Media Coverage
RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH
Richmond, VA

Juanita Huson Sylvest isn’t sure whether what she remembers about her first cross-country trip is real or a reconstruction of the family stories she has heard all her life. In 1946, Malva and Roland Huson, Jr., packed a Ford full of camping equipment and set off the see the country with Juanita, 4, and her 2-year-old brother, Roland III. “I’ve never been the same since,” Ms. Sylvest said.

The odyssey lasted for two years. The Husons visited all of the ten-48 states, drove north to every Canadian province and south through Mexico as far as Guatemala City.

Forty-three years later, Ms. Sylvest and her mother are doing it again.

They departed in June from Baton Rouge, La., also the point of departure for the first trip. Instead of an auto modified for sleeping, they’re driving a spacious motor home.

But just as in the ‘40s, the Huson Travel Letters will be penned every two weeks along the way, describing such attractions as the baths at Hot Springs, Arkansas, a coal mine in West Virginia, or a pencil factory in Tennessee.

Roland Huson, Jr., who died in 1969, devised the letters as a way to help with finances. For $25, about 300 children subscribed to the series of 40 chatty letters about the family’s journey.

Huson figured that children might absorb history and geography lessons from personal letters more readily than from textbooks. “Children don’t like to study,” Ms. Sylvest said, “but every child likes to receive mail.”

She had been looking for an excuse to reprise her childhood adventure and revise the letters. She found it last year in two related incidents. The National Geographic Society declared that young people were geographically illiterate. And her middle daughter, a college sophomore, came home with a map in which she had placed Colorado and Vermont next to each other because they both were places you could ski.

“Kids really get a lot of information, but they don’t get it in a connected manner,” Ms. Sylvest said.

A former Richmonder, she worked in the travel industry in Annapolis, MD. She has two daughters here and one who recently moved from Mechanicsville to Lexington, where she was interviewed by phone.

Ms. Sylvest knew that she would have an experienced traveling companion in her mother, Malva Huson Brown, who retired in Baton Rouge after careers as a newspaper editor and librarian. “It was really my decision and I kind of talked her into it,” Ms. Sylvest said. “We make a very good team. She navigates. I drive. I do the writing and she does the editing and research.”

When she decided to re-create the travel letters, she tracked down 59 people who subscribed in the 1940s. “A lot said they wished they had saved the letters,” she said. “One man who had saved them was nine and 10 when he received them. He enjoyed the letters many times. His children used them when they were in school and he’s saving them for his grandchildren. It’s a unique bit of Americana.”

This time around, the cost is $75.00, and they have lined up about 300 subscribers thus far. While her parents typed ditto stencils and hand-cranked the letters on a portable machine, Ms. Sylvest composes subsequent pages are photocopied. The envelopes are addressed by hand.

Some schools and classes get the letters – “Dear Panthers” -- and keep them in the library for everyone to read. But schools, with their bureaucracies and curriculum committees, were difficult to sell on the idea, Ms. Sylvest said.

One unexpected market turned out to be people who educate their children at home. Three home-schooling magazines have written about the trip, which will go through December, 1990.

About one-third of the subscribers are adults, including an 80-year-old woman who toured extensively as the wife of an Army general and wanted to travel again vicariously to old favorites and new destinations.

“In a way, a lot of people have a dream of doing something like this, but they know they’ll never really do it, and this is a way they can experience it. It’s kind of like having a grandmother and an aunt on the road, sharing an adventure.”

Mother, 74, and daughter, 47, look for the diversity of the nation by visiting the capital and two other places in each stated. Before they set out, they wrote to the education and tourism directors of all 50 states and were inundated with material.

To supplement the income from the travel letters, Ms. Sylvest is writing travel features and has a contract to update maps. A licensed captain, she’ll make occasional stops to teach sailing classes.

“It is not an 18-month vacation,” she said.

After a break in Virginia, the travelers headed north to Pennsylvania and New England. The official stop in Virginia is scheduled between Thanksgiving and Christmas, “so I can be with my kids over the holidays.”

“Someone asked us if we were buying T-shirts in every place. No! We would be so weighted down.”