Media Coverage
THE NEWS JOURNAL
(Wilmington, Delaware)
Making geography easy: By personal mail
By GARY SOULSMAN, Staff reporter
The Traveling Husons are moving faster than a speeding glacier through each of the 50 states, taking their good old time. Last week they coasted into Delaware to see what they could see.
The Traveling Husons are a daughter and mother, an affectionate 48-year-old driver and her friendly 74-year-old co-pilot. Juanita Huson Sylvest, a writer and sailor, and Malva Huson Brown, a retired librarian, embarked on their 18-month, American odyssey last June from the family home in Baton Rouge, La.
Delaware is their 19th state.
By the time you read this they will have shoved off to Maryland. But they promise to write a chatty letter soon, telling about their visit to Winterthur Museum and Gardens, Longwood Gardens, Bombay Hook Wildlife Refuge and The Green in Dover.
The letter will be part of a 40-letter series that sells for $75. The Huson Travel Letters are a kind of travelogue for kids. But one-third of the 150 subscribers are adults.
Writing about the road is an all-American idea. It’s attracted writers as diverse as Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck and William Least Heat Moon. Along the way they tend to find metaphysics and milkshakes on blue highways.
The Husons are on a different journey. It’s about geography, ecology, history and tourist oddities. They have “dug diamonds in Arkansas, visited a coal mine in West Virginia and boated through the Soo Locks in Michigan.”
“The thrust of the biweekly letters is to be chatty and appeal to the child’s innate curiosity,” said Juanita. “The desire to know more about the world in which we live is a natural instinct.”
The whole project is based on the idea that kids don’t necessarily like to study and read textbooks, but all children enjoy getting personal mail,” said Malva.
Mother and daughter fear young people are growing up with more knowledge of the history of bad sitcoms than accurate information about geography. They want to help correct this.
They also have data to confirm their fear. Juanita’s daughter was asked to identify the 50 states in college and located Vermont next to Colorado. So far we have no information that Vermont asked to be moved. “We realized young people weren’t learning geography as they used to.” Juanita said.
When someone subscribes to the Huson Travel Letters, the women send out an atlas and the packet of the letters already written, encouraging the subscriber to trace the journey on the atlas. Letters, written on a portable computer, arrive every two weeks. Each is personalized, bearing the name of the young reader.
Writing about their October journey through Pennsylvania, the women talked about covered bridges they saw along the say. “Why covered bridges? Without the protection of a roof overhead, wooden bridges would last only 25 to 30 years, aging from alternating problems of too much sun and too much snow. Yet with the roof protection, many of the covered bridges are over 100 years old! Pennsylvania has more than 220 covered bridges.”
The journey is special for mother and daughter because each made a similar trek 43 years ago. At the close of World War II, a husband, wife, son and daughter piled into a modified Ford with a typewriter and ditto machine.
They traveled for two years, cranking out letters. They were called Travel Letters. The husband and wife, both former reporters, had 300 subscribers. The family of cartoonist Al Capp was among them.
Subscriptions did not cover costs, so the family took short-term jobs such as picking apples in Washington State. This time Malva’s savings are helping finance the trip.
In the ‘40s, the family found the land to be open and unposted. It was easy to camp or rent a lean-to at a tourist court for $2 a night. This time they find the land more settled, though they’ve been surprised by the amount of open space in the East.
“It’s hard to find the local character and the local food,” said Juanita. “The sameness of franchised America is very obvious. I guess I feel nostalgia for the way things used to be, which is what a lot of people feel.”
The women say they’re not afraid to be traveling alone. They’ve had no problems, other than some mechanical woes, the worst being a two-tire blowout. They waited for help on the side of a road for seven hours.
The Husons, who’ll be traveling through December of next year, have observed two reactions to the trip. “Some people think we’re extremely courageous,” Juanita said. “They tell us they’d like to do it. Others just think we’re crazy.”
Please note: The instructions given in this article
for ordering HUSON TRAVEL LETTERS are no longer valid.
The letters are NOW AVAILABLE through this website.
Please click on "Contact Us" or "Purchase Now."
Return to Home Page HUSON TRAVEL LETTERS
Return to MEDIA COVERAGE
Go directly to CONTACT US form
Purchase HUSON TRAVEL LETTERS now!
|
