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Traveling via the Mailbox -- Juanita Huson Sylvest

Most homeschooling families have recognized the open enthusiasm with which children welcome and respond to personal letters. This is one of the reasons that pen pals play an important role in homeschooling.

This natural enthusiastic response to personal mail was the creative idea behind a unique product of the 1940's -- Travel Letters -whose 1989 rebirth seeks to address the modern-day concernsabout geographic and historic illiteracy. The story...

At the close of World War I1, a young journalist couple, Malva and Roland Huson, loaded their two preschoolers. a typewriter, Ditto Machine, camping equipment and three changes of clothes into a Ford modified to serve as home, office and transportation.

The 'Traveling Husons" devoted almost two years to exploring the USA's people, places and perspectives, sharing their adventures with children throughout the country via a vehicle of their own creation -- Travel Letters -- a delightful chatty, personalized letter which children received every ten days or so to their homes.

Recognizing children's natural curiosity about the world around them, the letters were a friendly, personal communication from friends, sharing their adventure and discoveries about the physical and cultural geography, history and economics of the country.

Although homeschooling was not a popular movement at the time, nonetheless, many parents recognized the worth of these letters as an important supplement to their children's "formal" education. Even cartoonist Al Capp subscribed for his daughter!

I was the preschool daughter (4-5 years old) on that trip and have no doubt that that experience was a major factor in molding me into the person I am today -- an intelligent, adventuresome, inquisitive soul who greets each new life experience as another door to continued learning!

Throughout my childhood my parents never hesitated to take my brother and me "out of school" in order to travel with them, arguing with the educational powers that were that the world was the greatest classroom. Before I even entered first grade I had traveled through every one of the 48 contiguous states, five Canadian provinces and through Mexico into Central America.

However, as much as they might like to, most families are not able to take their children on that sort of comprehensive "field trip." Therefore, the Travel Letters were designed to bring as many children along with us as possible. And they worked! In my preparation for the new '89-'90 Huson Travel Letters I tracked down almost 50 of the 300 subscribers to the original '40's series and found that the letters were remembered with great fondness as having contributed to the recipients' childhood sense of adventure and inquiry.

One man said that his complete set of Travel Letters were a cherished possession which had not only enhanced his joy of learning as the 9-year-old originally receiving them: but that his children had used them to supplement their studies, and now his grandchildren were using them.

The new Huson Travel Letters, to be launched in January, 1989 by my 73-year-young mother and me, will be rather like children having an aunt or older cousin on the road who writes to them every other week. That personalized letter will allow each arm-chair traveler to experience a cross-country adventure as it occurs.

We'll share our discoveries and activities as we explore the cultural and physical geography, history, economics and (new) ecology of each of the fifty states we visit during the 18 month journey. The children will be able to trace our route on the maps accompanying each letter.

As before, the writing style is friendly and conversational, rather than attempting to be a comprehensive presentation about any state or subject. Our goal is to share our love of travel and sense of adventure, allowing it to fuel the children's natural desire to learn more. Knowing that children are inherently full of questions and always on the alert for answers, we trust that our young readers will take it from there.

The 18 month 40-letter Huson Travel Letters series is available by subscription for $75.00 (94 cents/ week). They come personally addressed to each individual child or family group. Letters will begin in January 1989, arriving every two weeks accompanied by a map. For additional information contact: Huson Travel Letters, c/o Color Art, Inc., 10300 Watson Road. St. Louis, MO 63127 or call (314) 9662000.

As a mother of three grown daughters, Juanita Huson Sylvest was a very active "coach" in their schooling. Now a U.S. Coast Guard licensed captain who helps women learn to sail, she firmly believes that teaching is a matter of getting out of the way while supporting the student's natural desire to know. At age 10 she began a 13-year stint writing an award-winning general interest weekly newspaper column. Recreating the Huson Travel Letters in company with her journalist-librarian mother, Malva, is the fulfillment of a long-held dream.

In Charlottesville we visited the home of our third president, Thomas Jefferson, one of the most talented men we've ever heard about. A famous writer, statesman, and farmer, he also designed his own house and then filled it with his own inventions. Our favorites were the dumbwaiter used to bring food from the basement kitchen to the first-floor dining room, and his 7-day clock which used cannon balls for weights and required a hole be cut in the foyer floor!

We were surprised to find that Jefferson's bed was built into the wall and was very short -- because he was very tall. But guess what? He liked to sleep sitting up, propped against a lot of pillows! Do you think you would get much sleep that way?

If you look at a nickel you will see a picture of Jefferson on one side and his home, Monticello, on the other! Monticello (pronounced Monty-chello) means "little mountain" in Italian. It sits on top of a small mountain overlooking the University of Virginia which Jefferson also designed.

Our next stop, Richmond, once served as the capital of the Confederacy. One street, Monument Avenue, features statues of famous Confederate soldiers at almost every intersection. The story goes that if the statue faces south, the soldier returned home, but if it faces north, he died in the North's battlefields.

In the historic St. John's Church we watched a man re-enact Patrick Henry's famous "Give me liberty, or give me death!" speech. This powerful speech was delivered to only a small group of people in that tiny church. News of it then spread throughout the land by people on horseback, taking weeks to do so. Very different from today when the entire country can hear an important speech via television while its actually happening!

The distance that took colonial riders one day to travel by horse, we can travel in just one hour today by car. That was how long it took us to get from Richmond, capitol of the state of Virginia, to Williamsburg, capitol of the colony of Virginia.

We really had fun in Colonial Williamsburg! It's like stepping through a time warp back into the 18th century. There are no cars -just horses, buggies and ox carts.

Women wear long dresses, aprons and white caps. The men wear knee-length pants, shirts without buttons and 3-pointed hats. We got to see how they made candles, printed books, forged tools and created the powdered wigs which important men like George Washington wore.

In nearby Jamestown we were shocked to see how small the boats were which brought settlers across the ocean from England! The full-size replicas of the Godspeed, Discovery, and Susan Constant looked like they might be fun for a day's sail on the Chesapeake Bay, but they seemed awfully tiny and cramped for weeks on the ocean! And with livestock aboard, too? Whew...!

In Yorktown, the third town of the "Colonial triangle," we saw a real 18th century shipwreck! It is too fragile to raise from its watery grave, so engineers have built a cofferdam around the entire ship and special filters cleanse the muddy river water inside. You can walk out on a pier, look down in the clear water and actually see the ship. We watched divers working on the wreck -- one of 20-some ships scuttled by Cornwallis before he surrendered to George Washington, ending the Revolutionary War.

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