Media Coverage
THE BUFFALO NEWS
Buffalo, NY

Writing duo chronicles motor-home adventure for subscribers

Mother-daughter team’s newsletters take readers on cross-country odyssey By Agnes Palazzetti, News Staff Reporter

“Festy” is the rig and feisty is her crew. Read all about the trio in “Huson Travel Letters.”

It’s the detailed reporting of the adventures and misadventures of 74-yr-old Malva Huson Brown of Baton Rouge, LA and her daughter, Juanita Huson Sylvest of Annapolis, MD, as they relive a cross-country odyssey made more than 40 years ago.

Ms. Sylvest, who is also a licensed sailboat captain, is at the helm of “Festy”, guiding the 29-foot motorhome through concrete swells from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.

With her mother as “first mate”, Ms. Sylvest will dock the motorhome at campgrounds in 48 state capitals, reaching each with side trips to big cities and small towns and sharing all of the experiences with “pen pals” across the country.

This week, “The Traveling Husons” are at the KOA Campground on Grand Island, touring Western New York for the more than 300 subscribers to their travel letters.

Perched on one of the bed/couches in the motorhome on Monday, Ms. Sylvest said the trip “is something my parents did with I was a little girl and though I remembered the traveling, I remembered little of the actual places we visited and what we saw. I always had the urge to do it again at an age where I could really appreciate it.”

"My father came up with the idea of writing personal letters to children about the trip. It was his expereince that kids didn't like to study textbooks, but loved to get personal mail."
-- Juanita Huson Sylvest

That first odyssey began when she was four years old and her parents decided to see the country and, at the same time, teach geography to schoolchildren everywhere.

“My father came up with the idea of writing personal letters to children about the trip. It was his experience that kids didn’t like to study textbooks but loved to get personal mail, “she explained. “And they hoped that they could pay for the trip with the subscriptions to the letters that they would sell.”

Mrs. Brown and her late husband, Roland Huson, had been in the weekly newspaper business and public relations. With that savvy behind them, they would contact newspapers in each of the cities they visited. Her husband would speak to civic organizations. Slowly, the circulation rose to 300. The $25 per subscriptions cost, however, didn’t quite cover all the expenses.

She remembered the time, “We got to Washington, the state, and ran out of money. We wired back to our home bank in Baton Rouge, but before the money finally got there, we found ourselves picking apples with the migrants to have food and gas money. But we had fun.”

After more than a year of planning, the two women began this 18-months odyssey last June and have already traveled more than 9,000 miles.

“And that’s only the motorhome mileage,” Ms. Sylvest pointed out. “It’s sort of like a mother ship which gets us from destination to destination. Once there, we unhitch the little Nova and run around in it.”

This time around, instead of a typewriters and ditto machines, there is a word processor. Also much improved,” said Mrs. Brown, “are the roads.”

“We dug for diamonds in Arkansas, visited a coal mine in West Virginia, rode through the locks of the Sault Ste. Marie, missed visiting the Statue of Liberty because of a bomb scare but saw it from the Staten Island ferry…and just last week, had the most incredible ride here seeing all of the beautiful foliage along Route 17.”

“As before, money for the trip is being raised through a biweekly newsletter that goes out to a subscription list including schoolchildren and senior citizens both in this country and abroad.

Pre-trip publicity began the list, but the two are picking up subscribers along the way. This time around, the cost is $75.00 for the “tour”, but as Ms. Sylvest point out, “To refuel this truck – and that’s really what a motorhome is when it comes to gas and repairs – takes 80 gallons of gasoline. Believe me, the filling stations love to see us pull up to the pump!”

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