Travel ads and topics reflect changing tastes, transportation
That ad is for the Great Northern Railway, which offered an “Empire Builder” trip to New York City for $ 151.70 — six cents cheaper than the Milwaukee Road.
The destinations changed depending on the time of year. In the summer, the ads tended to be for B. C. or back east. In the winter, there would be ads for California sun spots like the Catalina Island resort, the Hotel Virginia in Long Beach, and the Santa Monica Beach and Ocean Park.
Ads for Hawaii didn’t start to appear until the 1950s. But once they began, they didn’t stop.
“Hawaii, loveliest of sunlit, palm- fringed isles anchored in a tropic sea,” purred the Hawaii Visitors Bureau in 1952. “So close ... only nine hours by plane, four- and- a- half days by ship ... from the Pacific Coast.”
Many people chose to go by ship. The most renowned Hawaiian cruise line, Matson, offered voyages in January 1959 aboard the S. S. Luraline from Seattle to Honolulu for as little as $ 145. That only got you a one- way fare, but once you got to Hawaii, few people were in any hurry to return. ( Part of the Luraline’s interior was replicated in Vancouver’s tiki wonder, the Waldorf Hotel.)
Hawaii aside, many people chose to abandon ships, and railways, to travel by air in the 1950s. In 1955, a flight from Vancouver to Montreal took 13 hours, but two years later Trans- Canada Air Lines introduced the TCA Mercury, which flew from Vancouver to Toronto non- stop in only six hours and 55 minutes.
As jet technology made travel to Europe and Asia quicker, Vancouverites took advantage and vacationed in Europe, Asia and Australia. But many took to the road in their cars, including The Sun’s legendary 1950s columnist Jack Scott.
Today, Scott is famed as the editor who sent The Sun’s vivacious fashion editor Marie Moreau to Cuba to cover the revolution, where she charmed her way into an interview with Fidel Castro. He also sent football writer Annis Stukus to Taiwan to cover a looming war between Taiwan and China.
Still, Scott was only The Sun’s editor for a couple of months before he was gonged. His main gig was his folksy column, Our Town, where he wrote about day- to- day life in the city.
The Sun’s owner/ publisher Robert Cromie must have liked Scott a lot, because in May 1950 Scott talked Cromie into sending him on the mother of all Sun trips: a cross- Canada drive with his family. The Scotts ( Jack, his wife Brown Eyes, and daughters Judy and Jill) slept in a trailer, which were all the rage in the early ’ 50s.
Scott shot the rapids near Revelstoke, he hung out with mountain goats in Lake Louise, and he almost melted in the sweltering heat of the Prairies. He complained about the poor roads in Saskatchewan, talked to farmers about the flood in Manitoba, and fell in love with Quebec City.
It was the kind of trip everyone dreams of making, but can’t, because it takes an eternity. It took Scott four months to make it across the country to Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, where his daughter Judy poured a bottle of water from the Pacific Ocean into the Atlantic.
The plan was to sell the trailer and drive quickly back across Canada, but there wasn’t a big market for trailers in Halifax in October, so Scott and family turned south to continue his travelogue for Sun readers in Boston, New York, New Orleans, San Antonio and Phoenix.
On Nov. 28 he reached California, which he dubbed “the happy state.” Alas, he caught viral pneumonia and limped back to Vancouver in midDecember. The family had travelled 28,140 kilometres in seven months, enduring 16 flat tires ( 12 on the car, four on the trailer) along the way.
Scott continued to travel for the paper — his photo file has a great shot of him photographing llamas in Bolivia in 1956. There is also a fabulous undated photo of a shirtless Scott drinking water from a big spoon in some mountainous terrain, a woman ( hopefully his wife) by his side.
Strictly speaking, though, Jack Scott wasn’t writing the kind of travel story today’s readers are used to. Modern travel stories started appearing in The Sun in 1964, when the paper decided to have a dedicated travel section in its new Friday Leisure magazine.
Another Sun legend, Barry Broadfoot, went to Tahiti — Tahiti! — to write a travel story on Dec. 4, 1964. Presumably, he travelled there on some kind of junket; it’s hard to imagine an editor signing off on such an expensive trip for a single travel story.
The paper stopped taking free trips at some point in the 1960s, which brings up one of The Sun’s legendary stories. It took place in the early 1970s, when the late Jack Ramsay was travel editor. Jack was rather thin, and had big glasses, which made him look sickly.
One day he phoned in sick, so sick that he advised he probably wouldn’t be in for a week.
“A day goes by, then another day, and he didn’t phone,” recalls retired Sun writer Paul Musgrove.
“About the third or fourth day they started to get worried about him: ‘ Jeez, what’s up with Jack? What’s the matter? Maybe he’s really sick, we’d better go and check.’ They sent [ someone] around to knock on his door to see if he needed anything. No Ramsay; he wasn’t there.
“There was a big hunt [ for him]. They phoned the hospitals and checked the police reports. No Jack. A couple more days go by, and The Sun gets a call from some PR outfit saying that Jack Ramsay’s plane would be arriving from Stockholm at four o’clock, if we wanted to go pick him up.”
Ramsay had taken a free trip to Europe, so he was fired. But he was well- liked, and after awhile got back on at the paper. He wasn’t travel editor, though.