January 2011

I’m a newcomer to Puget Sound, but I’ve lived here long enough to know not to brag about Seattle. Blow its horn too loudly, and some joker in New York or, God forbid, San Diego will hear you and move here with his family and tell all his friends about it, and before you know it, everything you love about the place will have vanished in a tidal wave of office buildings, condos, and malls.

It’s the newcomers who enthuse about the place.

“You think New York and Boston have harbors?” they ask. “Take a peek at Elliott Bay. You think Denver’s got mountains? Why, Seattle has got not only the Cascades and the Olympics but the dormant icy immensities of Rainier and Baker. You say Minneapolis has lakes? Get a load of the parklike shores of Lake Washington or the dynamic waterfront along Lake Union.

I sometimes think that planning a trip is as much fun as going on one, and the most enjoyable part of it all is choosing the right hotel. Guidebooks come in handy here, of course, and word of mouth, but so does history. Whether you spend the night in a manor built to the baronial specifications of an Oregon lumber magnate or in what was once the millionaires’ clubhouse on a Georgia coastal island, these are places with distinct and individual pasts. Their lure is as deep and wide as their paneled and glass-roofed entrance halls, as mysterious as their multiplicity of winding corridors, and as dramatic as the marble stairways that frame your grand entrance. Sweep down these steps “entirely aware and seeming oblivious,” suggests J. M. Fenster, the author of this issue’s lead article on splendid—and old—hotels. Doubtless for every hotel Fenster visits you will furnish another dozen candidates. It is a wonder of our tear-it-down age, especially where prime city real estate is concerned, that there are so many gilded and Deco-ed hotels to select from; I’m sorry we couldn’t fit in all your favorites, and I’m eager to discover what they are.

The New York State Travel Information Center’s guide includes information on the region (800-CALLNYS). If you’d like to substitute an automobile for a canoe, you can parallel the author’s route on the scenic river road, Route 97, all the way from Port Jervis to Hancock.

We slid the canoe into the river just above Skinner’s Falls, which is not really a falls but a rift, the word locals use for rapids. I had tried once before to run it and got hung up halfway through, cutting too close to the right bank down what looked like a safe channel but turned out on closer acquaintance not to be. This time, I very much wanted to make the run cleanly. That was my son, Evan, sitting up in the bow, and while he knew me too well to be overly impressed by anything I did, it would have been nice to have, however modestly, shone. And it shouldn’t have been that hard. Skinner’s Falls rates a two on the official difficulty scale, which runs from one to seven. It wasn’t as if we were trying to shoot Niagara.

The list below is limited to hotels mentioned in this article. Of course, this is a highly selective sampling, offered in the hope that it will inspire travelers to find their own favorite palaces.

(Numbers without area codes are 800 numbers.) Lincklaen House (315-655-3461); Menger (345-9285); Palmer House (HILTONS); Brown Palace (321-2599); St. Elmo (303-325-4951); Gadsden (602-364-4481); Sheraton Palace (325-3535); Fairmont (527-4727); Copley Plaza (617-267-5300); Drake (55 DRAKE); Omni Parker (THE OMNI); Omni Shoreham (THE OMNI); Gait House (626-1814); Willard Inter-Continental (327-0200); Stouffer Mayflower (HOTELS-1); Waldorf-Astoria-Hilton (HILTONS); Plaza (759-3000 or 228-3000).

At the turn of the eighteenth century, a story went around Connecticut about a pious old woman who was berating her nephew for being such a rake. And an aging rake, at that. “But we’re not so very different,” he insisted. “Suppose that in traveling, you came to an inn where all the beds were full except two, and in one of those was a man and in the other was a woman. Which would you take? The woman’s, to be sure. Well, madam, so would I—”

Before 1829, Americans on the road stayed at inns, sleeping without privacy in the same room and even in the same bed. One timid foreigner complained that he would lie awake all night worrying about who might slide into bed with him. An Englishman, on the contrary, recalled a late night when five young ladies came into the room and began to undress for bed. “I raised my head,” he said, “and desired to be informed which of them intended me the honor of her company.” But they arranged a bedroll on the floor.

During the summer of 1972, my wife and I took an automobile tour of Europe. Only in Budapest did we see Russian soldiers, in uniform, parading up and down the sidewalks.

One evening, while we were having dinner, the band at our hotel struck up “Lara’s Theme,” the title song of Dr. Zhivago .

Knowing the Russians’ hatred of the book, I pointed to the soldiers outside and said to the maitre d': “With them outside, I’m surprised you play that song.”

Thrusting a fist into the air, he said with vehemence: “ We show them.”

On a crisp, cool, sunny Saturday in January, a Midwestern café—a freestanding building with one counter, stools in front, grill behind —became the site of the most memorable experience of my high school years.

It was 1960. I was a senior member of the debate team from John J. Ingels High School, in Atchison, Kansas. I was growing up within sixty miles of the origin of the 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education , but, as of 1960, had never heard of Linda Brown or the case that bears her name. I was soon to discover that there was a great deal about which I was unaware.

In the early sixties, when the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am was still played under Bing’s name on the Monterey Peninsula, I had only recently taken up the game. A friend of mine, a dedicated golfer, invited me to accompany him to view one of the rounds at the “Crosby Clambake.” We arrived on this particular morning at the Pebble Beach links.

My friend was eager to follow Tony Lema, a local favorite on the verge of stardom. I, on the other hand, wanted to join the ranks of “Arnie’s Army,” so we agreed to part and meet in an hour or so at the clubhouse.

It didn’t take me long to locate the throng about the redoubtable Arnold Palmer, but its sheer numbers discouraged me, and I opted instead to observe the lesser luminaries whose talents were on display before far fewer spectators.

One day in the fall of 1954, I was waiting to meet an old friend in the reception area at the National Press Club in Washington when I noticed a flurry of activity. It seemed clear that an important person had arrived at the club, and I soon discovered that it was the Vice President and an entourage of Secret Service men and White House staffers. Before I realized it, Mr. Nixon came bearing down on me, flashing a campaign smile and offering a friendly greeting. Though I was certain we had never met before, I got to my feet hesitantly and replied in kind.