Media Coverage
L. A. PARENT MAGAZINE

About 40 miles north of Shreveport, we came to a place where three states meet. You would have laughed if you could have seen us dancing around the post which marks the three boundaries. We held hands...and danced from Louisiana into Texas into Arkansas into Louisiana into Texas...it was fun traveling from state to state so quickly.

Before Kerouac and Steinbeck, there were the Husons. Hitting the road in 1946, a couple of young journalists, Roland and Malva Huson, and their two preschoolers, "Gadget" and "Jigger", spent almost two years discovering America in a modified Ford that was their shelter and transportation. Unlike the above literary giants, however, the Huson's travels didn't culminate in weighty tomes. Their odyssey was recounted in weekly letters, dispatched to youngsters throughout the land, with the pedagogical purpose of bolstering their knowledge of geography and other scholarly subjects as painlessly as possible.

Forty-three years later, Malva Huson, now 73, and "Gadget", who currently answers to the name of Juanita and is a journalist in her own right, are planning on reliving that adventure."It's always been a long-term desire of mine to re-create this trip, but I didn't know if there would be any interest in it by a new and, in many ways, different generation," says Juanita Huson. The impetus came from two sources: the younger Huson's own daughter's stunned discovery in college that New Hampshire and Colorado, two states known for their winter-sports facilities, were not geographic neighbors, and Congress' declaration of National Geographic Awareness Week, kicking off Nov. 13, to address the issue of geographic illiteracy. "Kids don't suffer from a lack of access to information but, rather, from a lack of interest in geography," she says. "They're missing a sense of connectedness, an understanding of where the various states are with regard to one another."

Like the original subscribers, kids who sign up for the letters will also receive a map, allowing them to situate the Huson's whereabouts. Written in a mode deemed accessible to third through eighth graders, the new Huson Travel Letters have received advanced kudos from educators and child experts, who claim that TV and computers have not dimmed children's delight at receiving mail.

Creating those letters and personally addressing them to each child will certainly be a great deal easier in the age of modems and word processors. Her late father had to rely on his yankee ingenuity to devise a way of personalizing the letters' greetings as he cranked them out on the portable Ditto machine. But that's not the only added convenience of travel in the Eighties.

"There were no Holiday Inns and not very many nice campgrounds back then," recalls 73-year-old Malva Huson. Her husband had transformed their Ford into a makeshift bedroom that mom, pop, "Gadget" and "Jigger" shared on most nights. Although she does appreciate contemporary creature comforts and the luxury of rolling down the road in an RV, the spunky septuagenarian does have one regret: "it'll be easier, but it might not be as much fun or as adventurous as the first trip."

The Husons plan on leaving Baton Rouge, La., in January, just like the family did 43 years ago, and heading Southeast. One major change in itinerary has been penciled in: "This time we'll also visit Hawaii and Alaska, which weren't states back in the Fourties," she says.

For $75, your child will receive 40 personally-addressed letters, one arriving every couple of weeks accompanied with a map. The mother and daughter team will share the writing chores; the style of the letters has been contemporized, but the chatty syntax will remain, and the missives will still contain a wealth of information about the geography, history, science, economics and sociology of this vast land.

To get a subscription, write Huson Travel Letters, c/o Color-Art, Inc., 10300 Watson Rd., St. Louis MO 63127.

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