Buying the New Yorker 1986 - page 88

I was all prepared to presume that this little newsletter was long gone, but I kept finding old articles like this one in the New York Times that mentions Passport:

In existence for 18 years, Passport is for the sophisticated, experienced traveler who cares more about comfort and cultural attractions than expense. Each month subscribers get the eight-page Passport newsletter plus an ''extra'' - sometimes a two- to-four-page special report called Visa; sometimes a booklet such as the recent one on 132 unusual museums in Europe.

Passport's publisher, Moris T. Hoversten, believes in brevity and frankness, whether laudatory or critical. For example, a Visa report in March on a new Caribbean resort said: ''We recently spent four days there. Glad to leave in spite of the fact that it's one of the most beautiful settings in the Caribbean. Several other people also glad to leave. Felt they were being gouged and treated like second-class citizens.''

Moris T. Hoversten began to sound like an interesting fellow, so I kept digging to see what I could find. And look! I ended up finding the magazine!

I tried to dig around and find a good cranky snotty review to quote, but it costs $89 to log in. Toss in another ten bucks and you get the actual magazine sent to your house and everything!

"Striped and Baggy." That pretty much sums up my entire wardrobe in 1986. One of the reasons that it has taken me so long to get this post up is that, God is my witness, I swear that I saw this exact ad in a recent issue of The New Yorker. The fact that I have not been able to find it proves to me that I have now been doing this long enough to have gone insane.

And I think HWW LTD has gone out of business. Pretty hard for them to be putting ads out if they are out of business.... Unless that's what they want me to think!

Questers had a website for a while, now you can buy their domain for as low as $14.99. Rainbow Falls is probably still there: the thing is I don't know which one Questers was going to take you to. There's one in Tennessee, one in Hawaii, one in Ontario, one in Washington State, and I could probably find ten more if I wanted to spend another half hour or so looking for them. Perhaps they had found 32 places named Rainbow Falls and only did tours to them. That would be confusing, but sort of fun.

And love that font in the header by the way.

Occasionally, in moments of frustration, my parents would explore the possibility of taking advantage of some form of boarding school. I suspect that The Tasis Schools were not on their radar, as they were in the market for something more inexpensive and needlessly punitive. I am particularly struck by the fact that here we see them advertising the day school option for the younger enrollees. In order to take advantage of this, one would have to live nearby (or hire someone to live nearby) so that young Schmedley can go off to day school. Many of the schools seem to have gone by the wayside, leaving only schools in England, Switzerland and Puerto Rico. I tried to come up with some droll statement about the third location, but nothing that I can come up with can hit the right target.

I have to say that I find these last two ads completely adorable. The one for Ponte Vedra Beach looks like it came straight out of the fifties. Ponte Vedra is interesting historically in that during World War Two, it is the site that a German submarine successfully landed and unloaded a team of spy saboteurs. These spies split up across America to wreak havoc, but didn't get terribly far as their leader, thinking better of this whole wheeze, went off to the FBI and ratted the whole bunch out.

They also have golf and tennis.

"Books-on-File." "Since 1958." Write them a letter with a title of a book that you're looking for and they'll write you back with information about how hard it might be for them to find it. I have a bad feeling about this.