My addiction to travel in Europe began with my first European tour in the summer of 1960. I have my Aunt Marie to thank for that. She died in the spring of 1958, leaving a life insurance benefit to four of her nieces and nephews, my sister and I among them. It was not a big sum, perhaps $800, but my mother decided that using the money for a summer trip to Europe would be a good use of the money. It would be fitting, too, because Aunt Marie had become a regular summer visitor to Italy, a thing quite out of the ordinary for a middle class woman of middle age in that place (1950's Concord, NH).
Aunt Marie was a fiercely independent woman. She founded a private school, build a schoolhouse on land in a one of the better neighborhoods of the state capital, and ran her life, mostly as she saw fit. She was married, though, to a haberdasher who had a shop on Main Street, which catered to the "better class of men." He was a diminutive man, bald, with pince-nez spectacles, three piece suits and a gold watch chain. They had no children and lived on the second floor of a grand house at the crest of a hill in, arguably, the best part of town. At one time they had a live-in cook. I remember there was a foot switch under the rug in the dining room for summoning the cook from the nearby kitchen (not that she couldn't hear if she was called). Frank McSwiney was his name. My mother referred to him as "that gold-plated piss pot." My mother didn't like him much.
Marie was tall and handsome. She stood erect, often clasping her hands behind her back to emphasize her up-right posture. She had kind eyes and preferred to print words rather than write in cursive. She drew the dots above her i's and j's as small, discernible circles, not mere pencil points. So, she taught in her own school, which bore her maiden name and made her known as "Miss Scully," not Mrs. McSwiney, and spent her summer vacations in Italy, where the strong sun imparted a slight golden tint to her gray hair, at least that's what she said had put it there.
Every year in early June, Marie would journey to New York City and board an ocean liner for the crossing, eventually to her beloved place in the sun. My mother would usually drive her sister to the train, or even, once or twice, drive her to NY City. Once, as mother and Marie put her luggage in the trunk for the start of her summer trip, Frank stood by at the curb. He bade Marie goodbye and gave her a gift for her trip: a dime.
In June of 1960, I boarded a BOAC Comet jet at Logan Airport heading for London. The Comet was the first commercial jet to fly the Atlantic route. My sister, Sylvia followed a few days later in a propeller plane that took nearly 18 hours to cross the ocean. Sylvia had purchased a new Volks Wagon beetle to be claimed in Zurich after visiting London and Paris. From there we would make up our itinerary along the general plan of a big loop, down to the Riviera, across northern Italy, on to Zagreb, Yugoslavia, up through Austria, Germany, Denmark; back down through the low country, returning eventually to London. We had our wheels and a book with the addresses of Youth Hostels across the whole continent.
One part of the trip stands out in my memory and that was the few days we spent behind the Iron Curtain. That would be Yugoslavia, a country that existed for less than a century, but in 1960 it was, to Americans like me, a communist country and hence an Iron Curtain country, regardless of it's exclusion from the Warsaw Pact. We entered Yugoslavia from Trieste, Italy, with an exotic prelude when we bought black market currency from a certain "Mr. Arturo" operating out of a cafe in Trieste.
During this summer as we were making out way through Western Europe and a bit of Eastern Europe the chill of the Cold War was on the front pages of the International Herald Tribune reporting the trial of Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot who was shot down over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960.
Traveling in Yugoslavia was also my first experience being cut off from the Latinate languages. When I went to the toilet in our first hotel I found two doors, one labeled "Zenski" and one labeled "Muski". Go figure! Flip a coin and hope you don't blunder into the wrong cabinet.
Gradually, it came to me that all the conventions I had until then relied on to get by in the world, which side of the road you drive on, which faucet (left vs. right) was hot and which was cold, even the colors we used to code such things, red for hot, blue for cold, were nothing but conventions. I was still a teenager who had lived in an American cocoon. I thought social law was as firmly cast as natural law. It's as if I might find the water running upwards out of the faucet when I turned it on. In short, it blew my mind. It liberated me, and it frightened me. I could see the whole social fabric coming unraveled.
Eight weeks on the road in Europe expanded my horizons greatly and frayed my nerves so severely that by the time I returned to London to catch my return flight I had a series of panic attacks. Back home I had a reverse direction culture shock as I reintegrated myself into American life. Thereafter Europe represented culture and history on a different plane from my native culture. It would be 12 years before I would return, and that trip began in Yugoslavia, which still existed then.