her marriage has survived, redefined by our cruise and a renewed commitment.