A Travel Writer’s Journey
Nancy exploring Egypt’s blinding White Desert
“The blood remembers. It flows through our veins... and our destinies.
Looking back on a gypsy life of traveling and musical adventures, you start to see how this works. You’re born, simply enough, in Nashville - Country Music - Tennessee, yet you are named after two faraway cities in France, Nancy and Lyon. Is it the maternal Irish and French blood that drive you to take up traditional Irish music, busk your way around France, then live in Quebec for twenty years? Or is it just your mother...?
Looking back on it now, I see how my Celtic Blood ricocheted me through time and place in a crazy backwards ancestral immigrant trajectory, that began in my father’s Hillbilly Tennessee Highlands, and lept from Ireland, to Quebec, to the Scottish Highlands of my paternal great-great-great-grand-daddy Kilgore Lyon. And with it, endless hellos and goodbyes, bonjours and au revoirs, visas, passports, immigration papers from the Gouvernement du Quebec and the British Home Office, not to speak of foreign husbands, Monsieur Le Tattoo Artist and Mr. MacBagpiper.”
Marked for Adventure
When I was but thirteen, my mother piled me and my three younger sisters into the family station wagon and drove us from Indianapolis, Indiana to Acapulco, Mexico for the summer. I’ve tried to top that rollicking rite of passage with travels from Tunisia to Malaysia, Ireland to Australia, and road adventures in my 1970 VW Westphalia Dame Gitane, busking around Europe and the UK, and from the Big Apple to San Fran..
As a seven-year old Indianapolis cow girl
QUIRKY is another travel cliché that I hate. But in most of my travels, I am chronically lured to the odd, weird and “off-beat.” My column Innocents Abroad for the Montreal Gazette was a great excuse to fly to Tokyo on a flight simulator, and later look for a real fugu fish restaurant while I was actually in Japan. And to interview lots of charming people about their innocent misadventures abroad. None of this material brings in advertising revenue of course. But my editors appreciated good entertainment value.
Vagabonding Far and Wide
Traveling through inner and outer worlds
Ever since that dramatic 13th summer vagabonding in Mexico, I have been thriving on getaways of various lengths and sorts, traveling through outer and inner worlds and living in different countries. I spent three years in Ireland, living in Dublin, in Clifden and on Inishbofin in County Galway, and on Sherkin Island in County Cork. I spent a summer in Paris, a decade in Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, a summer in London and a year in Gateshead, England.
I was a Montrealer for 20 years and now live between Sutton, Quebec and Tarpon Springs, Florida. All these different places, cultures, ways of beings — have sometimes lead to a cultural indigestion. Not to speak of the complications of immigrating - twice - and the governmental, bureaucratic, headaches and heartaches this has entailed. At times I have felt terribly tossed between yearning for wild adventure and yearning for a quiet hearth. Which road or path to take? Beware of the traveller's conundrum.
Magazine internships in Manhattan
After getting my journalism degree from Indiana University in 1969, I landed a job that jump-started my writing career. I was one of 33 journalism students across the U.S. chosen by the Magazine Publishers Association for a summer magazine internship in New York City— a five-week editorial stint at Forbes Magazine, followed by five-weeks at House Beautiful— with a weekly salary of $77.52, airfare to New York, and swanky cocktail parties and tony lunches at the St. Regis, the Plaza and various other ritzy New York hotels, hobnobbing with the editors of Time, Look, Newsweek, Harper’s, Cosmopolitan and Esquire magazines.
The foyer of the elegant old Forbes Building on lower Fifth Avenue housed a tycoon’s private museum—Malcolm Forbes’ personal collection of fabulous Fabergé eggs. I loved to dawdle in front of the cases of luminous jewels on the way up to editorial, where, because of my lack of business acumen, I didn’t quite fit in. On Malcolm Forbes’ 50th birthday, he strolled around the office passing out crisp $50 bills to everyone—nearly’s my week’s wages! I took mine and invited an intern from California for drinks at the posh Tavern on the Green in Central Park. Sitting under the Perrier umbrellas, sipping whiskey sours, we felt almost like famous published writers...
The Big Apple was talkative, dangerous and alive
I expected to hate New York City, but I loved it. It was friendly, talkative, dangerous and alive. All of us magazine interns, wide-eyed ingenues in Fun City, were lodged in Columbia University housing up on 116th Street and Broadway, on the spooky edge of Harlem. My spartan little writer’s garret with a graffiti-carved desk overlooked the bright lights and traffic streams of The Great White Way.
Every morning I’d eagerly put on pert a Midwestern suit, stick a subway token in my shoe in case I got mugged, and join the sweaty mash of commuters on the grubby Broadway IRT downtown. From my Harlem aerie over the Hudson I wrote letters back home about New York City’s extremes: underground, a drunk mumbling to a subway candy vending machine Mirror mirror on the wall, I am the ugliest of them all, while on the street above, a slick blonde Vogue Magazine model posing for a fashion shoot at the Plaza Hotel — and about the subway that brought all these people together, for better or worse.
After Forbes, it was House Beautiful Magazine. On my first day as an intern, I was sent to Marketing Research, where I was instructed on how to put gnat-size pencil dots onto yards of paper. My letters back home now read, “Life in exciting New York City is getting duller and duller as I record the numbers of adult, female purchasers of washing machines in the last year who own Frigidaire separate home freezers.” Surely it was a mistake. I did not graduate from Journalism School and come all the way to New York to be doing this! Other interns were getting by-lines in Newsweek, and their names on their magazine’s masthead. One even got to work on the Time Magazine mafia cover story. She scoured the city, picking up brass knuckles, switchblades, bludgeons and bombs, and a sawed-off shotgun—to use as for props for the cover shoot.
Meeting the Travel Editor
After a week I was fed up alphabetizing filing cards at House Beautiful and started spending my lunch hour wandering around the editorial department. I peeked into the glassed office windows looking for a receptive soul. One of the editorial ears I bent belonged to a matronly buxom blonde, who happened to be the Travel Editor. Marion Gough was looking for a full-time assistant. I explained to her the prestigious Magazine Publishers Association’s Magazine Internship Program, which no editor at House Beautiful seemed to know about. (Otherwise, why did they stuff me away in Marketing?)
“Come on in darling, sit down,” Marion Gough beckoned. Sinking into the white leather sofa in her glamorous office crammed with travel books, globes, maps and souvenirs from every continent, I felt I’d finally arrived.
For months after that, every morning an avalanche of travel press releases awaited my trusty letter opener. Zip, zip. Ireland By Bicycle. Zip, zip. France By Hot Air Balloon, The Amazon By Raft, The Rhine By Barge. Zip, zip, zip China... Cuba... Mozambique, and honeymoon specials to the Seychelles. Honey, be a travel editor, and we’ll give you the whole planet!!! The brochures, letters of invitation, press releases piled up and up, and I never dreamed that one day I would have my own such avalanche to deal with…
New York Magazine
I had planned to stay in New York City only a year, but after a few months at House Beautiful I stumbled upon a copy of New York Magazine. The issue of this magazine featured a Bowery bum on its cover. The bum was actually a writer who had dressed up like a bum and lived on the streets of Manhattan’s downtown Bowery without money for two weeks—just to see what would happen and to write about it. That night I wrote an excited letter to the editor of this daring new incarnation of the old Sunday Herald Tribune magazine, asking for a job.
A month later I was on the masthead as Editorial Assistant to Executive Editor Sheldon Zalaznick, working in a funky four-floor walk-up on East 32nd Street, where hot-pants were acceptable office attire and joint smoke went unremarked. I felt lucky then, as I feel lucky now, to have been on the scene in the magazine’s heyday, with visionary Editor-in-Chief Clay Felker directing a cast of soon-to-be celebrity writers — Dapper Tom Wolfe in his summery Panama hats, white suits and spats: “the Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flaked King”; the flaxen-haired Gael, Gail Sheehy, checking the emotional pulse of our lives; Street-Talkin’ Tough Jimmy Breslin; Scandal-sleuthing Detail-Junkie Julie Baumgold, and my Gotham City heroine, lanky gorgeous Gloria Steinem in her tinted aviator glasses, the Superwoman Savant who founded Ms. Magazine. They were coming and going all around me sharing the excitement of the dawn of the New Journalism.
It was genial teamwork, made all the more fun by the staff champagne breakfasts at the Four Seasons, lunches at Maxwell’s Plum, glamorous movie premieres, press trips, parties at Clay Felker’s penthouse, and strange perks.
My Day At The Circus
Once the magazine received an invitation from a PR agent for Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus for a staffer to get to ride a circus elephant. Nobody else in the office wanted to do it, so I jumped at the chance.
I still have the certificate bestowing upon me the coveted title of Elephant Equestrian Extraordinaire after my successful trek from the Circus Yard to Madison Square Garden — “Perched Precariously on a Ponderous Pachyderm” — riding bare-backed a naked elephant through the streets of Manhattan. And the certificate stated that “this ride was carried through with disciplined dignity and absolute aplomb.”
““Hang on to her ears!” the Dutch trainer screamed up to me from very far below at an ungodly early a.m. as my renegade beast named Efa twirled her two-ton head and refused to grab the tail of the old gray one in front of her. The safari across all those wide Manhattan avenues was harrowing. ”
At New York Magazine I graduated from fact-checking 5,000-word Julie Baumgold social exposés to writing for The Passionate Shopper column. I greedily collected bylines. Where to Buy Your Bird... Homage to Frommage... What’s Open on Sunday. But after three years of writing about where to rent a gorilla suit, where to buy organ-grinder monkeys and desert tarantulas, and how to bid for 500 pounds of confiscated bean curd and 162 dozen door peepers at a U.S. Customs Bureau auction — I resigned. Yearning to be a real writer, not a shopping writer or a writing shopper, I took a big risk, announced my resignation—and became a freelancer.
I left New York Magazine with a few assignments, from Town & Country, Lady’s Home Journal, House Beautiful and Ms.Magazine, and New York Magazine as well. My dream was to move to San Francisco, hippie haven—with those hip San Francisco poets and the clanging cable cars.
How I got out to San Francisco in late October of 1972 was a crazy reflection of the 1970’s. My airfare from Newark to San Fran was a dirt cheap $49 because I flew as a courier on Flying Tiger Airlines.
What a way to greet the west—strapped into the cockpit jumpseat of a DC-8 cargo jet loaded with footballs! From the picture window cockpit of the Flying Tiger jet, I devoured my first views of the eerie Nevada badlands and that symbol of Flower Power, the Golden Gate Bridge.
After landing in Frisco and checking into my room at the YMCA, I spent glorious days soaking up my first views and smells of the Pacific Ocean from the pounding edge of Golden Gate Park, the city’s exotic Eucalyptus-scented sanctuary…browsing for some Lawrence Ferlinghetti in his own City Lights bookstore, along with Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac and other Frisco poets… and listening to a sage old soul with one-stringed Chinese violin busking on Stockton Street.
I didn’t know where—or how— I would live in San Francisco before hopping a Greyhound bus to Los Angeles for $16.50 to meet up with a Travel and Leisure editor I’d befriended. She had a rental car, an expense account and a curiosity about Death Valley National Monument.
Death Valley Daze: My first travel article published in the New York Times in 1973
I published my very first travel article on California's Death Valley in the New York Times in November of 1973. When my travel article was featured in a New York Times advertorial to promote the Times' travel section, I was thrilled. I was hooked on the travel writing genre. My insatiable curiosity for the world suddenly had something to do!