The Gypsies

If the sticky, glass-headed little men of Mars were watching Earth with their big, blue, magnifying eyes last week, they must have decided that the nation was either being overrun by man-eating weevils, or that something else--the marijuana habit, the cumulative horrors of television, or a vast atomic catastrophe--had addled the nerve centers of the masses. Armies of people were fleeing the country, and the rest of the populace seemed to be scurrying away from their homes like disturbed ants.

The Americans were simply engaged in history's biggest vacation travel spree. Sixty million U.S. citizens--moved by no stronger stimuli than the slam of the schoolhouse door, the rustle of a travel folder and the feel of the hot summer sun --were going somewhere, many of them half way around the world, before the summer was over.

Wonders & W.C.s. The advance wave of U.S. tourists had already crashed against Europe's shores. Piccadilly Circus, the Roman ruins and the Louvre were acrawl with dollar-shedding Americanos. Approximately 400,000 tourists from the States (100,000 more than last year's record) were going to Europe to spend an average of six weeks, goggling at the wonders and grumbling at the water closets of the Old World. One-third of them were going overseas by air, and most of them were heading for Italy (which was drawing pilgrims of all nations for Holy Year observances), France and England.

Another 25 million Americans were, or would be, crossing to Canada for the fishing, the scenery and the $1.10 dollar; thousands more, mostly Texans and Californians, were heading down Mexico's modern, gas-station-studded highways for the Old-World atmosphere, the bullfights, the silver jewelry and the cheap peso, and a healthy minority from the East were bound for Bermuda's pink sands or for the West Indies, with its palm trees and invigorating cheap rum.

But these were the outflankers; the main body of the tourist army was applying itself assiduously to seeing America first, hitting the highways in the cool of the morning and getting into the best cabin courts by midafternoon. Thousands of Westerners and Southwesterners were reinstituting an old prewar custom--going to Detroit to pick up a new car and using the savings in freight charges to finance their trip. Almost every automobile company was cooperating enthusiastically; some not only guaranteed prompt delivery, but free showers, free food and free beds to those waiting for cars.

For only $763, Northwest Airlines and a group of enterprising bush pilots would fly anglers from New York direct to an Alaskan river which boasts trout as big as baseball bats; New England skippers would provide the picturesque discomfort of a sailing ship cruise on the open Atlantic for only $60; and many a summer hotel was advertising not only tennis, golf, and hayloft theatricals, but "cultural lectures" on Freud and Thomas Aquinas.

Clockwise. The average tourist (who, in 1950, had begun looking for bargains again) would disregard them all. If he lived in the country he would head for a big city--despite the heat, the crowds and the stench of exhaust fumes. If he lived in a city he would head straight for mosquitoes, poison ivy and a bull that wanted to gore Junior. He would travel by car, visit a national park if he could, and a relative if he couldn't avoid it, and almost always he would drive clockwise around a circular or elliptical route.

A government which tried to move him --and his 59,999,999 fellow tourists--out of his home and off to his destination would disintegrate in bloody revolution.

Yet the 60 million would not only get there and buy an armload of curios, but all would get back home on time, by a national instinct for large plans and desperate maneuvering.

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