MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Back in 1957, Arthur Frommer published "Europe On $5 A Day." The guide became an immediate best seller, and it changed the way Americans viewed international travel. Frommer died Monday at the age of 95. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Pauline Frommer. NPR's Elizabeth Blair has this appreciation.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: Arthur Frommer started writing travel guides when he was stationed in Germany during the Korean War. "The GI's Guide To Traveling In Europe" included tips like free Air Force flights and how to get them and GI gasoline discounts. Frommer's first NPR interview was with Susan Stamberg in 1989.
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SUSAN STAMBERG: Arthur Frommer, you are a little late. Do not tell me that you, the guru of travel writers, have traveling problems getting to our studio in New York.
ARTHUR FROMMER: I get into the same traffic jams as everyone else does. No travel agent can help you out of those.
BLAIR: Years after Frommer wrote "Europe On $5 A Day," he started noticing that budget travelers were saving money on hotels and restaurants but then spending a fortune visiting what he called dead physical monuments and structures.
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FROMMER: They would spend their days just as senselessly as the rich tourists were doing, by which I mean they would trudge to see the changing of the guard and the tomb of Napoleon in Paris. And I no longer feel that that type of travel is worth the effort. Travel isn't worth the fatigue or the expense of it unless it is associated with ideas and with people, unless it stretches you, unless it makes you a somewhat different person when you return than what you were when you began.
BLAIR: Frommer said it was much better to go to places where you're forced to examine your assumptions. Born to Jewish immigrants from Poland and Austria, Frommer grew up in Jefferson City, Missouri. In 2016, he told Hadassah Magazine that he was the only Jew in his class. Later, at Yale and in the Army, he said he was always in the minority. Curiosity about other cultures was central to Frommer's ideas about travel - and, of course, frugality. It was a philosophy that worked for millions of people who bought his books.
KYLE MCCARTHY: He was a demigod in our industry.
BLAIR: Kyle McCarthy has written a number of guide books for Frommer's. She says he was encouraging to her and others pursuing a career in travel writing. She says, as far back as the 1950s, he showed people that traveling overseas wasn't just a luxury pursuit.
MCCARTHY: Frommer gave kind of the mainstream middle-class American the chance to see the world and the confidence to see the world. I think that's what was so important.
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FROMMER: Travel to me has never, from the beginning, been a recreation. It has been a learning experience.
BLAIR: Arthur Frommer talking to NPR in 2007.
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FROMMER: It has been an activity of immense excitement. And in fact, it's an experience that, to me, is an essential purpose of a civilized life.
BLAIR: Arthur Frommer's legacy continues with his daughter, Pauline Frommer, who oversees Frommer Media. Announcing her father's death, she wrote that he showed how anyone can afford to travel widely and better understand the world.
Elizabeth Blair, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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