Photo by Jim Coit

Philip Sousa:“What you see in the travel section of the San Diego Union is positive.”

Suppose you had a job in which you received two or three calls a day from people imploring you to travel around the world at their expense. One morning, for example, you might get a phone call from the government of Japan, suggesting that you fly overseas, courtesy of Japan Air Lines, to explore the temples of Kyoto. An hour later you might receive a letter from the Ritz Hotel in Paris, describing the fun you could have as their guest in a luxury suite. Suppose the job actually required you to go on many of the jaunts. Sure, sure, it sounds glamorous, Philip Sousa concedes, but honestly, it can be rough out there as travel editor.

Mary Lou Temple (left): “She always does that... comes over to see what we’ve got. Usually we’re not here to catch her in the act.”

Photo by Jim Coit

Sousa has filled that job at the San Diego Union for almost nine years, and in that time he says he has logged an average of 200,000 miles a year — more than any other travel editor in the country: that’s also more than most commercial airline pilots cover in the course of their careers, he’s been told. He has visited so many countries that he long ago lost count of them all. (He has a better idea of the limited number of places he hasn’t been.)

Giza, Egypt

“People ask me what my beat is, and I tell them it’s the world," he says, enjoying the sound of the phrase. “And sure, there are times when I find myself ensconced in total luxury. But I think most people don’t realize that I’m also likely to find myself down on my knees at ten in the evening, washing my underwear because 1 don’t have time to send it out to the laundry."

Sousa at Dingle Peninsula, Ireland

For anyone whose illusions are not utterly shattered by that vision, Sousa is quick to sketch more of his job’s hidden exigencies. He tells how on his recent visit to the Philippines he had to excuse himself from a party of officials and sit down in the airport lobby to attend to a pile of unpaid personal bills. “A non-travel-writing person may have to do that once a year on a vacation, but I have to do it everywhere I go,” he sighs. Then there’s the jet lag; the disruptions in his home life; the aerial near-misses; the flubbed reservations. He says when he’s on the road, he often finds himself working nearly every minute. “The last month I was gone, I had only forty-five minutes free.” He means this literally. “That was one night in Honolulu between my last appointment of the day and a dinner engagement where we talked business all night long, until 1:00 a.m.”

It sounds as though he’s seen too much envy in friends’ eyes, as though he’s been buttonholed in the elevator of the Union-Tribune building in Mission Valley too many times by colleagues who tell him what a lucky fella he is. So he protests, more or less convincingly, that he’s really just an ordinary working stiff.

At forty-seven, Sousa may count himself among the workaday legions, but his persona is the very image of the bon vivant. He dresses impeccably, favoring well-cut sport coats and elaborately tailored shirts he has made overseas. He drives a Mercedes Benz 380SL sports car with license plates which read “Sousa 1.” When not traveling, he exercises twice a week in a gym and on Saturdays rides bis bike with the American Youth Hostel organization in Balboa Park; as a result, his body is trim in spite of his indulgence in rich food, which he says is an occupational hazard. He has a well-developed tan that contrasts with the snowy white shooting through his dark hair; in fact, his looks are striking enough to allow him to work as a professional, modeling during some of the compensatory time off he regularly accumulates as a result of logging so many working weekends on the road.

He’s a masterful raconteur, and despite his claims to the contrary, he loves to talk about his work. He expressed more hesitation at sharing details of his private life, however. Only reluctantly did he acknowledge that he was born in transit. His father, an American, was an economist specializing in international banking, who also intermittently taught students and worked as an importer and exporter. In any case, Sousa says his father was working in Paris when he met and married Sousa’s mother, an American tourist who was visiting the French capital. Some time later they were transferred to South America and two days out of Buenos Aires Philip was born.

His parents saw themselves as citizens of the globe, and Sousa says they wanted their son to feel at ease with the native language wherever he lived. So his first words were in Spanish, and it continued to be his primary tongue, although he says his parents had a romantic attachment to the language of their courtship, French, and sometimes would speak it “to broaden my horizons." He also got a chance to practice his French, plus Italian and Portuguese, on family trips from South America to Europe. He says several times they made the crossing in one of the four-engine sea planes called ‘Sandragons, which landed in the bays and rivers of cities along the way.

He says he switched to speaking primarily French in high school, which he attended just outside the city of Lausanne in Switzerland. After graduation he attended one of the colleges of the University of Paris. By this time, Sousa had a rudimentary grasp of English, but in the Paris of the late Forties and early Fifties, flooded as the city was by waves of GIs and gawking dollar-rich tourists, “I used to pretend I couldn’t speak it,” he says, rolling his eyes and shuddering at the memory of the invading Americans.

Today Sousa thinks that “we Americans have matured immensely as travelers. . . . What you find these days is that the very same GI is going back to Europe but this time he has read about the place; he’s probably done some research. In fact, chances are he has already been back to France two or three times.” At the same time that Americans have become more sophisticated travelers, the advent of mass-scale traveling by the Japanese has helped banish the image of the ugly American. “And now you have the ‘ugly’ Germans. They come in on huge 747 charters and take over a place. In Thailand they have weekly 747s for men only to come to the massage parlors of Bangkok. They spend the whole seven days in a massage parlor, and then they fly back to Germany. Now, what exposure do you think they have to the Thai culture? In the jet age, they’re doing the same thing that trainloads of GIs did when they went to Paris for the weekend.”

Yet not long after Sousa sneered at those post-World War II GIs, he found himself among their company. Upon graduation from college, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and moved to America, a stint which rapidly forced him to become proficient in the language of this country, although today Sousa still speaks it with a peculiar accent which reflects his varied linguistic influences. He says he’s still fluent in Italian, French, and Spanish. He can converse in German and Portuguese (though he says he couldn’t read history in those languages or translate them), and he has learned the basics of Japanese and Vietnamese.

He says he doesn’t know if it was his linguistic skill that bagged him the job as travel editor. After working first as a freelance writer and then as a reporter for Associated Press in New York, Los Angeles, and San Diego (where the AP bureau was located in the Union-Tribune building), Sousa joined the staff of the San Diego Union in 1971 and covered beats as varied as religion, the military, and the Apollo space launchings. For more than a year he also worked as the Union's Sacramento correspondent. He says over the years he wrote several travel features for the Southwest section of the Sunday paper (which then lacked a regular travel section). One day in 1972, Gene Gregston, one of the paper’s editors, called Sousa in and asked if he would like to start a travel section. “I was stunned,” Sousa says.

From the very beginning, he recalls, the section was a moneymaker. In fact, he says today the travel pages are the third most profitable ones in the Union (following the real estate and entertainment sections). He adds that last year the travel section brought in about two million dollars in revenues — not bad, he says, considering that it’s essentially produced by two people.

That other person is Mary Lou Temple, who’s responsible for the design of the section. On one recent Wednesday I found her and Sousa supervising the final stages of producing the section, which would then be printed Thursday morning for eventual insertion into the Sunday paper. This particular issue was devoted to Hawaii; Sousa's recent visit to Molokai was featured on the first page, emblazoned with the headline “Hawaii Still Calls.”

Just then another woman sidled up, Evelyn Kieren, the travel editor for the San Diego Tribune (though the two papers have separate newsrooms, they share the same production facilities). “So you’re sixteen pages, eh?” she said to Sousa, eyeing the accounts of horseback riding on Hawaii, skiing in Hawaii, a helicopter ride over the islands.

Temple whispered to me out of the corner of her mouth, “She always does that . . . comes over to see what we’ve got. Usually we’re not here to catch her in the act.”

Unfailingly suave, Sousa chatted briefly with Kieren, then returned with me to the newsroom. Although it’s common knowledge around the papers that he has nursed a long-time mutual hostility to the Tribune travel section in general and to former Tribune travel editor Neil Morgan in particular, Sousa offered me a more polite explanation for Kieren’s surveillance of his section. “Usually we don’t confer about what we ’re doing. But she’ll be running her ‘Hawaii’ issue the Thursday after ours appears. We do use some of the same stock photographs, and in this case she was just checking to make sure that we didn’t select any of the same ones.”

Back at his desk, he busied himself with examining more photocopies of the finished pages. On the desktop around him sat neat piles of manuscripts submitted by free-lance writers, including a foot-and-a-half-tall stack of rejects submitted during just the last four weeks. Sousa says he receives about six such submissions per day from would-be travel writers all over the world, and distinctively, the travel editor says he doesn’t discourage even novice writers from trying. “We never know when a gem is going to come in over the transom.” Still, the odds of a freelance piece winning acceptance are slim; of the thirty to forty weekly free-lance submissions, Sousa is only able to use about six. For cover stories, he pays from fifty to a hundred dollars; contributors receive $175 for three or more color photographs, and $150 for three or more black and whites. (These rates certainly won’t recover for most writers the cost of a journey to some exotic locale, but for professionals the cost is a legitimate business expense; moreover, the writer may have had the trip paid for by a foreign tourist service, an airline, or a hotel.)

Both the mail and the phone also bring the dozens of travel invitations he receives every month, a profusion he claims is understandable given that more than a hundred different countries have offices of tourism, as do probably eighty different airlines, and an unlimited number of hotel chains, cruise companies, resorts, and even cities. “The San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau constantly brings in professional travel writers and editors from outside the area,” he asserts. “Even Sacramento has a travel-writers’ program.” He says the vast majority of the dozen or so full-time travel editors on America’s major metropolitan daily newspapers in fact depend exclusively on such free jaunts. But Sousa and the San Diego Union notably are not among them.

Sousa says when Jerry Warren assumed the Union editorship in 1975, Warren decided that his program for upgrading the paper would include a firm policy that the Union would pay for all its own trips.

Warren explains that this was part of a general policy, which took effect in 1976, that barred Union reporters from accepting free tickets or promotions. (The paper’s music and drama critics still accept free “reviewer’s tickets” for performances they review in print.) Warren says, “I felt this would enhance our level of credibility and integrity. However, there are some trips we can’t pay for, because there’s no other way to get to the destination.” He cites as an example an inaugural plane flight, where all passengers fly for free. Warren declines to say how much this policy has cost the Union. “It’s all a part of our travel budget,” he says.

“He’s my boss, so that’s that,” Sousa remarks sulkily, adding that he vehemently disagrees with that policy.

His disagreement is based on his belief that “I will report what I see on a trip, no matter who pays for it. I am going to tell it like I see it, not only because I was trained as a reporter to tell the facts, but also because I wouldn't want to do an injustice to our readers. ” He offers this incident as an example of that independence: Before Warren’s arrival, Sousa once flew to the South Pacific as a guest of the UTA French Airlines. “I came back and I did write about beautiful Moorea, but I said that only a sardine would travel on UTA. I’m five-foot, ten inches tall and 170 pounds — average height and weight — but the plane was so crowded that I was a basket case by the time I got there. ” Instead of a snub, he says he subsequently received a letter from the president of the airline thanking him for the critique and telling him that as a result of it the firm had decided to reconfigure its aircraft.

In contrast, under the anti-freebie policy, Sousa says he finds himself in situations such as the one when he recently flew to Thailand in the coach section of the airplane, while Kieren of the Tribune (which has no qualms about taking the freebies) enjoyed the amenities of the first-class cabin. “So when we arrived, she emerged from first class fresh and rosy. She hadn’t paid a damn thing, whereas I [the Union] had paid several thousand dollars to, again, wind up as a basket case. And I don’t think that’s fair,” he pouts. “I think maybe there is some validity in being able to tell readers about the experience of flying coach, and if I were new to the field, that would be one thing. But I know damn well how it is, and I don’t like it!”

He could — but doesn’t — offer one other bit of evidence in support of his contention that it doesn’t matter who pays for his trips: namely, even though the Union has underwritten his travel for the last six years, nearly all of the pieces in the Union's travel section nonetheless are paeans to the various forms of travel that they describe. Their tone is invariably so positive, so promotional, that the airlines or the hotels or the cruise firms might as well have done the writing themselves.

Cobblestones are. “charming”; sheep-herders are “stoic.” Rarely do foul odors assault the nostrils of Sousa’s armchair voyagers; seldom during sightseeing do they stumble over scrawny children sleeping in rags on the pavement; itineraries are never botched by foreign bureaucracies seemingly at odds with travelers..

Instead, readers savor descriptions like Sousa's recent sketch of San Juan, Puerto Rico: “This town that many connoisseurs rank as America’s most exhilarating playground. ” On the Caribe Hotel’s exclusive beach, Sousa notes, “Mostly shapely young women and lithe young men, in couples and solo, bask in the sunshine at the edge of the protected cove’s quiet and clean waters.” He assures the readers that there is more to Puerto Rico than beach life: there’s tennis, the “Caribbean’s most elegant casino,” fine restaurants, a “celebrated disco.”

In a recent section devoted to Europe, Sousa starts off by advising readers, “The signals coming across the Atlantic vary in wording but have a common message. It goes something like this: Come, this year you can do more than just dream about castles — you can see them with your own eyes, without wiping out your wallet.” His recent report from Hawaii was similarly bucolic. “Most evenings, the lights of Oahu twinkle like a cluster of lighthouses a mere twenty-six miles to the west across the Kaiwi Channel,” it began. “Content with their island’s gentle pace and predominantly rural character, most residents seldom bother with the sight. But visitors do, especially after a couple of days here when they realize that the twenty-minute air hop from bustling Honolulu is a journey back in time.”

In conversations with me. Sousa readily acknowledged that culture shock can jolt even the savviest travelers. As one example, he mentioned that he has never gotten used to the casualness with which even the most elegantly dressed businessmen in Japan will “unzip their flies and respond to the call of nature right in front of God and everybody.” So why don’t these and other, more serious, discordant notes sound on the pages of the travel section? Wouldn’t they alert the would-be voyager to what things will really be like upon arrival?

When I raised this point, Sousa at first insisted that his section does occasionally report drawbacks to travel. He cited one piece he ran last fall, written by a New York Times reporter about train travel across Russia. “Though it reported a lot of negative elements, it was something that obviously would have been of interest to our readers. So we printed it at length,”- he says. Closer to home (and to the advertising dollars which actually get spent in the Union), Sousa recalls his own experience while traveling in Mexico last year, when he found himself paying nearly a hundred dollars a day for a single room at a Mexico City Holiday Inn in the off-season. “It was a sensitive situation,” he says, “because we’re close to Mexico. We do a lot of business together. But I felt I had to tell it like I saw it.” As a result his article did offer example after example of the inflated prices.

Nonetheless, he softened that particular blow to Mexican tourism by starting the story with a beguiling front-page spread of beautiful photographs and an enticing description of a Mexican craftswoman at work. And he ended that same story with the conciliatory reassurance, “Paradise is not lost. It just costs a little more now.” Furthermore, Sousa eventually conceded that by and large, “ what you see in the travel section of the San Diego Union is positive.”

And why not? he asks. A travel writer’s job, he says, is “unlike news, where you have to tell everything that happens of importance.” Furthermore, he contends it differs from the task of, say, a restaurant critic. Unlike the assessment of cuisine, what kind of standards could one hold up to judge a travel experience, something so intensely personal? Sousa continues, “I believe it would be a waste of time and space for me to devote a column to a horrible place to go. For example, I consider El Salvador to be out of bounds. Under the present circumstances, nobody except for correspondents and adventurers would go there. . . . Or would it make any sense for me to spend $3000 and two weeks to go to Libya to see how tourism is doing under Colonel Khadafy? No.” Instead he argues that he does best to save the space for descriptions of safe, seductive places like Thailand, the Philippines, and Hawaii, Sousa’s most recent destinations.

He makes six to eight such foreign trips per year, each lasting from two to Five weeks; he brought up the recent one as an instructive example of what he does during such globe-hopping. His first stop was Bangkok, where he joined some 2000 delegates to the Pacific Area Travel Association, but his first order of business was coping with the jet lag after the twenty-six-hour transit.

Sousa says over the years he has developed his own method for battling the temporal disorientation. ‘‘When I arrive at my hotel, no matter what time of day it is, even if it’s ten o’clock in the morning. I first tell the desk I don’t want to be disturbed. Second, I put a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign in the door. Third, I take a couple of aspirins. Fourth, I take a couple of shots of vodka, which happens to be my favorite drink. Then I close the drapes and I go to bed. And usually, the next morning, I wake up totally adjusted to local time.”

He says the Thai government had planned a heavy program of sightseeing for the convention. ‘‘It meant being up about 6:00 to 6:30 every morning because there was a breakfast seminar at seven, followed by a 9:00 a.m. workshop and a 10:00 a.m. trip to whatever we were going to see, whether it was an interesting village or some other attraction. We’d return about two or three in the afternoon, to be followed by a four o'clock seminar, and a Five o’clock press conference, and at six o’clock there was a briefing for reporters on what was going to happen the next day. At seven we had to be at a reception that the minister of tourism was giving, and while that may sound like a social occasion, it isn’t. It’s work, because you’re there with your badge and you’re approached by people from forty different countries . . . who want to tell you about their country or whatever. That would go on to about 8:30, when we proceeded to dinner. Dinner went on to perhaps ten o’clock, at which time I would have to either take an evening tour of the city or go to my room to prepare to get up at 6:30 the next day.”

Sousa says when he proceeded on his own to the Philippines, the bustling schedule continued. “I had to set up briefings and interviews with the head of the tourist ofFice, with various hotel managers. All that takes time. ” At one point he dashed down to Zamboanga, a Moslem enclave in the very southern part of the islands. “It’s a very beautiful part of the Philippines, and most visitors who go there spend three or four days to take in the sights. I only had two days. So in those two days, I had to cram in all the attractions in the area, and there are plenty. And some of it, like traveling by canoe to a nearby island, takes time. . . . The two nights that 1 was there I don’t think I was back in my room before midnight. For instance, the first night I arrived there was a local festival going on in a nearby village. Well, by the time I went to the village, witnessed the festival, which was a dinner with Filipino dances and music, and got back to the hotel, it was one o’clock in the morning. ”

He reiterates that upon his return stop in Hawaii he enjoyed only those forty-five minutes of free time. When I asked him whether he ever goes to beaches during his travels, he again sprung on the defensive. “You know, I haven’t been to a beach in San Diego in two years. And I love San Diego beaches. But going to them is a luxury I can’t afford because when I’m home I usually have to clean my house or my car or mow the lawn. However, when I’m on assignment, I think it behooves me to see the beach — if for no other reason than to see if it is as golden as the brochures say it is or if it’s a rotten piece of seaweed-cluttered nonsense.” He says he thus did spend two hours on the sands of Molokai in Hawaii. ‘‘But I took my briefcase and a pile of notes and papers with me. Because I knew I was not on vacation. I was on the job, and I had to do it.” Sousa says even when he’s in San Diego he usually works at his desk in Mission Valley from about eight in the morning until six or seven at night. There he writes the stories based on his trips, selects photographs (which he shoots) for use in the section, edits manuscripts submitted by his regular columnists and free-lance contributors, and plans his upcoming editions. Knowing that his readers consist of everyone from retired people interested in cruises to backpack-loving students to young professionals seeking more exotic destinations, Sousa’s answer is to toss them all a bit of everything — in proportion to the destinations where the greatest number of San Diegans spend their travel dollars.

He says the top foreign spot for local people is Baja, followed by Hawaii and Canada, the rest of Mexico, the Caribbean by cruise, Europe, Alaska by cruise, and then the rest of the world. As a result, "We may write only once a year about Burma but we’ll have a dozen stories about Mexico.” Reinforcing this plan is the fact that the newspaper’s advertising department promotes a number of “theme” sections (concentrating, for example, on “Europe,” “Canada,” “Cruising,” and so forth) planned months in advance. The advertising sales force and Sousa then work together to fill the theme issues with advertising and stories extolling the subjects of the themes.

To anyone who asks why he doesn’t include more pieces on one location or another, Sousa responds by citing the sheer volume of the pieces he does run.

“Multiply fifty-two weeks by nine years and that’s almost 500 issues, each with a minimum of six different stories. That’s 3000 different destinations, or different approaches to some destinations. That would fill an encyclopedia. The point is we didn't single out a place. I often think of the travel section as a cruise; it gives you a taste of an area.’’

The analogy pops into his mind naturally, since he prefers traveling on cruise ships to any other form of travel. “I’m a cruisaholic without redemption. . . . For the simple reason that I am unaware of any other type of vacation where you have the option to be as busy as you want or as quiet as you want, and not have to pack and unpack every day or so. ’’ He enjoys recalling how he disembarked in the port of Catania in Sicily during one cruise and stocked up on salami, bread, mozzarella cheese, and other supplies. Upon returning to his cabin, he found an invitation to dine at the ship’s captain's table. Politely, he declined “and I took off all my clothes down to my BVDs, I locked the door, and I spent the night listening to local Italian music and having my picnic. I loved every minute of it!”

When I asked Sousa about other travel highlights, however, the newsman in him rather than the tourist seemed to come to the fore. The assignment he describes as being most challenging since assuming the travel editorship also involved a news story rather than a travel feature. It broke on March 27, 1977, when the biggest air disaster in history occurred in Tenerife in the Canary Islands, a day when Sousa just happened to be in San Diego. Sensitive to the fact that the victims included a number of San Diego residents who had flown to the islands to meet up with a Mediterranean cruise, Sousa’s editors called him into the office and asked him to speed to Los Rodeos Airport, where the Pan Am and KLM 747s had collided. The travel editor says within two to three hours he was airborne.

Upon arrival, he found a mob of almost 300 other news people, all of them furiously sniffing out possible scoops. Sousa got one break in the form of an anonymous tip to be in a particular phone booth at a particular time. Once there, he received a call from someone who played him a hitherto unreleased tape of the conversation in the air control tower at the time of the crash. (He never determined who his informant was, although he suspects it was one of the Spaniards who ran the tower and who would have been “anxious to show the world that their people weren’t at fault.”) On the same story, he conceived the idea that it would be interesting to catch up with the cruise ship for which many of the victims had been destined. “I had to chase it all over Spain and Italy, but I finally caught up with it in Italy and sailed with it the last four days to Greece.”

Among his more typical travels, he says he could tell more stories about his human encounters than about the sights he has seen. “And most times those are a matter of having an open mind and a smile. ” On that recent trip to Thailand, for example, he says he broke away one day from the travel convention to make a side trip to the famous bridge on the River Kwai. He had hired the services of a Thai boatman to motor down the river in a long dug-out canoe. “I wanted to ask a number of questions about the river and the railroad and so on. But I don’t speak Thai and he didn’t seem to speak English, and so it was awkward. ” Finally they came to a place where the trestles built by World War II POWs came into view. As the boatman saw Sousa grab for his camera, he immediately slowed the boat to a crawl. When Sousa thanked him, the boatman cut the engines entirely and the two floated silently under the bridge.

Then, hesitantly, the Thai started talking — in stilted English — and confided in Sousa that his hobby was imitating John Denver. When Sousa bade him to demonstrate, the Thai pulled out his guitar and began singing “Perhaps Love,” and other Denver tunes. “And he could sing John Denver just like John Denver,” Sousa marvels. “He had memorized not only the words but the intonation of John Denver. He even wore wire-rimmed glasses like John Denver. There was no one around except for one or two fishermen who’d go by in another canoe. And here I was listening to live John Denver — the Thai version!”

He referred to that same incident when I asked him if he roughs it; if he ever opts for adventurous travel of the sort which he claims to have experienced as a young teen-ager, when he and two chums sailed a twenty-one-foot sailboat from the mouth of the Parana River near Buenos Aires via various inland waterways all the way up the Amazon in Brazil (at times they had to have the boat removed from the water and transported by oxcart or flatbed over short land passages). Sousa answered that on that River Kwai outing he endured a five-hour ride on public mini-bus to reach the canoe landing. “There I was, wearing my Levi’s and sneakers, I got mud on my feet, and after the canoe ride, I traipsed up the jungle to a little village where I caught a second-class train.”

Still, he doesn’t hide the fact that his personal tastes run in the opposite direction. He says another of his brightest memories is of the assignment on which he flew to New York first class, hopped on the Concorde to London, stayed at the Ritz, then sailed back on the Queen Elizabeth II. Along the same lines, he says this summer he may stay at the Ritz Hotel in Paris or London, “just to tell people what it is like to spend a champagne weekend.” For his own vacations, Sousa never travels. Instead he either stays in San Diego or retreats to the Russian River area in Northern California, but even on such short sojourns, he tries “within limits to give the little experience some class ... by having a nice dinner at some choice country restaurant in the area or by otherwise lifting the tone of those few days off.

“I happen to enjoy beauty in life,” he says, almost defiantly. “Whether it is a beautiful woman or a handsome man or a beautiful vase in a museum. I enjoy nice cars. Fine clothes.” He asserts that if the world in the travel section is orderly and well-scrubbed and aesthetically pleasing, well. . . that just happens to be the way he genuinely perceives it.

He’s confident that it’s the way his readers want to see it. Sousa boasts of the fact that “ninety-nine percent” of the letters and calls directed to his department laud the section. “I’ve had readers call me up and confide that the first thing they read on Sunday morning are the funnies, followed by the travel section. And only then do they have the heart to go back and face the front page. ” He’s proud of that, just as he is when travel agents in San Diego tell him how no matter what destination is featured on the travel section’s front page — be it Ensenada or Equatorial Africa — people invariably walk in Monday morning clutching the newspaper and saying that’s where they want to go.