Army Vet Arthur Frommer dies at 95

Many of you youngsters are too young to remember arguably the most popular travel guides of the post-WWII period, Arthur Frommer’s “Europe on $5 a Day”.

“This is a book,” he wrote, “for American tourists who a) own no oil wells in Texas, b) are unrelated to the Aga Khan, c) have never struck it rich in Las Vegas and who still want to enjoy a wonderful European vacation.”

Why do we notice him? Frommer was an Army vet who started writing about European travel while still on active duty in the ’50s.

Frommer began writing about travel while serving in the U.S. Army in Europe in the 1950s. When a guidebook he wrote for American soldiers overseas sold out, he launched what became one of the travel industry’s best-known brands, self-publishing “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day” in 1957.

The books were updated periodically – I remember the trauma when the title changed to “”on $10 a day”! – but for many of us stationed in Europe, learning how to travel on the cheap opened up a lot of destinations we may not have otherwise seen, especially on military paychecks.

Frommer’s philosophy — stay in inns and budget hotels instead of five-star hotels, sightsee on your own using public transportation, eat with locals in small cafes instead of fancy restaurants — changed the way Americans traveled in the mid- to late 20th century. He said budget travel was preferable to luxury travel “because it leads to a more authentic experience.”

Frommer’s advice also became so standard that it’s hard to remember how radical it seemed in the days before discount flights and backpacks. “It was really pioneering stuff,” Tony Wheeler, founder of the Lonely Planet guidebook company, said in an interview in 2013. Before Frommer, Wheeler said, you could find guidebooks “that would tell you everything about the church or the temple ruin. But the idea that you wanted to eat somewhere and find a hotel or get from A to B — well, I’ve got a huge amount of respect for Arthur.”

Memories…I remember when he recommended a formerly 3 star hotel near the Champs Elysees which had fallen to only one-star status. The elevator didn’t quite match to floor level… but our inexpensive room had floor-to-ceiling velvet drapes, an en-suite claw bathtub, and a raised bed seemingly the size of the Rive Gauche. We would never have found it otherwise.

Frommer was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, and grew up during the Great Depression in Jefferson City, Missouri, the child of a Polish father and Austrian mother. “My father had one job after another, one company after another that went bankrupt,” he recalled. The family moved to New York when he was a teenager. He worked as an office boy at Newsweek, went to New York University and was drafted upon graduating from Yale Law School in 1953. Because he spoke French and Russian, he was sent to work in Army intelligence at a U.S. base in Germany, where the Cold War was heating up.

Re- Field Station days – wonder where he was stationed and what his actual duty MOS was? Some of his then-radical suggestions:

Never travel first class. (If going by boat, consider freighters.) Pack lightly enough to be free from porters, taxi drivers and bellhops. Stay in pensions; take the room without the bath. Eat in restaurants patronized by locals. Try to engage locals in conversation. Study maps. Take public transportation. Buy a Eurail pass.

Tip of the hat to Kent, a great Intel NCO, for bringing this to my attention.

Category: Cold War, We Remember