The Traveling Press

In the musette bag of red-haired Horace Sutton are Dramamine tablets, bug spray, a ten-bladed Swiss army knife, cable cards, swimming trunks, traveler's checks--and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of paregoric. These are the tools of Sutton's profession: he is a travel writer, working for newspapers and magazines in an age when more and more of the world's citizens are excursioning to more and more foreign countries.

In the last year Sutton has toted his tools more than 100,000 miles, most recently to Tahiti, where he dined on raw fish in coconut milk, papaya-banana pudding--and, of course, paregoric. His wife Pat, 24, a former night-club dancer, usually goes along, once traveled abroad six times in six months. Sutton is handsomely rewarded for his peregrinations: from his column, Of All Places, which is syndicated in 35 papers, and from his periodic travelogues for the Saturday Review, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and other publications, he earns some $40,000 a year.

Short of Respectability. Not surprisingly, Sutton and his travel-writing press colleagues are the envy of newsmen on more prosaic beats. Every now and then, Denver Post Editor Palmer Hoyt pokes his head through the door of Travel Editor Bruce Hamby and inquires: "How does a guy get a job like this?" In the years since World War II, the travel editor has come to play an increasingly important press role. New York Times Travel Editor Paul J. C. Friedlander has a staff of five men and a secretary. Travel supplements proliferate, ranging from the Chicago Tribune, which prints one every week, to the Oakland Tribune, which produces two a year. Resort hotels, steamship companies, airlines and luggage manufacturers flock almost unbidden to advertise; last year the Chicago Tribune grossed $4,414,684 in travel ads, and the New York Times some $8,000,000; the Times travel ad lineage is up 300% from war's end. Yet, for all the highly respectable growth in his profession, the travel writer himself has never quite achieved journalistic respectability.

Before World War II the principal function of newspaper travel copy was to fill the white space between resort ads. This dubious responsibility fell either to hacks or to travel-ad salesmen; when the Milwaukee Sentinel, a Hearstpaper, decided to beef up its travel department, it reached into the ranks of the advertising department for an editor. Most travel stories were no more than barely rewritten handouts from railroads, tourist centers and Miami Beach.

An Abiding Fact. Travel writing and editing has improved, but a painful hangover persists. The double-duty ad salesman, selling space and writing puffs, lingers on many papers, among them the San Francisco Examiner and the Boston Globe.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch lumps its travel section under the catchall division, "Promotion News," and uses great gobs of free publicity copy. Stanton Delaplane, whose travel column is syndicated even more widely than Horace Sutton's, insists on paying his own hotel bills--but demands a 25% commercial discount in the U.S. A CAB ruling prohibits airlines from letting newsmen fly free on scheduled flights, but some travel editors evade the ruling by selling "reprint rights" of their articles to the airlines for the price of the fare--plus a few extra dollars to make the transaction look better. The airlines sometimes exercise the reprint rights in their house organs, especially if the writer has made lavish and approving mention of the host carrier. Travel copy is singularly noncritical. "Let's face it," says the Denver Post's Hamby. "You start panning too many places and you won't have a travel section very long."

The travel writers defend freeloading on the ground that it is a well-established journalistic practice. Says Horace Sutton: "Since when have you seen a theater critic like Brooks Atkinson scrambling in line to buy a seat for the second balcony?" Sutton, with far more justification than most, maintains that no one tells him what to write. But others of his genre admit to an abiding fact of the travel editor's life. "Half of my job is public relations," says the San Francisco Chronicle's Polly Noyes. "Even for the agencies I don't like, I try to get news. If they can't make a story out of something, I do it myself." As long as such obliging journalism remains in the travel sections of U.S. newspapers, the travel editor will never take his most important journey: to the realm of the let-the-chips-fall working newsman.

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