Remembering Wilcock: Savvy Traveler in Two Worlds

Sad to read the NYTimes obit on John Wilcock, a pioneering counterculture journalist and activist whose greater source of income was a series of early $5-a-day travel books, and with whom I spent some time for The Times on the Greek island of Mykonos some 45 years ago. The obit noted that a 1973 story in The Times had dubbed him "an influential man nobody knows," which sounded familiar, prompting me to search for it on the newspaper's website and discover that it was the headline on a story I'd written.

Wilcock, could be edgy but also charming and fun, far-ranging in knowledge and personal experience. He and his then-wife took me to my first (and only) nude beach, and stayed in touch over the years--including via his penchant for micro-publishing: a periodic newsletter printed on a single standard sheet, folded into a tiny square such that each fold was a distinct min-page, as I recall.

So here's to John, first the obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/obituaries/john-wilcock-pioneer-of-the-underground-press-dies-at-91.html

And my encounter with him: https://www.nytimes.com/1973/02/04/archives/at-home-with-john-wilcock-an-influential-man-nobody-knows-an.html Or, more simply:

At Home With John Wilcock, an Influential Man Nobody Knows

By DAVID M. ALPERN

February 4, 1973, Page 448 The New York Times Archives

ON the cluttered porch of an unpainted cottage on the Aegean island of Mykonos, John Wilcock was talking about his two lives. In the first he is one of the most widely read travel writers in the world, oracle of the nitty‐gritty of inexpensive, traditional tourism; in the second he is an apostle and chronicler of the radical underground. “If you count the sum total of all the travel books I've sold,” he said, “it comes to over 800,000. And yet, who ever heard of me? It's just one of thoge ironies. I'm better known by people who don't even know me as a travel writer.”

He's right. Few of the millions of tourists he vicariously leads by the hand every year through Mexico, India, Japan, Greece and Yugoslavia with his highly personalized books remember that his name, sometimes with the name of a co‐author, is on the cover. They are more likely to express an almost religious attachment to the “$5 a Day” label, also on the cover. And if a name sticks in the mind at all, it will be Arthur Frommer, who Was the author of the original “Europe on $5 a Day” and now publishes all the others.

An Underground Boswell

Still fewer of Wilcock's travel readers would recognize him, as a living legend of the counterculture, a Boswell of the underground press. It was British‐born Wilcock who 16 years ago helped found New York City's Successful Village Voice and became perhaps its best‐read columnist—before a rather disagreeable parting of the ways. After that he helped launch the East Village Other, the prototype for a whole generation of wild weeklies, personally got The Free Press in Los Angeles off the ground, or under it, and later served as a free‐floating godfather and consultant to freak sheets in London, Amsterdam and other cities. He does not, however, have a financial interest in any of these publications, and people who know Wilcock well believe that Unlike some of today's undergrounders, he has a mental block about making big money.

He was one of the first to write about Andy Warhol, about whom he eventually did a book, and about Lenny Bruce and Timothy Leary. Today he is rooting around for the Warhols, Bruces and Learys of tomorrow and spreading his offbeat view of life, sex, drugs and politics in an irregular subterranean publication called Other Scenes, printed in Pine Bush, N.Y., which he puts out himself, generally at a loss. Of Other Scenes the Library Journal said, “Along with The Realist ... the most important little mag now being published on social issues.” Another of his projects, a hip travel bulletin called Nomad is mostly given away. But then Wilcock is an incorrigible communicator. He has been known to hand out free copies of Other Scenes in the street, along with fragments of prose or poetry, merely to get through to people and provoke a reaction.

Wears Two Hats

How does he manage to wear both hats, one placed firmly for the straight world of travel, the other jauntily for, the alternate culture, and reconcile the two roles with his obviously active conscience? “You know,” he said, “nobody ever asked me that before.” He was discussing the question with a visitor who had read in his “Greece and Yugoslavia on $5 a Day” that Wilcock was planning to spend five months on Mykonos while working on a new guide to the Greek islands; in the book Wilcock had invited readers who were passing through to drop off current magazines. The visitor did so after climbing the 150 stone steps and 50 yards of mountain path that led to the four‐room cottage that Wilcock and his wife, Amber, were renting for $250 month.

Wilcock is a small man, 45 years old, with slightly graying longish hair and a puckish smile. Dressed in baggy trousers, a T‐shirt that said “Edinburgh Film Festival” and slippers from Japan Air Lines, he looked a bit too scruffy for a best‐selling travel writer and far too straight for an underground celebrity. Inside, the house was an obstacle course of boxes and cartons. The Wilcocks were just finishing up their stay and getting ready to move on to Italy and France to visit various underground friends and talk about new publishing ventures. “The packing is incredible,” said Amber, a pretty, robust Bronx girl who has been helping Wilcock with his projects for the past nine years. “We must have shipped 300 pounds of books here, and all my husband's games and puzzles and other things. You'd think with all the traveling we do we wouldn't get, into this kind of problem.”

Wilcock climbed into a hammock the porch and said, in his mixture British and American accents: “Most the people who read my $5 a books would probably think I was near Communist if they knew about radical writing. And a lot of the I know laugh at the idea of spending as, much as $5 a day when they travel. But to me all the different things I fuse very well and I don't feel kind of conflict, although I realize the impact of it is contradictory some people.”

As a closet anarchist and nonstop social critic, Wilcock has less than the highest respect for most commercial travel writers. “They're whores,"I he said, “except for the biggest names, some of whom tend to be pretty independent and interesting writers: But for the most part they write what's beneficial to a country. They don't say anything negative. They don't make any cricicism and the reason is obvious: Their publications would lose money. I don't think The Times will print that. I don't think anyone will print that.

“Most travel writing—the airline magazines, the canned releases and planted stories—is just P.R. bull, paying “back somebody's free trips. I mean, a free junket to a fancy new hotel somewhere that produces simultaneous stories in 425 publications may be a little misleading to the public.”

[Editor's Note: The policy and practice of The New York Time's is desscribed in a guide that the Travel Section provides for potential contributors. The guide says, in part: “Our authors must be personally familiar with their subjects. More important, they must be entirely free to praise or criticize. Under no circumstances will we publish an article that grows out of a trip paid for by airlines, hotels or any other organization with an interest, direct or indirect, in the subject being written about."]

Wilcock charges that much travel writing is thinly disguised public relations, ignoring the realities of life in another country. Even in his guidebooks, he says, he cannot make political or sharp social comment: It would be blue‐penciled.

“Even in the travel books,” Wilcock said, “you can't write exactly the way I feel; it just Wouldn't appear. You can't make political or sharp social comment, or at least I can't.” And he doesn't, according to publisher Frommer, who said in an interview in New York that “Wilcock is quite professional about the job. One just doesn't find political commentary creeping in to any degree.”

Asked to comment on travel writers who take junkets, Frommer replied: “Freeloading is endemic in most newspaper travel writing. No one can possibly do all the traveling that is necessary without free tickets, and this definitely affects what the writer writes about, if not how he writes about it.”

“But our writers,” he went transcend that level. We pride ourselves on the fact that our books adult, frank and critical, not the stereotyped form of travel guides that stand, mouth agape in wonderment at every sight.”

Frommer's company makes no secret of the fact that his original baby, “Eu, rope on $5 a Day,” which has sold more than a million copies since 1957, now sponsored by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, whose symbol is printed on the cover. KLM, said Paul Pasmantier, Frommer vice president, became involved in the early nineteen‐sixties after the book began to sell well and Frommer quit practicing law and moved permanently into publishing. He had written the first issue of the book in his spare time. The airline's sponsorship, Pasmantier said, consists solely of an agreement to buy a fixed number of the guides (he wouldn't say how many for how much), an arrangement that provides Frommer with capital to finance revisions of the book. KLM does not help in any other way, Pasmantier said.

The book, however, has not escaped the barbs of critics who have doubts about the link with KLM. In an article in The New York Times Book Review in 1967, Nora Greenberg said Frommer had “repaid KLM unwisely and too well.” “... his enthusiasm for Amsterdam [in the book],” she wrote, “can only be looked upon with suspicion.”

Though Frommer speaks of “freeloading” in “most newspaper travel writing,” his own writers do accept free help, varying from country to country, from local tourist bureaus, who some times provide translators, guides, chauffeur‐driven cars, meals and accommodations. Frommer's firm says it buys the air tickets for its writers and gives them expense allowances. “But a writer's allowance,” said Pasmantier, “is not expected to cover all his expenses. The balance must be made up out of his own pocket, from his advance against royalties, in other words. The exact details of an author's financial arrangements are left to him.”

In the kind of arrangements Wilcock makes he has struck what he, at least, considers a tolerable compromise with his radical conscience. The Indian Government provided guides and picked up the whole tab for his first visit to India and Japan Air Lines took care of some of the expenses for his work on the original Japan book; the airline, in fact, sponsored it. Now, he says, he pays his own way at hotels and restaurants while traveling, although he concedes that in a few places he has made friends who will not let him pick up the bill for a bed or a meal.

As for plane tickets, Wilcock says, that is Frommer's department. “How he gets them is his worry. But say that giving us plane tickets is going to affect the content of a book ridiculous. After all, we would be going to the same places one way or another. And I'm not about the airline.”

Providing free transportation is hardly ridiculous from the airlines' point of view. Airlines' do not have to be written about to profit from the books Wilcock writes. If people want to get to the places he has described, they almost always fly—and they pay for their tickets.

Underground Outlets

It is in his other role as an underground publisher and writer that Wilcock finds the outlets through which to rap uninhibitedly about the countries he visits.

“I want to say what I believe in; that's why I'm a writer,” he said as he lay in his hammock in the sun. see things in totality, not just terms of hotel prices. In my travel books I'm cautious in a sense: I restrain myself and write about what think tourists have to know. But if feel strongly about something I simply print it in Other Scenes, or give to The Realist or some other sympathetic publication. Like some stuff just not meant for the travel books and some of it obviously is.”

The real world of subsidized travel, however, does not make the same convenient distinction. While he was doing his book on India, Wilcock was also filling his notebook with tidbits for an upcoming issue of Other Scenes. One was a story, originally printed in a left‐wing Indian newspaper called Blitz, about an investigation involving one of the country's cabinet ministers. Later, when copies of Other Scenes got back to India, “all hell broke loose,” Wilcock said. “It even went so far that the Tourist Minister was asked how a travel writer who had been in India at the request of the Government was printing allegations about a minister. I was criticized as being a Communist; the affair became a scandal. To my amusement, the minister was later thrown out. They got him on some

“A similar thing happened in Japan,” Wilcock continued. “After I had been there to do the first book I put out an issue of Other Scenes devoted to Japan, and in it I ran a lot of sexual stuff. Other Scenes came to the attention of Japan Air Lines; and it immediately dropped sponsorship of the book. And even now, six years later, the Japanesse won't have anything to do with me, will no longer pay for tickets for me to go to Japan to update the book.” He thinks he might have solved the problem by using two names in his two kinds of work; he finds it abhorrent that JAL considers its free trips a business investment damaged by his other

Cub Reporter

The name John Wilcock first appeared in print when he became, at the age of 16, the youngest staffer in the history of The Daily Mirror of London, and ever since then he has been a working journalist, above and below ground. In 1951 he sailed for Canada and a job with United Press International, but before long he was drawn to the United States and Greenwich Village. While helping to set up The Village Voice, he kept one foot in the straight world and eventually stepped over the line, moving to The Times Travel Section in the late nineteen‐fifties.

He stayed for nearly three years; he says that his work there was not a wholly satisfactory experience for him, or for The Times either, but it did set him on the road to a new career. He read and was impressed by two manuscripts about Hong Kong. “Hong Kong had always been legendary to me,” he said, “so I rang up a travel agent and asked how much it would cost to go. The price was $1,000, but for an additional $500 could go all the way around the world and stop off anyplace I liked. So I took two weeks leave of absence from The Times along with my two‐week vacation, and with literally just a briefcase full of stuff, and my tape recorder, I went to San Francisco, Hawaii, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Saigon, Delhi, Istanbul in 30 days.” On his return he sold one article

When Frommer, whom he had met at party in the Village, asked him in 1960 to do a $5‐a‐day guidebook to Mexico, he left The Times, “by mutual agreement.” He has worked as a freelance writer ever since, more or less, but despite a prolific output, which he estimates at about 250,000 words a year (including a column for Penthouse magazine), he says his income remains “under the $10,000‐a‐year category.”

Writers' Spokesman Responds

Al Borcover, the president of the Society of American Travel Writers, was asked to comment on the statements in the accompanying article concerning “freeloading” by travel writers. Borcover said that the society did not now have strict regulations about “freeloading.” He added, however, that its board was about to consider a lengthy code of ethics drafted by its ethics committee.

“It is true,” he said, “that some travel writers take advantage of their job and write flattering material about countries in which they have been entertained, but I think the subject is one in which every case of alleged abuse has to be considered on its merits.”

Borcover, who is assistant travel editor of The Chicago Tribune, said that his paper pays the bill when a member of the staff goes on a trip. He added: “However, we are permitted to go on inaugural flights operated by the airlines, and sometimes the airlines provide accommodations for writers at the destination as well as the free journey.”

Asked to comment on Wilcock's contention that most commercial travel writers are “whores,” Borcover said that his newspaper and many others had adopted a policy of running “honest‐to‐God travel articles that compare favorably with the contents of the rest of the paper as far as credibility goes.” He conceded that there were newspapers whose editors took little interest in travel and published “a lot of pap.”

Of Frommer's view on freeloading, Borcover said: “The acceptance by a writer of a free flight does not necessarily mean that he is being bought. The airlines do not try to buy favorable publicity; they simply want to expose their services and their destinations to writers' eyes. I have never been asked to write a favorable story about any place.

“But those words sound strange, coming from Frommer. At least some of his books have been subsidized by airlines. In fact, back in 1967, I wrote a book for Frommer's, ‘A Dollarwise Guide to Chicago,’ that was subsidized by American Airlines.”

“It is very easy to take potshots at travel writers, “Borcover said, “but I think that most editors are very responsible and do not allow writers to turn out exalting stuff in return for favors. That is certainly contrary to the ideals of the Society of American Travel Writers.”

Sold the Rights

Wilcock has sold his financial rights to some of the books for hard cash: $3,000 for the Mexico guide, $2,000 as a flat fee for doing the India book, Currently, he gets royalties only from the Japan and Greece books. “Tale Jaime,” Wilcock said. “It must sell 40,000 copies every two years, when we update it. The price is $2.50 now, and I get 7 per cent. That comes to $7,00( over two years, with $2,000 going for expenses. I guess I've made $70,00( from my travel writing over the pas 12 years, but that's money I was ?? and putting into my magazines. ??nust have put $40,000 into Other ??scenes, and it still loses money.” There was just about enough, he said, to cover ??he rent for the hillside house in My??onos.

Wilcock can generally “do” a country for a book in 11 weeks. He uses tired help and local residents for tips, translating and some of the field work, but relies mostly on his own eyes and instincts. “John has an incredible nose for things,” said Amber. “We'll be walking around some strange city and he'll say ‘Gee, I'd like to go down that street.’ And we'll find this incredible jazz coffee shop, the only one in town.”

Rules of Thumb

Short cuts are essential to maintain Wilcock's fast pace, however. While he claims to visit almost every hotel he lists, staying in each would be impossible, so he has developed what he believes to be some useful rules of thumb. “After a while, you learn to tie everything together very closely,” he said. “If I walk into a strange hotel to ask what the rates are and the guy reacts like very brusquely and unpleasantly, it's fairly safe to assume that he is going to do that with anybody. So why would anybody stay there? There's no earthly reason why he should be rude to a potential customer, or suspicious because you're asking questions.

“But if a guy is very anxious to show you around and show you a room, that's the one place you don't have to look at the rooms. If he's willing and friendly and proud of his hotel, then you know that it's fantastic, that it's perfect, that it's going to be all right. Everything that could possibly be fixed up he's going to fix up.”

In the end, though, Wilcock admits that he often gambles, letting the unsuspecting reader put up the stakes—part of his vacation. “I shouldn't say this, but a great deal of checking is left to the readers,” he said. “Frommer has always encouraged readers to write in and a lot do. He gets an incredible number of letters, most of them long and frank, going on and on about things I never thought twice about. It may be that a place seems O.K. to me, kinda pretty, you know. And then some reader will send a really nasty letter about cockroaches in the bathroom and all that. So, then, O.K., I've learned my lesson, and when we go back to update, we check further and maybe take the place out of our listing. To an extent, readers who are responsive to books like this are always going to be guinea pigs.”

Still, Wilcock believes that he knows more about the places he's written of than most natives. “For example,” he said, “when I went down to Mexico for the first book, everyone was very skeptical. The people I looked up there. friends of friends, all told me it was impossible to do this book. But I said: ‘Never mind. Why don't you just give me like a night and take me to the place that you know about, the restaurants you recommend and stuff.’ So, maybe I would get 10 or 20 different people each to take me out to places that they knew. And, collectively, when you put all the places, together, you know the country better than any one of those individual people, and they're all astonished. They can't figure out how you came down and in a few weeks learned more than they ever knew by living there.”

A John ($5 a Day) Wilcock Sampler

John Wilcock does not pretend to be a great stylist. His aim, in his “$5 a day” litanies, is to pack his prose full of facts, hints, advice, suggestions, to persuade travelers to follow their noses and to keep their expenses down. He sees his task as a practical rather than a literary one, and he works fast. He says he wrote the 60,000‐word India book in 65 days, and that included the field work.

Here is a Wilcock sampler:

Mexico (Acapulco): “If you happen to be charged with demonic energy (or dexedrine) you might try El 13 Negro. This is an after hours spot that's positively morgue‐like until 4 or 5 A.M. Then it comes to life and is still jumping at a time when more sober citizens are checking into the office. To give you an idea: the owner, a genial party named Beto, rarely makes the scene before 7 A.M.”

Japan: “... But, then, even on weekdays, the frequent trains from Tokyo station are crowded, and you might as well forget your notions of Japanese politeness temporarily, or you'll never get seat. Get out on the station platform and when the train comes in push and shove like the rest.”

India: “If you thought that getting around India and Ceylon [now Sri Lanka] was a matter of making a deal with your local “rent‐an‐elephant” agency, you're in for a big surprise. Sabu never had it so good. In addition to excellent Air‐India flights to these countries, the domestic transportation is efficient and

Greece: “One of the best ways to explore Athens is to adopt the same plan as for any strange city: get off the main avenues and just wander at random, letting your intuition guide you in whatever direction appears most interesting.... If you remember that you can't get lost (because all you need to do is to head for any bus or taxi and ask for Omonia Square or Syntagma Square), you'll enjoy your random wanderings with less trepidation.”

As Wilcock sees it, it is not the purpose of the “$5 a Day” guidebooks to transform a tourist into a knowledgeable native overnight, but rather to develop confidence in the visitor “who arrives, say, at the airport and doesn't know the first thing about the country: how much to tip without looking ridiculous, or whether to tip at all. He wants to know whether there is an alternative to taking a $5 limousine into town. Or, if he's looking for a reasonably cheap but clean hotel, he doesn't want to tramp the streets, or have to settle for the Hilton, which he can't afford.”

Sometimes a reader of a “$5 a Day” book will write a letter of complaint, perhaps about cockroaches in the bathroom of a hotel that has been recommended. The place has to be checked out. To some extent, Wilcock admits, his readers are “always going to be guinea pigs.”

The books are invaluable, Wilcock says for the first three days in a strange country; after that they can be thrown away. “In fact, once people have used one of these books to travel they never really need one again, because they are able to follow the principles. There are certain basic rules. For example, if you arrive in a strange town by train and you don't have much money but need a hotel, the best thing to do is to dump your bag in a locker in the station and then head down the main street and turn left within two or three blocks—and you'll find a cheap hotel. I mean things like that are just universal. Another policy for any tourist is always to follow the brightest lights.”

Wilcock also urges his readers to develop a willingness to wander; first‐time travelers, he finds, are “Incredibly nervous and conservative.” “They really believe,” he said, “that when they leave the hotel, unless they know exactly where they're going and how to get there and how to get back, they will be forever lost and doomed, and God only knows what will happen to them. So I try to encourage them to break out of this pattern by telling them again and again that if you know the name of your hotel, you can never really get lost”

His own traveling, Wilcock said, “had totally internationalized” hint and whittled away whatever congenital respect he had ever had for local rules and regulations. “Everybody starts out life by being, if not nationalistic, at least somewhat bound by the laws and conventions of the country he lives in,” he said. “But after you travel around a lot, you see things differently. When you see how customs involving the same matters vary in different countries, you get a total disrespect for petty laws. You eventually begin to feel that the only laws that apply to you are the common sense ones, laws of human values, not those of dumb, legislators.”

Wilcock sees himself as an interne tional courier and pamphleteer. One of his major goals now is to find an easily portable offset typing and printing device on which he can produce Other Scenes plus various guides and newsletters while he is traveling instead of having to send copy back to New York Amsterdam.

“I'd like to circulate the incredible ideas that exist in some countries but not in others,” he said. “I'm very interested in being able to move into a place and cover all the scenes: what is the most outrageous political thing being said, what the sexual developments are, what's hip in art—and then move on.”

Wilcock climbed out of the hammock to implement that idea. He was headed for Paradise, one of the three nudist beaches on Mykonos, to interview a colony of global drifters who were temporarily living there. “You know,” he said, “the younger kids today are infinitely more adventurous than I've ever been. They could write the travel books fantastically, except that they're not into writing stuff down like I am. They're just into enjoying it.”

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A version of this archives appears in print on February 4, 1973, on Page 448 of the New York edition with the headline: At Home With John Wilcock, an Influential Man Nobody Knows. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

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Some of Wilcock's observations on travel writing also drew criticism:

https://www.nytimes.com/1973/03/11/archives/letters-the-ethics-of-travel-writing-letters-to-the-travel-editor.html