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q fi    Front Trtweler to Tourist:

of the tourisfs world. The first airline stewardesses were the eight girls hired by United Airlines on May 15, 1930; their union was organized in 1946. By 1958 there were 8,200 of them employed by American-owned airlines. Thcy were be-ing trained in a program which lasted about six weeks. The generał requirements, as a careful reporter summarized them, were that the young lady be twenty-one to twenty-six years old, “unmarried, reasonably pretty and slender, espe-cially around the hips, which will be at eye level for the pas-sengers. She should have been to high school, be poised and tactful, have a good disposition and a pleasant speaking voice.” Stewardesses with similar qualifications were later trained for service on trains and long-distance buses.

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^ os Cabral’s company, which went from Portugal to India in 1500, did not, of course, have the advantage of slender-hipped, smooth-voiced stewardesses. They spent over six months at sea. They could not help knowing they had really gone somewhere. In the days before refrigeration or canning the passenger cuisine was not for gourmets. Fresh water was rationed, and fresh fruits and vegetables were not to be had. _AScurvy _t was the plague of, seafarer^. Typhoid. typhus. and malarią were rife./uLofUy

The Mayflower passengers were at sea for nearly two months, from mid-September to early November, 1620. On arrival William Bradford reported, “They fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the periles and miseries thereof, againe to set their feete on the firmę and stable earth, their proper elemente. . . . Be-ing thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles.” Knowl-edge that they had come so far stayed with them even into the second generation. Increase Mather gave over the first chapter of his catalogue of divine providences to “remark-able sea-deliverances.” These were as important in the American experience as were the forests or the Indians.

For Americans moving westward in the nineteenth cen-tury, their ways of living together en route shaped their lives

on arriyal^just as . the proverbial forty years during which Moses led the children of Israel from Egypt through the wil-demessto the promised land shaped them into a nation. As westering Americans organized against the perils of the trip they framed constitutions and by-laws which prepared them to organize new communities at their destinations.

Now, when one risks so little and experiences so little on the voyage, the expenence of being there somehow becómes dtgptiep and morq4rivj}il. When getting there was morę trou-blesome, being there was morę vivid. Wlien getting there is “fun,” arriving there somehow seems not to be arriving any place.

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The tourist who arrives at his destination, where tourist facilities have been “improved,” remains almost as insulated as he was en route. Today the ideał tourist hotel abroad is as much as possible like the best accommodations back home. Beds, lighting facilities, ventilation, air conditioning, central heating, plumbing are all American style, although a shrewd hotel management will, of course, have madę a spe-cial effort to retain some “local atmosphere.”

Stirred by air travel, international (hoteTchamS have grown phenomenally sińce World War II. In 1942 Conrad Hilton took over his first hotel outside the United States, the Chihua-hua Hilton, just over the border in northem Mexico. “I felt,” he later recalled “that by organizing week-end btis excur-sions with guides, large-scale entertainment at the hotel, an all-expenses-paid holiday, we could make a very good thing of it—which we did.” At the end of the war Hilton Hotels International, Inc., was founded. “What used to be a month-long vacation trip,” Hilton explained, “is now almost a weekend possibility. . . . The airplane is here to stay. Americans not only can but want to travel farther, see morę, do morę, in less time. . . . Father Junipero Serra set his Califomia mis-sions a day’s joumey apart. Today you can fly over the whole string in a few hours. If we were to set our hotels a day’s journey apart, we’d be around the world in no time. So perfectly sound business is in linę with national idealism.”