I’ve been feeling uninformed about how places around the country are celebrating the 250th anniversary. That’s probably because I spent most of 1975 and early 1976 promoting Bicentennial events and sites to tourists in six countries: Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan. The plum contract came from the late U.S Travel Service, Department of Commerce.
I don’t know how USTS’s successor works, but here’s what I did 50 years ago.
USTS was one of my freelance clients when the job offer came. The small office worked with the U.S. travel industry, private and public, to attract visitors from our biggest travel markets. Major objectives were to spread travelers’ dollars all over the United States, beyond such common stops as New York and Los Angeles, and to encourage return visits.
The unit chief, a former newspaper reporter, would assign a theme, give leads on possible sites and sights, and provide a desk for making long distance calls to sources. Writers didn’t travel.
Most articles covered seven or eight geographically diverse places. I usually started by calling state tourism offices for suggestions and contacts for sources of information and photos. Gathering the information took more time than writing the story. The research also yielded many ideas for places I’d visit and write about later.
My first feature article covered vacationing on wagon trains, reliving the fabled migration west for a few days. My prize find was a weekly family-oriented roll across the Kansas prairie with chuckwagon meals and campfire entertainment. Most of the others were two-day events linked to local history. Several places planned special wagon trains during the Bicentennial. Anyone know of one this year?
Among the dozen or so themes I wrote about as a freelancer or staff member were swamps (e.g., the Okefenokee in Georgia), aromas (e.g., mint fields in Idaho), and doll museums.
Once on staff, I also edited articles and led themed familiarization (fam) tours for travel writers from the six target countries. I think our embassies identified freelance and staff writers for major newspapers and travel magazines to invite on the tours. I coordinated with local visitors’ bureaus in arranging the site visits, accommodations, and restaurants.
All the writers spoke English or brought an interpreter, and I knew a bit of German, French, and Spanish. I served as a tour escort, but I also acted as a consultant on American culture and history, adviser on resources, and solver of whatever problems arose. For example, on a cross-country tour of theme parks (e.g., Opryland, Six Flags, and Disneyland), the German loved the wildest rollercoasters. The other writers didn’t. So I rode with her. I haven’t been on a rollercoaster since then.
I loved working with the international travel writers. We functioned as colleagues and became friends.
This year I’ve been studying 1776—through reading, classes, and viewing—not only as a critical time in American history but also as a moment in a centuries-long continuum. Seeds for the Declaration of Independence had fallen onto inhospitable grounds from the time homo sapiens formed communities. Just 250 years ago, an extraordinary group of thinkers, fighters, and neighbors came together to tend new seeds in uncertain soil. They succeeded and turned their attention to forming a more perfect union. Crops have flourished, but we still have some poisonous weeds.
The document signed by a few in 1776 united the many to resist a distant dictator and work toward unalienable rights for all. Since that time, millions all over the world have drawn inspiration and hope from their words. So must we.
And what did I do to celebrate the Bicentennial? I can’t remember. When my contract ended, I headed to Mexico to study Spanish for a month, visit my Mexican fam tour friends, and move on south gathering material and taking photos for travel articles.
On July 4 I was in either Guatemala or Colombia, happily sightseeing and comparing Latin America’s ongoing struggle for those unalienable rights to ours. It made me appreciate our founders’ words in 1776 even more.
Words matter.
—Carolyn Mulford