“After Words” The success of our motion picture, Sheep, Stars, and Solitude, changed the entire course of our film-making activities. Why go to distant lands overseas when our own West had so much to offer? Columbia River Country was the first of these western productions. This great river rises in a tiny spring in British […]

CHAPTER 24 Sheep, Stars, and Solitude Shortly after returning home from the filming of Finland Waters, Russia had attacked Finland, making our documentary on that country more timely than anything else we could have produced. A year and three months after completing Circle of Fire Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, and made this one of […]

CHAPTER 23Clothes Make the Man Packing for an extended lecture journey by train across America is a meticulous and exacting undertaking—two heavy projectors, a cumbersome public address system, often a phonograph (or later a wire recorder; still later a tape recorder), five or six cartons of frselms, a huge suitcase, sometimes a camera and tripod, […]

CHAPTER 22 I Travel by Train Now that America had entered the war, our timely Circle of Fire film strained our calendar capacity to the limit Also, war conditions put an unforeseen and almost unbelievable strain on travel, to get to lecture engagements. Gasoline was rationed; long-distance driving was a complete impossibility. Desiring to establish […]

CHAPTER 21 This is Your America On the thousands of miles of train travel, back and forth and up and down across America which it was necessary for me to make each year to arrive at my illustrated lecture engagements, I often carried motion picture camera and tripod—in addition to all the required projection paraphernalia. […]

CHAPTER 20Plaudits from the Geographic In the first year of its life, Circle of Fire, although highly acclaimed wherever shown, was less successful than Finland Waters or Lapland Adventure. Japan, Java, Singapore, and the Philippines were far away, inaccessible to tourists because of backlash from the European conflict. Wake and Midway had scarcely been heard […]

CHAPTER 19 The Soul of a Traveler During the late autumn days, following our return from Hawaii, we had as many film showings as we could handle. But, we discovered, Christmas is the season when auditoriums and club stages are “dark,” so far as illustrated lectures are concerned. During the December of 1940, Helen and […]

CHAPTER 18 Guam, Wake, and Midway Guam, Wake, Midway. We would be stopping at those three islands, two of them no larger than flyspecks in the 6500 mile sheet of salt water which lay between us and Hawaii. This clipper was not like ordinary passenger planes. We had no assigned seats but were free to […]

CHAPTER 17 Prophetic Prospects of War This chapter and the one that follows, concerning my final adventures in the Pacific, were written from notes made on my journey through these areas. All of the preceding chapters chronicling my Pacific journey—in Japan, China, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies—were excerpted from articles, exactly as I had […]

CHAPTER 16 Bali Bound I was on the plane bound for Bali. Every portion of my Javanese trip had produced a thrill. At Jogjakarta (usually called “Jogja” and spelled six different ways) there had been the great bazaars, the dancers, artisans, conglomerate native life. On the Prambanan Plain there had been ancient temples over and […]