Traveling in Style : editor’s note

O ur fourth edition of Traveling in Style features several noted authors, including Irving Stone, Allen Drury, Barry Reed and Charles M. Schulz. While I have visited with each by telephone and corresponded by mail, I am personally acquainted with Schulz, the creator of the Peanuts cartoon gang. The last time I caught up with Sparky, which is his nickname, he was busy at his easel at No. 1 Snoopy Place in Santa Rosa, a pleasant town north of San Francisco. Schulz, whose popular strip appears in 2,040 newspapers worldwide (including The Times), is an unusually nice fellow. Almost too nice, it would seem. Visitors are forever disturbing him. They ask for his autograph. Sometimes they even impose on him to sketch Snoopy on a paper napkin or a matchbook cover. Whatever is handy. A local businessman told me, “Schulz is just a plain good guy.” As for the Peanuts gang, to the residents of Santa Rosa they are alive and spreading sunshine: Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, Sally, Marcie, Violet, Pig Pen, Snoopy, ad infinitum. Particularly Snoopy. More than the others, Snoopy enjoys traveling. If he isn’t searing the skies in pursuit of the Red Baron, white scarf trailing his doghouse, he’s leading Woodstock & Co. on a camping trip. And Schulz? Well, he’s done some world traveling too. Still, he’s more of a homebody. The truth be told, he’s happier closer to the hearth. Right here in California. But of course he confesses all this in this issue of Traveling in Style. We feel certain you will also enjoy the travel reminiscences of Irving Stone, Allen Drury’s Nile cruise, a trip with Barry Reed to an intellectual’s retreat in New York. And there are stories by Betty Hughes, William Krauss, Charles Bernard, Georgia Hesse, Sam Hall Kaplan, Ron Butler, Marita Adair Hidalgo, and Tom and Michele Grimm. Finally, I’ve done a personality sketch of the world’s most-traveled man, Lars-Eric Lindblad. Snoopy might disagree. Schulz told me, confidentially, that his beagle considers himself the earth’s best-traveled critter. Hear that, Red Baron?