Indiana Alumni Magazine
On the Road Again
Travel: A window to the past, present, and sometimes the future.
By Mike Wright
IU President Emeritus John W. Ryan walked out of his Beijing hotel to take a stroll about 6 a.m. in November 1978 and was stunned at the silence. The streets weren't empty, but there were no automobiles. Instead, the roads were crowded from curb to curb, as far as one could see in either direction, with Chinese people riding bicycles.
"It was so eerie," says Ryan, MA/PhD'59, LLD'88, who served as president of IU from 1971 to 1987. "No one was talking. It was just silent."
Ryan was the leader of an IU tour that was the first university group allowed to visit the People's Republic of China after President Richard Nixon succeeded in opening relations with that country. IU and Ryan had worked for years to lay a foundation for the trip, but it was still a surprising as well as historic event for the IU faculty and alumni who traveled to China.
IU faculty members taught English in Chinese universities before the country opened to outsiders, and the university maintained other relations with institutions of higher education there. In 1975, a delegation from China came to IU, the first stop on a visit to the United States.
"We had a reception for them at the president's house," Ryan recalls. "The leader of the delegation was about 80, and he had been a general during their civil war. I had applied for a visa to enter China and had been unable to get it. So I told him that he apparently was more successful in getting permission to enter our country than I had been in trying to enter his.
"My guess is that the remark didn't go unnoticed. When it was decided they would admit a group, IU was already on their list."
Ryan says the timing of the trip to China couldn't have been better. Everyone knew it was historic, but the depth of that really struck the IU president during news coverage of a Chinese delegation's visit with government representatives from Japan. Chinese hotel workers all gathered around one of the television sets on a floor, watching with rapt attention the progression of their foreign minister toward government headquarters.
"I thought this was somewhat interesting, then it dawned on me that they were seeing an Asian country with crowds and crowds of people dressed differently than themselves, riding in cars and on motorcycles, and socializing with each other," Ryan says.
"These were people in a nearby country, but who were living in an entirely different way. I said to myself, 'This day, China is changing.'"
Ryan recalls the excursion as a "fantastic and historic trip." He had asked Claude Rich, BA'29, secretary of the Alumni Association at the time, to look into scheduling the China venture. Rich assigned the task to Frank B. Jones, BS'48, MS'51, who would succeed him as leader of the IUAA in 1968.
"So I said to Frank, in my own way, 'It's your job to get us to China,'" Ryan says. "I never dreamed that it would work, but it did. Frank Jones deserves a great deal of credit for pressing forward."
VENTURES AND ADVENTURES
Not all endeavors of the IU Alumni Association travel program, now known as Hoosier Travelers, come with the kind of historical significance of the China trip. But in close to 40 years in the travel business the program has grown from about nine trips a year to about 40 in 2004.
Rich decided to look into that kind of programming for IU after watching other schools book trips through local travel agencies. IU started with a group called Alumni Holidays, now AHI International, out of Chicago. According to AHI president Joe Small, whose parents founded the firm, Alumni Holidays was the first to offer travel opportunities to universities as a service to alumni. It seemed like a moneymaking plan for the business and a good fit for alumni organizations.
"There is an educational overtone to all travel," Small says. "So it seemed to my dad well within the mission of a university to provide people with travel opportunities."
A committee recommended in 1967 that the IUAA get involved in travel opportunities. IUAA's first European tour with Alumni Holidays was in the summer of 1967, taking 38 travelers and clearing a profit of $1,573.44. Today, the IUAA employs up to half a dozen vendors, including AHI, for a variety of programming and itineraries.
After the summer tour, the Hoosier football team won the 1967 Big Ten title, and the IUAA was put in charge of travel arrangements for fans to attend the Rose Bowl on Jan. 1, 1968. Enthusiasm for the team was at an all-time high.
BOWLED OVER — IU’s trip to the 1968 Rose Bowl sparked new levels of fan excitement. Cheerleader
Connie Clark, BS’68, MS’74, sees herself as a cover girl.
The February 1968 Indiana Alumni Magazine recounted the story of one alumnus and avid IU fan, Tom Tichenor, BS'54, who found himself in California with a Rose Bowl ticket in his pocket only five hours after attending a cocktail party in Louisville, Ky., with no thoughts of going to the game.
Tichenor was invited to the Standiford Field airport to attend a cocktail party for a friend who was supposedly leaving for Florida. Tichenor's wife, who was in on the secret designed by a group of friends, brought along a packed bag. A half hour before the flight left for California, one of the group said, "Tom, we've all been concerned about you and the Rose Bowl. Here's your plane ticket and a ticket to the Rose Bowl. Go."
He went, and the Louisville resident still says, more than 30 years later, that the trip was the "shock of my life."
"I was young with five kids," Tichenor recalls. "It wasn't an inexpensive trip, and I wasn't going to spend the money to go to the Rose Bowl. My wife would have probably shot me."
But thanks to the surprise, Tichenor was one of thousands who watched IU fall to Southern Cal, led by O.J. Simpson, 14–3. The IUAA-organized trip has been billed as the world's largest civilian airlift up to that time.
"It was well publicized that this was the largest group ever put together to go to the Rose Bowl," Jones recalls. "That helped us as we started to sell our tours."
The IUAA followed with a "Hoosier Mediterranean Holiday" trip in July 1968, then the "Music Holiday in Europe," hosted by School of Music Dean Wilfred C. Bain, DM Hon'81, and his wife.
IU faculty members still accompany some Hoosier Travelers trips, adding to the educational component with their expertise.
ALWAYS A MEMORY
Joan Benavole Curts, who has been to countless countries and on all seven continents during her 25 years as director of the IUAA's travel program, maintains that the best part of traveling for a living is meeting people.
FARAWAY FRIENDS — Most travelers say their fondest memories are of the people they meet. Photos
Patrick Tynan.
"I tell people, you choose our trips because of the itinerary, but when you go home you will talk about the people you met more than what you've seen," says Curts, BS'62.
Curts didn't expect to meet an international humanitarian when she led a tour to the island of New Guinea a few years ago, but one of her first encounters on the trip introduced her to just such a person.
"One enthusiastic woman, our guide, sat next to me on the flight to the river country," she says. "She asked me if I was from Indiana, and that turned out to be the start of an amazing story."
Curts says the guide, Nancy Sullivan, was involved in a project to help a blind teen on the island regain his sight.
"This young man, Christian, was quite shy and his eyes were milky looking," Curts recalls. "One eye was injured by an arrow, and the other eye didn't work well either. Nancy had taken him to an ophthalmologist on the island, who said to forget it. She didn't believe it. She got on the Internet and realized Christian could possibly benefit by a corneal implant."
Sullivan searched for a doctor willing to do the surgery for free, and found Indianapolis eye surgeon Francis W. Price Jr., MD'77. Impressed by the story, Curts agreed to arrange for accommodations while they were in Indiana for the surgery.
"I called a friend, and he agreed to put them up," Curts says. "The operation was successful, and they stayed about a week. Christian is back in New Guinea now and is married. He has a baby, named for Nancy, of course."
That's one of the more heartwarming stories Curts can tell. She also knows people who have married as a result of meeting on trips, and recounts a few humorous adventures:
- An excursion to the North Pole was led by a Russian crew. Curts says when the group got to the destination, the captain threw off his clothes and jumped into the water. The crew followed suit, as did some of the passengers.
- At the opposite extreme, a trip to Antarctica included a group from Penn State as well as IU travelers. When groups went ashore in the rubber boats, one of the Penn Staters wore a tuxedo and had his picture taken with the penguins.
Not all excursions go exactly as planned, of course. Cathy Hightower, BA'89, MS'00, director of alumni relations at IU Kokomo, was on the way back from hosting a trip to Salzburg, Austria, when the 9/11 terrorists struck.
"The captain came on and said U.S. airspace was closed and we couldn't land," Hightower says. "We ended up going to a cargo airport north of Montreal."
Hightower says people on the trip remained calm. Some of them used air phones to find out what had happened. Once on the ground in Canada, Hoosier Travelers were kept in the plane for about six hours while luggage was taken off and scanned.
"We finally were able to call the IUAA offices and they got ahold of the company that arranged the tour to call people and let everyone know we were OK," Hightower recalls. "We were finally taken to a resort about an hour and a half north. They were very good about keeping the group together. They fed us, put us up in rooms at their expense, and were very kind."
The next morning, the group was bused to Montreal's airport, then bused to Chicago, a 15-hour ride. In the meantime, IU President Myles Brand found out about the group, and IU sent an athletics bus to Chicago to take people home.
"It was a long few days," Hightower says. "Considering what other people went through, we were incredibly lucky."
Although the travel business hit a slump over the last few years — with the sagging economy, 9/11, the threat of war in Iraq, and SARS — Curts says people want to travel.
"I think it's in the DNA," she says. "From Ulysses to Columbus to Neil Armstrong… we all want to know what's on the other side of that ocean or mountain.
"We want to know how other
people live." 
Mike Wright, BA’78, is managing editor of the Indiana Alumni Magazine. For more information on IUAA travel opportunities and this year’s itinerary, go to www.alumni.indiana.edu/events/travel.