In 1988, control of ALSG passed into the hands of a large American insurance conglomerate, Blue Cross & Blue Shield, which later sold the assets of the company in 1992 to a foreign businessman, who moved the company from its long-time Spencer, Massachusetts offices to Boston, where the company continued in existence, fitfully, until it ceased operations altogether in June, 1993.

Two years later, back in Spencer, Massachusetts, a box of typed documents was discovered in a basement storage area of ALSG's former office building — a building then occupied by the thriving successor company to ALSG called passports.

Moist, mildewed, and abandoned with a covering label which read "Take to Dump", were a thousand or so pages of prose which, as it was to turn out, were written in some cases 25 years earlier. The box was in fact nearly taken to the dump, as the label instructed, but was removed at the last minute from the flatbed of the red Chevy pickup by an alert mailroom employee, who tore off the sodden cardboard cover, shooed away a variety of spiders and crawling slugs who were feeding upon a gooey pulp-like mass, and dug down into the box until she reached a depth at which the pulp became paper sheets, and further still until the sheets were no longer stuck together, but became separable one from the other, and readable. The remaining sheets, from that point down to the bottom of the box, where they became stuck together once again and finally unrecognizable as paper at all, became the body of this electronic encyclopedia called On the Road.

Special thanks is due to passports employee Claire Briddon, who appointed herself custodian of the abandoned documents, and who set about transcribing them, page by page, into a word processor. It was not easy work. There were instances where the ravages of time had rendered even the more-or-less dry pages illegible, and where it became necessary to interpolate words on the basis of the context in which they appeared, and to "make up the author's mind" where the workings of that mind were no longer inferable from the faded typescript which he left behind.

That task fell to me, a person who knew the likely author well, having first met him when he was graduate student in the Department of Philosophy at Yale University. I did my best, resolving ambiguities where I could, updating things like out-dated currency exchange rates, and road commentary having to do with roads that are no longer in existence. Also, I must admit, I found it necessary to excise altogether certain references to political points of view and pet themes which may have been reasonably championed by Voelkel in the sixties, when a vigorous conservative redress of popular opinion was perhaps necessary, but which are less important and interesting today. For better or worse, I took those allusions out, and have gone so far as to refer here to Dr. Voelkel as a "Chairperson," not as a "Chairman," which sort of reference he would have defiantly refused 25 years ago, when unisex titles first became the rage. With this fun-poking in place, it remains to be said that Ted Voelkel was, and remains, a foundation piece of the American student travel industry, and an author of incredible talent. Some of the fine things he wrote for ALSG you can read here.

My editorial tasks lightened considerably when David Phillips came to work at passports, in the late 1990s.  David, an Englishman, must be one of the world's all-time great travel writers, bringing a wealth of knowledge garnered in the university into the focus that only tough travel, on the road, can provide.  David assisted mightily in sifting through the piles of pages that his student travel colleague, Voelkel, had written years earlier, and broke new ground, much to my delight, with the authorship of dozens of additional essays that Ted never got around to writing. You can easily identify the Phillips contributions, which bristle with acerbic wit and humour (his spelling), and which do not shy away from identifying travel patches as "boring," or as "utterly irredeemable," when they are so in fact.

Other, very recent and important additions are attributable to Julian Moseley, the company's Overseas Director, to salespersons Kerstin Boehm and Bill Glennon, and to researchers Martine Prouty and  Kelly Eggleston.

Photographs have been provided mainly by two terrific talents: Nick Meers, who is based in London, England, and by his German counterpart, Rainer Jahns, based near Hamburg.

What remains to be said about the pages "clickable" here constitutes honest and enthusiastic applause. There is no better book, to my knowledge, for a teacher or student (or any other serious adult for that matter) who is contemplating a European trip. The book conveys an accurate feeling for the foreign destination before the trip begins, and makes anything like eventual "culture shock" highly unlikely. It is also downright useful when it comes to getting from one place to another, and knowing in advance which places are to be sought out, and which places one might best avoid. Each of the essays retrievable here reflects recent professional input from passports tour couriers overseas, who often use them, downloaded into their portable laptop computers from convenient cybercafes, as operational manuals.

Aside from its obvious utility, and the vast amount of information which it conveys, let me suggest that this compilation stands as a friendly reminder to historians that the now-robust American student travel industry began not just with marketing prose and low-priced air tickets, but with the hard work of a very few altruistic individuals, who saw in overseas travel by young people a hope that there would be better days ahead for a culturally heterogeneous and sometimes dangerous world.

That hope shines through these pages.

Dr. Gilbert Scott Markle
Executive Director 

passports  
Spencer, Massachusetts