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        Where Gray Line Got Its Mojo

                                                                                         c 2024 TommyBooks.com

                                                           Thomas Herget

                                                            “You only live once.

                                                        But if you do it right, once is enough.”

                                                                                                         Mae West

                              That ole fork in the road

In the spring of 1970 my good buddy Dante approached me in San Francisco and asked if I had any plans for the coming summer. I told him no. He and I had recently graduated from St Mary's College in Moraga and I was looking forward to an epic summer making big bucks while enjoying all the benefits associated with being a stud bar keep in San Francisco's most popular straight fern bar, Henry Africa.

But Dante was a really sharp guy whose ideas were creative and fresh and I trusted him implicitly. So I asked him what he had in mind.

“Let's go to graduate school.”

“What!” I scoffed. “Why in the hell would we want to go to graduate school?”

“Because if we go to graduate school we can qualify for student loans. Then you give me your loan and I'll combine it with mine and I'll buy a house which I'll fix up and sell. You'll get your money back and I'll buy another house.”

It sounded like a good idea to me and we soon enrolled in Golden Gate University's Masters in Public Administration program. Two years and two houses later we gradulated with nearly identical 3.34 gpas.

Dante was a natural in real estate and went on to became one of San Francisco's premier developers.

Meanwhile, six months before graduation, one afternoon in late March I notice a 2x4 card thumb-tacked to the University's “Help Wanted” bulletin board stating that a local sightseeing company, Holiday Tours, was hiring tour guides for local tours. I knew nothing about being a tour guide but I had just seen the movie “If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” which was about a fun-loving tour guide escorting a group of wacky American tourist around Europe. What impressed me about the movie was that the tour guide really enjoyed his work and, in the end, he almost got the babe. At 24 years of age, to me the most important criteria for a good job were fun and babes.

So I decided to check it out. I figured that my background would really benefit me in this endeavor. By the time I was 8 years old I could say “I'm hungry. When do we eat?” in English, Italian, German and Japanese because I had already lived in those countries. My father was a highly esteemed career US Foreign Service Diplomat and for my first 16 years we lived mostly overseas. I attended 6 grade schools, 3 high schools and 4 colleges. My first two years in high school were in Rome, Italy at Notre Dame International HS. My third year was spent in Los Angeles at Notre Dame HS. I graduated from Georgetown Preparatory School in Garrett Park, Maryland.

College was just as crazy. I spent my freshman year at Xavier U in Cincinnati, Ohio. My sophomore year at George Washington U in DC and my final undergraduate years at St. Mary's College, Moraga, CA.

I went to Holiday Tours, applied for the position and much to my surprise they hired me! This geeky, shy, fashion-challenged, near-virgin who had marginal social sophistication and no actual public-speaking experience was destined to become a tour guide.

I was given two days of training. The only thing that really sunk in during training was when I heard some of the older male tour guides talking about how much fun they were having and all the babes they were meeting. Everything else discussed in those classes was just a blur.

On April 18, 1971 I was assigned my first tour which was a “Night Club Tour” of San Francisco. The “Night Club Tour” cost $26 per person and included dinner at the Fairmont Hotel followed by visits (cover charge and two cocktails included) to The Venetian Room (where Tony Bennett was performing that night), Earthquake McGoons (where you'd find Mickey Finn & his Honky Tonk piano), The Sinaloa Cantina (Cabaret Music) and finally the Finocchio's Night Club (Home of the “World Famous Female Impersonators”).

Holiday Tours was so busy my first night that management had to charter 26 Gray Line buses to satisfy the demand for the Night Club Tour. Being a rookie I was assigned the last bus which was only half full with 22 guests, four of which were college coeds traveling together on spring break. Man, was I in heaven.

Because I was the last bus, management instructed me to give a brief City Tour before heading to the Fairmont Hotel for dinner. We couldn't have all 26 buses arriving at the hotel at the same time and swamping the restaurant. John, my Gray Line driver, followed a circuitous route downtown while I prodded my memory in a futile attempt to articulately disseminate what they had taught me in training. Now I wished I had spent more time reading the material they had given me.

Thirty minutes into my tour John stopped at what I thought was a traffic light. I was facing the guests towards the rear so I turned toward the front of the bus to get my bearings, stall for time and hopefully remember something interesting. Imagine my surprise when I realized that we weren't at a traffic light but back to where we had started, the Bellevue Hotel. I was even more surprised to see George, one of the owners of Holiday Tours, standing on the curb and tapping on the bus window trying to get my attention. Once he had it he beckoned for me to get off the bus.

Completely befuddled because I knew we hadn't covered this in training class, I handed the microphone to John and exited the bus. I'm standing on the sidewalk looking at George when I hear the bus door close behind me. I watch George wave to the passengers as the bus pulls away from the curb. Once the bus had departed George turns to me and says, “John called and said your tour was terrible. He said we had better let him take over or else we were going to have to refund some money.”

I'm sure you would agree that under normal circumstances this should have signaled an abrupt end to my once promising career as a tour guide. But these were not normal times in San Francisco and I was, after all, a warm body. Holiday Tours was just too busy to let me go. They had the perfect assignment for a non-speaking rookie tour guide.

The next day I was sent to San Francisco International Airport (SFO) where I dutifully stood, for almost a year, as a mute human arrow in the baggage arrival area. My job as a mute human arrow was simple. When asked by one of our arriving passengers, without saying a word, I would point to the appropriate carousel where they could claim their luggage.

You may be wondering how I could continue to work for a company that had subjected me to such humiliation? Do you remember my mentioning that there were four coeds on my first tour bus?

That was all the incentive I needed to stick around and get better.

                                        Background

I would like to give you some history and background on the travel scene in San Francisco and the World when I started in 1971. Your eyes might glaze over like mine do when discussing history so if that's the case then skip this section. You can always come back to this section for clarification if you run into something in my stories that you don't understand. But if you decide to gut it out and read this section then I will reward you with a special travel story at the end of this history lesson. The bonus story is called Kinky Japanese.

The late 1960's and early 1970's was the dawn of the era of the Infinity Travel Group (ITG) and the Group Inclusive Tour (GIT), two new ideas in leisure travel that opened its doors to the globetrotting masses. By joining a group, any group (The Lubbock Trowel and Error Garden Club or The Left Handers Club), you qualified for huge discounts in travel.

At the same time the concept of back to back charters was born (some say in the hallowed halls of AITS in Boston, Ma). With back to back charters a travel company, or wholesaler, could significantly lower the cost of a travel program. In the past an airplane was chartered by a wholesaler to take a group from point A to point B. Included in the cost of that plane were what are called deadhead charges,the substantial fee for ferrying an empty plane and crew before and after the charter.

But in the late 1960's someone came up with the idea (the rumors I heard at the time was that this was the brainchild of Stan The Man Rosen, VP sales at AITS) of running the same program continuously for a certain number of weeks. This way a wholesaler would carry a group from point A to point B and then use the same plane to carry the group that had traveled the previous week back from point B to point A. Now a wholesaler would pay deadhead charges only for the first and last planes and none for the weeks in between. A huge savings. It seems so obvious today but it was radical, outside the box thinking back then.

A trickle down effect of this strategy was that the wholesaler could negotiate an excellent price for a block of hotel rooms at point B by guaranteeing and using the same hotel rooms every week for the duration of the program.

These innovative ideas generated huge savings that were reflected in the cost of the tour packages. Wholesalers like Tradewind Tours, Hawaiian Holidays, Wiki Wiki Wonderland, Westa Fiesta, Jet Fun, Jet Set and many more were now offering travel packages at unbelievably low prices.

For example: The Tradewind Tours and Hawaiian Holiday packages were 14 day programs; three nights in San Francisco, seven nights in Honolulu and three nights in Las Vegas. These programs included all air fare, all airport transfers, all luxury hotels with meals, a city tour in each destination and the services of a professional tour conductor to facilitate any and all special needs or requests. The price? $399 per person.

For the first time middle-income America could afford to travel to destinations that up until now were the exclusive playgrounds for the rich and famous. And travel they did, by the millions.

Charter airlines like Trans International Airlines (TIA) and World Airlines (WA) were adding airplanes on a monthly basis, the most popular being the 254 seat Douglas DC 8 Stretch. This was an airplane that both tour director and passenger hated because of the long narrow claustrophobic tube design and cramped seating. The only saving grace to that plane was that it safely got us to our destination. I know of no accidents or fatalities involving the Stretch 8.

Another trickle down from the back to back charters was the growth of ground handlers or destination management companies (DMC), like Holiday Tours in San Francisco. Someone had to coordinate and manage all the land activities that the travel packages offered and that became the responsibility of the DMCs.

In the late 1960's and early 1970's in San Francisco there was only one DMC of significance and that was HolidayTours, owned by Tony and George . These men operated under a brilliant business concept. They had no assets which translated to no financial outlay to get started. They rented a nondescript office with a couple of phone lines in the basement of the old Bellevue Hotel in downtown San Francisco and opened for business. And what a business it was. Almost from the start Holiday Tours was handling 15 to 20 groups a week. Holiday Tours would charter every bus that the Gray Line bus company owned and then put their own tour guides on the buses to give the tours.

For those of you unfamiliar with how a DMC made money in the Golden Days of Group Travel allow me to briefly explain. The wholesaler would hire the DMC and pay a per capita (per person) fee to the DMC to provide airport transfers, briefing rooms, sightseeing tours, hospitality desks and tour guides for their groups. The wholesaler also booked the hotel rooms through the DMC who controlled the room block.

I mentioned briefing rooms. On the first day, upon arrival at the hotel, the passengers were herded into a large ballroom (briefing room) where they were told (briefed) about the many attractions of the destination city and the optional tours that were available to visit these attractions. At the conclusion of the briefing the guests would then have an opportunity to purchase the optional tours before collecting their hotel room keys.

The briefing room had a stage up front with the guest seated in the middle. In the back of the room were 10 – 15 tables, each staffed by a tour guide with a large selection of optional tour tickets for sale. The room keys were brought out at the end of the briefing and distributed by hotel staff from tables located at the front of the room.

Normally at the end of a briefing a family would split up; the husband getting in line to buy optional tours while the wife got in the room key line. Sales for optional tours were phenomenal, but keep in mind, this was the primary objective of the briefing and the briefer, to sell tours. The briefer described each tour as if it were the eighth wonder of the world and subtly implied that it would be your loss if you passed on this once in a lifetime opportunity.

For Holiday Tours the role of the briefer rested on the most capable shoulders of Tony, one of the owners of the company. Over the years I have come to appreciate what he, as a briefer, was able to accomplish. His sales were consistently in the 90% range or better. When a tour was close to 100% sales he would give away the last seat, just to reach the 100% goal. His skill as a briefer was one of the major reasons why Holiday Tours had the majority of DMC business in San Francisco; the wholesaler received a huge commission on the optional tour sales.

In summation let's follow the money. Holiday Tours made a couple of bucks on everyone they brought in from the airport, a couple of bucks on every hotel room and a couple of bucks on every optional tour. Add that up and then multiply the total by the thousands of people arriving every week. You come up with a tidy sum. Then deduct the paltry fixed expenses of an unpretentious basement office staffed by a gay man with a bad rug answering the phones, tour guides earning $2.50 an hour and a bald Chinese accountant.

You can easily understand how one of the owners could afford, in just two short years, to purchase a home in one of the most exclusive residential enclaves in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Rumor has it that Jake, the much beloved Chinese accountant at Holiday Tours, found it quicker to just stack the money up against a 12 inch ruler he had taped to the wall. Once the stack reached 12 inches he knew how much he had so he slipped a rubber band around the amount and threw the bundle into a money bag.

Ah yes, the Golden Age of Travel in San Francisco.

And here I am. A butterfly at heart who through a stroke of luck lands on the one profession that fits my DNA. With a very short attention span I'm always looking around for the next pretty flower and travel fits the bill. Everything I've done in travel has a beginning and an end. You know that no matter what you do it has a completion date. A city tour, three hours. An escorted tour, one to two weeks. Even when owning a sightseeing company no two days are alike. There's always something new and exciting just around the corner. That's why I can honestly say that after spending almost 50 years in the travel business I have never worked a day in my life. It's been fun from the get go.

                                       Kinky Japanese

Seeing as how we are talking about the Golden Age of Travel in San Francisco let me tell you a quick story about Japanese tour groups and what the Japanese tour guides did and said that really infuriated the local American tour guides, myself included.

In the early 1970's in San Francisco Holiday Tours was moving 25 – 30 bus loads of tourists nightly on their Night Club Tour. At the same time Japanese DMCs were moving almost as many Japanese tourists on a Japanese Night Club Tour of San Francisco.

This was the Gold Rush Era for Japanese tourists to California. They were arriving daily from Japan on Japanese owned air planes, riding Japanese owned buses with native Japanese tour guides, staying in Japanese owned hotels, shopping at Japanese owned stores and dining in Japanese owned restaurants. A very small fraction of the Japanese tourist dollars being spent in San Francisco was making it way into the local American economy. Most of it was being funneled back to Japan to benefit the Japanese economy.

That was bad enough.

But what really steamed the local American tour guides was that these Japanese travel companies would not permit Japanese speaking Americans to give tours to their people. (Historical note: An American owned Japanese speaking San Francisco sightseeing company, Dolphin Tours, sued a bunch of Japanese travel companies for the right to give tours to Japanese tourists in our own country and after 8 years of battling it out in court, prevailed). The Japanese companies would only use Japanese guides that they had brought over from Japan to give the tours of San Francisco. The tour guides that they brought from Japan had no San Francisco history training and fabricated outrageous, misleading, and disingenuous stories about my beautiful City and her cosmopolitan yet adventurous spirit.

One example of why we needed a good strong tour guide union in San Francisco similar to the one in Italy can be found on the above mentioned Japanese Night Club Tour. Every night 20 buses or more of Japanese tourists made a stop at the Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theater as part of their Night Club tour. The Mitchell Brothers theater was one of the first in the USA to offer topless, bottomless, totally nude, lap dancing and simulated sex acts on stage.

The Japanese tour guides would tell their groups that the O'Farrell Theater was where Americans go for their sex education classes. The guides then joked that that's why Americans were so inept and inadequate in the bedroom.

Some of you might chuckle. But if you're a purist you'd be pissed.

Let's set the record straight. As a tour guide you should give credit where credit's due. Especially since I was living in San Francisco while history was being made.

In the early 1970's the City of San Francisco and her happy, satiated citizens were leading a historical sexual revolution that reverberated across this Great Nation. There was so much free sex available in San Francisco that we really didn't need the O'Farrell Theater. The only reason Artie and Jim Mitchell kept their theater open was for the kinky Japanese. The O'Farrell Theater was one of the few American owned businesses that saw any Japanese tourist money.

This was the tipping point for myself and many other tour guides and we decided to address the issue of a tour guides union. We loved our City and bristled at all the misinformation being disseminated. In the Fall of 1975 I became one of the founders of San Francisco's first tour guides union. You will find my signature, alongside five others, on the original parchment.

Today the San Francisco Tour Guides Guild is one of the oldest and most powerful tour guides' union in the Nation.

Hurrah !!

                                                                Numb Nuts 

I have never been considered the sharpest knife in the drawer. I graduated second in my class at Georgetown Prep... from the bottom. The only classmate I beat was Buck and he went on to become a gazzillionaire, so that turned into a hollow victory. But stick me in a learning situation long enough and strictly through osmosis I'll absorb and eventually figure out what you're trying to teach me. Such was the case with me - the mute human arrow - at San Francisco International Airport (SFO).

After a year of expertly pointing arriving guests to the correct luggage carousel I was beginning to get noticed by the cognoscenti, the decision makers.

It's now the spring of 1972 and I was standing in my usual spot at SFO between carousel 1 and 2 when Della walked up to me and asked, “Hey, numb nuts. Have you ever been to Hawaii?”

Before I get any deeper into the story I need to give you some background on Della. She stood 4 foot 11 inches tall, weighed all of 98 lbs but packed a punch that would put even Mohammad Ali to shame. Della and her husband Cass were in charge of the West Coast/Hawaii division of “Trade Wind Tours”, at that time one of the largest travel wholesalers in the world. Della and Cass were responsible for the successful movement of thousands of happy travelers every week.

I knew of Della's position and clout and the fact that she had been born and raised in Hawaii to a very affluent local family. So there was no wiggle room for hedging my response. I squatted down so that I could look her straight in the eye (I had just seen “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and knew that eye contact was important to upper management) and said, “Yes ma'am, I've been to Hawaii.”

My response wasn't a lie. I had been to Hawaii but it was way back in 1955 when the tallest building in Honolulu was the Aloha Tower down at the harbor where the cruise ships docked. At that time my family stayed at the Hilton Hawaiian Village which was literally a village with thatched huts scattered around a very wide and sandy Waikiki Beach. It no way resembled today's modern resort with it's many high-rise buildings and a narrow strip of beach glistening with imported sand.

I was waiting for her to elaborate on her question when we were interrupted by a 288 lb passenger from the “Wiki Wiki Wonderland” tour group. He was dressed in bright madras shorts, black socks, brown Hush Puppies and a Moose Lodge windbreaker covering an off-white tee shirt. This delightful man was complaining about how this goddamn airline with it's goddamn narrow seats had lost his goddamn luggage with his wife's goddamn medication inside and I'd better find it pretty goddamn quick before she gets a goddamn stroke right here in the goddamn airport.

Della, relieved that he wasn't one of her passengers and not wanting to breathe in the offensive odors emanating from every pore of this obviously first time travelers body, yelled back to me as she walked away, “I'm staying at the Jack Tar. Come by when you get done here.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I meekly responded before turning my attention to this valued guest who was the main reason I jumped out of bed every morning, eager to solve the many challenges that awaited me at SFO.

“Follow me, please, to the lost luggage counter,” I said. Then I made the rookie mistake of asking “Didn't you get the pre-trip information packet that emphasized, emphatically, to never pack important medication in your checked luggage but to instead secure it in your carry-on luggage to avoid just what is happening?”

“Ya, I did. So what? What's your point? The goddamn airline's not suppose to lose luggage. Wait'll I get home and write to “Wiki Wiki Wonderland”. They're gonna pay me for all this goddamn aggravation,” he snarled.

That's when I decided to forget talking any sense to this man and to just go and find the “goddamn bag”. Which we did. Within 60 seconds.

You see the man never attached the “Wiki Wiki Wonderland” color coded luggage tags to his bag. Instead of being identified and picked off the carousel by the Sky Caps we hire to retrieve our groups luggage, it went directly to the carousel with the regular passengers luggage. When I asked him if he had received the color coded luggage tags in his pre-trip information packet his response was what you might expect, “Ya, so what? What's your point?” He then proceeded to take them out of his pocket and thrust them at me. “Here. You put 'em on.”

Ah, the envious life of a human arrow.

Later on that afternoon I caught up with Della at the “Trade Wind Tours” hospitality desk in the lobby of the Jack Tar Hotel.

(The hospitality desk is staffed with knowledgeable local tour guides who are eager to assist members of the tour group.) She saw me coming and jumped up from the desk and motioned me to join her out of earshot of the rest of the tour guides.

She got right to the point. “Robert is sick and can't escort his “Golden Aloha” program scheduled to arrive here this weekend. I needed to find a tour escort right away so I asked you. I'm taking you at your word that you know Hawaii and I'm putting you in charge of the group in his place. You're going to be the tour director traveling with the group. But I'm warning you that if you screw up you'll never work in this industry again.”

You can imagine the terror that coursed through my veins. My feet felt rooted to the hotel carpet and my throat was so dry I was unable to speak. The expression on my face can only be described as vacuous and clueless. Local guides dream of escorting groups out of town. It's the next big career step up. Here it was being handed to me on a silver platter and I was struck speechless.

She looked up at me, correctly read my expression and said, “Ahh shit. I knew I was making a mistake. Damn. Well, it's too late. I had to submit a name for the airplane manifest and hotels, so you're it. Just don't open your mouth during the trip and I'll assign my best ground staff to handle everything. With any luck we'll get through this and the passengers won't even know how dumb you are. Come on back to the desk and take the information packet I put together for you. Read everything and hopefully with any luck you should be able to answer the most elementary questions.”

She turned back towards the hospitality desk and after five steps looked back over her right shoulder to see if I was following. I wasn't. She trotted back, gave me a less than subtle punch in the stomach and said, “Come on. Get your ass in gear. Heel!”

This final prodding snapped me out of my frozen state and I scrambled to catch up to her.

Do you know that to this day I remember absolutely nothing about that program. I was in a mental fog for the whole two weeks I was leading (?) the group. I can give you an outline of the basics which were: the program was the Golden Aloha Package which consisted of 3 nights in San Francisco at the Jack Tar Hotel, 7 Nights in Honolulu at the Hilton Hawaiian Village and 3 nights in Las Vegas at the old Riviera Hotel. There were 302 members in the group which necessitated the use of one of those new jumbo jets.

I do remember at the welcome briefing in San Francisco where the tour director is usually introduced to the group and given time to make an introductory statement, my microphone mysteriously malfunctioned. So I briefly stood up and waved to the masses before Della escorted me off stage and Tony, one of the owners of Holiday Tours, began his briefing.

While on the road the tour director normally covers the hospitality desk daily from 8 am to 5 pm. For the two weeks that I was with my group my appearance at our hospitality desk was limited to 8 am to 8:15 am daily. The rest of the time I was not-so-subtly encouraged to stay out of the local travel staffs way, preferably in my room which overlooked the noisy trash compactor.

I know you're going to ask me, once again, how could I subject myself to this humiliation and degradation? My response to you is I was paid to visit San Francisco, Honolulu and Las Vegas. Do you know how many babes there were in those three cities? Even a dweeb like me could occasionally get lucky under those circumstances. Plus this phantom tour director managed to collect $352 in tips from an appreciative group of happy homeward bound travelers.

That $352 didn't stay in my pocket for very long. I promptly lost it all to the slot machines at Las Vegas' McCarran Airport while waiting to board my plane back to San Francisco.

As I said I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I'm learning. I had too much fun earning that money to just throw it away. No more gambling for me.

                                                                    The Strike

The sun is setting on the Summer of 1974 and Autumn is rapidly approaching. By now I am working part-time as a local guide in San Francisco for Holiday Tours and part-time escorting tours to Hawaii and Las Vegas for two quality wholesalers, Trade Wind Tours and Hawaiian Holiday Tours. I'm still learning the tour director ropes but fortunately I am working with the best local tour guides that those cities have to offer and they're covering my mistakes.

It's September and I'm escorting a small group of 178 happy campers. This Trade Winds Tours program calls for 3 nights at the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco, 7 nights at the Sheraton Waikiki Hotel in Honolulu, and 3 nights at the CircusCircus in Las Vegas.

The San Francisco portion, as usual, goes off without a hitch.

Then we arrive at Honolulu International Airport. My group is going through the traditional welcome ritual of lei flower greetings and individual photographs with traditionally dressed Hawaiians when my local guide informs me that the Sheraton Waikiki is over-booked and that my group is going to be staying at the Princess Kaiulani (PK) instead. I was slightly irked that I hadn't been informed earlier of this major deviation so that I could better prepare my group for what I was sure was going to be a huge disappointment.

Why, you ask, would the group be disappointed? Because the Sheraton Waikiki is situated right on Waikiki Beach and the PK was a block-long walk inland away from the beach. To make matters even worse, in order to get to the beach my group was going to have to cross Kalakaua Ave, the busiest street in Honolulu. All in all this had the makings for an unhappy week in Hawaii. But a good tour director soldiers on even in the face of what portends to be a monster obstacle with major distractions.

But I did chicken out, just a little. Rather than get on each bus before leaving the airport and explaining the hotel change, I left this disagreeable task to my local guides. Instead I took a cab to the PK ahead of the group so that I might reconnoiter the substitute hotel. I had not stayed in the PK in previous trips and I needed to familiarize myself with the location and layout of the hotel before my group arrived. The better to answer all their anticipated angry questions.

I was standing at the hotel entrance when my group arrived from the airport. I tried to maintain a cheerful facade as 178 unhappy and grumbling passengers filed past me heading towards the briefing room set up in a small ballroom just off the lobby. In past briefings I would get up on the stage, welcome the group to Hawaii and then introduce our local briefer. In this case I could feel the hostile vibes emanating from the group and thought it best to just let the briefer do his thing without my intro. I didn't want their unhappiness with me to spill over onto him.

It became apparent that I had made a major rookie mistake by not getting on each bus at the airport and explaining the hotel switch personally to the group. They now thought, in their own convoluted way, that I had known about the hotel switch all along and hid this damning information from them. I was counting on our briefer, a local Hawaiian who was very good, to lighten the group's mood.

The group was a blend of smaller groups from the East Coast and as hard as the briefer tried, they were not placated. Optional tour sales were terrible. I decided to bite the bullet and place myself in the most visible place in the briefing room, the room keys desk. I politely handed out the room keys while mentally writing off making any gratuities on this trip.

Once I had distributed all the room keys I then headed back out to the lobby to position myself near the front desk to help facilitate what I knew was going to be a deluge of demands for room changes by people unhappy (for a myriad of real and imagined reasons) with their rooms.

I was standing next to the front desk when I noticed a large collection of elderly ladies sitting on their luggage in the middle of the lobby. I recognized these ladies as being part of my group. After three days familiarizing myself with my 178 passengers back in San Francisco I knew these ladies to be 60 retired teachers from Pennsylvania of which a good percentage had never traveled before. This was their once in a lifetime dream vacation to Hawaii.

I approached this defiant looking bunch and mentioned that the bellmen would gladly take their luggage to their rooms. They ignored me and continued talking, sotto voce, among themselves. I started feeling like a miscreant second grader standing in front of the principal's desk. Then one of the ladies who had her back to me turned and said, “We're not going to our rooms. We were promised an ocean front hotel and we're going to stay here until we get one.”

I knew this lady's name because she was the one who, in San Francisco, had filled me in on her group's history and background “Gertrude,” I said. “The tour operator reserves the right to

change hotels based on availability. You have to...”

I stopped trying to explain the legal ramifications to her because she had just hit me with a Sister Bridget look. When I was in second grade and cutting up in Church, Sister Bridget would appear out of nowhere and silence me with a look that sent cold shivers directly to my tiny frightened soul.

Then I heard a commotion behind me at the front desk and silently prayed that it was one of my people complaining about a room. I turned, saw it was, then returned my attention back to Gertrude. To my relief she silently dismissed me with a wave of her hand and I literally ran to the lesser evil, room changes. I was hoping that after a while the ladies would tire of this display of solidarity and accept the inevitable. I say inevitable because, even in my limited experience, I knew you couldn't produce empty ocean front rooms where none existed.

Three hours later I was hurriedly called into the office of the PK's General Manager. Apparently the local newspaper had heard about the strike by “60 little old ladies” and was sending a reporter and photographer over to cover the story. In an attempt to ward off bad press the Sheraton Waikiki had decided to bounce another group arriving in two days and to give their rooms to my striking ladies. The General Manager asked if I would please explain this to my ladies and assure them that they would move to the beach after two nights at the PK.

I shot out of the GM's office and quickly explained the unusual development to my astonished local staff. I then walked over to my strikers who were all standing next to their luggage as if they knew the standoff was over. I was wondering how they could have anticipated this unusual development when I had only just learned about it minutes before. I approached Gertrude, who had evolved into their de facto leader. When I saw the twinkle in her eyes I knew that she was the one who had called the newspaper to report the strike. Way to go Gertrude!

I explain the unprecedented development to the ladies who were all doing their best to act surprised at my announcement. They showered me with “attaboys” as they grabbed their luggage and headed to the elevators. I suggested that they wait for the bellmen to help with their luggage but they spurned the offer. They had seen enough of the lobby for one day and didn't want to wait another second to get to their rooms.

I spied Gertrude, holding a small cloth valise, standing in the middle of a group as they waited for an elevator. I hurried over to her and offered to carry her luggage up to her room if she would just point it out to me.

She lifted up her valise and declared that this was all the luggage she had. She explained that inside the valise was another shift, a change of underwear, some toiletries and a bottle of Jack Daniels. She then looked me in the eye and said, “I don't need anything else.”

What a babe!

For the first time I realized that babes come in all ages and sizes. A true babe emanates from within.

                                                                      Wet Dream

An added development to my ladies strike was that they were given complimentary tickets to the Don Ho Show by none other than the King of Tiny Bubbles himself. He had heard about my group's defiant stand and knew how to take advantage of good publicity. The fact that he only singled out the “little old ladies” for free tickets didn't upset the rest of the group. These ladies had, after all, stared down the mighty Sheraton Waikiki which had rewarded everyone with an ocean front hotel.

So there we were, the evening after the strike, walking from the PK Hotel three blocks down Kalakaua Ave to the world famous Don Ho Show at the Waikiki Beachcomber Hotel. We're walking because the complimentary tickets did not include round-trip transportation. Fortunately all my ladies were in a good mood. This was highlighted by the fact that they were all wearing colorful mumus that they had purchased that afternoon, just for this occasion.

Not to be outdone I too had splurged and bought a bright flowery blue aloha shirt and was proudly strutting down Kalakaua Ave, one mumu clad lady on each arm with 58 more following in our wake. We were definitely attracting stares from amused people that stepped aside for our picturesque entourage.

Unbeknownst to me a very influential lady also witnessed this entertaining spectacle. I didn't find out about it until I returned to San Francisco 10 days later. There was a message for me at Holiday Tours to call Roxanne at American International Travel Service (AITS) in Boston. This company was rumored to have been financed by Sheldon Adelson and was one of the biggest and best international wholesale charter companies in the world.

I had met and worked with Roxanne, the quintessential international tour director, in San Francisco on the many occasions when she passed through The City with her docile and compliant tour groups. I remembered her groups that way because she ruled with an iron fist covered in a Gucci glove and her people loved her for it. They trusted her experience and knowledge implicitly and threw wads of tip money at her at the end of their trips. What I liked about Roxanne was that she was a tall striking redheaded Jewish princess with a Rubenesque figure that I secretly lusted. I had mentioned this unrequited desire to no one because what chance did I, a former human arrow, have with this wet dream of a woman.

I called AITS and caught Roxanne in her office. She is a no nonsense, no small talk individual and got right to the point.

“I was in Honolulu last week and heard good things about how you handled your 'little old ladies strike'. I was also in a bus with my own group driving up Kalakaua when I saw you walking down the street leading a bunch of little old ladies who were all dressed up in those godawful mumus. You had one little old lady on each arm and the rest following you like you were the Pied Piper or something.”

“When I got back here to the office I told Julie, the boss of the AITS Tour Directors, that anyone that has the balls to walk down Kalakaua Ave escorting a bunch of little old ladies in godawful mumus is our kind of tour director. How would you like to come to Boston and work international tours for AITS?”

I wish to god I could tell you I was erudite and witty with my response. But that wasn't the case. I mumbled something along the lines of, “Sure. That sounds like fun.”

But where I really lost it was when she added,”You're gonna need a place to stay. You can start out at my home until you find a place of your own. It's a little small so we'll have to snuggle up. Hope you won't mind?”

Sch-wang!!

I was completely tongue-tied. She laughed a sexy laugh and told me to call Julie right away and talk to her about the position.

I hung up the phone and rushed into Jake's office. He's the much beloved Holiday Tours accountant and mentor to all the tour guides. Before he could react I playfully planted a loud kiss on his bald Chinese dome.

“Hey! I thought you were one of the straight guides,” he jokes as he reaches into his back pants pocket for his hanky. He then adds with a chuckle, “You goddamn tour guides are all going gay on me.”

Wrong on both counts Jake.

First, I am no longer a goddamn tour guide. Within a very short time I will be traveling the world as an International Tour Director.

Secondly, when not traveling the world I am about to become the personal boy-toy sex slave to a combined Valkyrian and Amazonian woman, a living and breathing wet dream

Life could not get any better than this.

I left San Francisco for Boston and an appointment with destiny on a beautifully crisp and brilliant sunshiny early February morning with the temperature holding steady at 60. I drove cross country in my '67 Malibu, a fantasy video constantly running through my fertile imagination showcasing Roxanne's considerable yet delectable topography. I pictured myself climbing her impressive mountains and diving deeply into her lush seductive valley.

But, alas, that was not to be.

I arrived in Boston in the middle of the historical '75 snow blizzard. Roxanne had taken sick on her last tour and was laid up at home with flu like symptoms. Another tour director, Bret, owned a home in South Boston and had a room I could use until Roxanne was well enough to entertain house guests.

Roxanne didn't return for a week. During her absence I completed seven days of training which included two days in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There I assisted with Saladin Shrine Temple's airport check-in of 38 excited noblemen and noble ladies who were flying to Detroit to join the main Hawaii bound group.

By now our boss Julie had had it up to her eyebrows with Roxanne's maladies. AITS had daily multiple programs heading all over the world and Julie was woefully short on experienced staff. Roxanne's lingering absence had really put her department into a bind.

I got back from Michigan and heard how Roxanne, that morning, had begrudgingly dragged herself onto a Miami bound airplane to catch the Carnival Cruise Line ship that AITS had chartered on a yearly basis. Julie needed a warm body to cover, for an hour a day, the AITS hospitality desk on board the ship. Roxanne always the consummate princess, had reluctantly agreed to this plum assignment.

Within days stories were filtering back to the office about the endless cries of passion that were constantly emanating from her stateroom and reverberating throughout the ship's hyperactive rumor mill. Apparently Sergio, an old Italian flame, was the newly transferred Chief Purser for the ship, and they were lustfully rekindling their friendship.

I'm sure now you're wondering how I emotionally handled these ripe rumors of Roxanne's trysts. Under normal circumstances I would have been devastated for at least a week. But these were not normal times. I had just been assigned my first international training trip and it was to the only destination in the world that could make me temporarily forget Roxanne, Rio de Janeiro.

If the stories that I had for years been hearing about Brazilian women were only partially true, I was in for an experience of a lifetime.

As for Roxanne. I'd heard that Sergio wasn't really the Chief Purser but a former Banquet Captain that had just been promoted to a very junior purser position. In any case I'm sure she and I will be hooking up sometime in the future. But right now “I'm going to Rio.”

                                                                    Rio de Janeiro

Bret (Tour Director) and I (Tour Director in training) flew from Baltimore to Rio de Janeiro on a 254 seat Trans International Airlines DC 8 Stretch Charter. The seats were all occupied by a mixture of five affinity groups (Crescent Shrine Temple, Gilbert Employees, Capital Kiwanis, Beni Kedem Shrine Temple and West Virginia Federation of Women).

The 16 hour flight was met in Rio by our AITS ground manager and former AITS tour director Charles. Charles had coordinated all the hotel, restaurant and destination management company (ground handler) commitments that the AITS sales staff in Boston had negotiated for the “Sunny Rio” program. Our arrival was the tenth out of a total of 20 scheduled for that winter and by now Charles really had it buttoned down. Much to the point that he would be leaving Rio after the next two programs to start up the AITS summer European programs.

Watching Charles work his magic was an experience that I remember to this day. What impressed me was the way he conducted business with humor, dignity, creativity and respect, all characteristics that I embrace. He showed me the many diverse rewards and gratifying opportunities this dynamic profession offered. By the time we left Rio six days later I was centered in an awesome travel epiphany.

Pretty neat, huh?

And that's just on the business side.

On the personal side was an even deeper awakening.

After working nonstop for 24 hours on our arrival day in Rio, Charles noticed that I was exhausted. He took out his business card, wrote on it the name of an establishment in Copacabana Beach, then explained that it's a “Terma”. A Terma in Brazil is a combination club/gym/spa exclusively for men and staffed by beautiful women. He encouraged me to try it out as his guest, assuring me I would enjoy the experience. So I went, never dreaming that Charles had purposefully downplayed the situation, knowing I would be pleasantly surprised.

I haven't been the same since. I'm here to tell you that after that first visit I made it a point to stop by a Terma almost every day we were in Rio. Here's why.

At a Terma you pay a small fee at the door which gives you access to all the club's facilities (locker room, spa, gym, weight room, swimming pool, jacuzzi, sauna, bar and lounge) and female personnel. Yup, female personnel. If, after a hard workout, a man decided that he was in the mood for some fun carefree sex, he only had to catch the eye of a female staff member of his choosing. She would then escort him to a private mirrored bedroom where she delightfully fulfilled all his sexual fantasies.

For the first time in my devout Catholic life I was experiencing guilt free sex. Sex that finally satisfied that nagging craving and left me clear-headed and content. Sex enjoyed with some of the most beautiful, sensuous and delightful women you could ever imagine. Sex as it was intended by the Creator. The Catholic Church impedes the natural maturation and development of one's sexual appetite by laying on a heavy sexual guilt trip. No one wore that hair-shirt of guilt better than I... until Rio.

Detractors will argue that a Terma is legalized prostitution and I can't build a credible argument to refute that charge. What I can tell you is that for the next two decades, whenever a man confidentially asked me where he should go before he dies I'd tell him, “Go to Rio. Give your wife the Gold Card and don't ask her any questions. Just let her spend whatever she wants, where ever she wants. And you, my friend, then treat yourself to a week in Rio.”

I don't know how many of those starry-eyed fellows ever took my advice but they sure enjoyed listening to my growing inventory of entertaining stories accumulated over years of multiple visits to

Rio.

I will say this. Whatever I had envisioned in those first couple of years of the direction that this budding career in travel and it's accompanying lifestyle would take me, was woefully short of the reality that it was to become.

                                                                      Bye Bye

I'm in Marrakesh, Morocco, where it's 96 degrees in the shade. I'm sitting in a terrace cafe located on the sun-drenched roof of an antiquated three story building that has occupied the same spot for centuries. The equally ancient ornate wrought iron railing I'm leaning against is all that prevents me from falling 30 feet into the teeming vibrant square below. This bustling square is the site of the Djemaa el Fna, a huge 800 year old outdoor market located in the “medina quarter” or “old city” of Marrakesh.

From my perch I observe this ancient square and reflect on its chameleon personality that constantly changes throughout the day. In the morning you would find the temporary stalls filled with merchants offering daily staples like oranges, water, and vegetables. By afternoon the stalls are occupied by dancers, story tellers, magicians, medicine men and snake charmers. Evening brings out the native masses as they enjoy supper at what are now mouth-watering food stalls.

The square is edged to my left and right with terraced cafes, ancient gardens and inexpensive hotels. Directly across from me, off in the distance, begins the souks, a vast commercial business district that predates this square. In the souks you will find thousands of one and two story buildings and store fronts crowded together and lining narrow streets, some no more than footpaths, that meander forever through a maze of similar streets and structures. Here a person can disappear, simply vanish, in the blink of an eye.

Within the souks is heard a constant din of merchants, traders and customers haggling over goods and services that haven't changed much since the twelfth century. Your senses are inundated with the poignant smells of imported herbs and spices. You'll shield your eyes from the sun's reflection off brilliant polished brass and beveled mirrors. Eventually even you will succumb to their beauty and purchase intricately woven Moroccan rugs and tapestries. The streets are too narrow for modern vehicles so the merchants rely on the oldest mode of transportation known to man, the donkey and the push cart.

Within the souks time has stopped.

I am surrounded by ancient history as I, an international tour director, anxiously wait for my tour group to rendezvous at this prearranged spot. Earlier this morning my group of 96 sleep-deprived American tourists boarded a Spandex Air Lines charter for the short flight from Tenerife, Canary Islands (a Spanish territory and popular tourist destination located 65 miles off the west coast of Africa where we were enjoying a sun drenched week ) to Marrakesh for a one day whirlwind optional tour of one of Morocco's oldest cities.

We had spent the morning visiting the Koutoubia Mosque with its magnificent 235 foot minaret; then the ancient ruins of the Palace of Bedi which is the colorful setting for the annual folklore festival. After riding some honest-to-god camels we finished the morning at Medrassa Ben Youssef, a Muslim school and walled garden burial grounds built in 1565 for the Saadian princes. The fountain located there is decorated with stalactite wand wood carvings and inscribed with kufic and cursive Arab script.

Following our lunch at the Hotel Moroc Turist, the afternoon has been set aside for shopping in the “medina quarter”. An early dinner is scheduled at the Marrakesh Casino where we will dine on traditional Moroccan food while being entertained by local musicians, acrobats and belly dancers. Finally we will board our return Spandex flight for an 8 pm departure back to Tenerife.

The reason I'm a bit apprehensive as I wait for my group is because they are all members of local chapters from West Virginia and Maryland of a large fraternal organization, the Order of the Eastern Star. Having spent the day with them I know that for most of them this is the first time that they have traveled outside the confines of their respective states. The thought of my middle-aged novice travelers wandering the unpredictable and sometimes treacherous alleyways of the 800 year old souks is enough to stress any tour director.

I'm sitting in the rooftop cafe and chatting with my local guide, Mustapha, when he abruptly stops what he is saying and gestures with his chin at something happening below. I turn around and visually sweep the marketplace.

“What?” I ask.

He points to a cluster of stalls approximately 200 yards from our vantage point and asks, “Weren't those girls on your plane?”

I finally zero in on what he's talking about. I see two very attractive blond young women giggling, weaving and supporting each other as they follow a good looking Moroccan youth thorough the stalls towards the souks.

“Yea,” I respond. “They're part of that German group of 20 that shared our plane from Tenerife this morning.” He obviously had noticed the two babes when they boarded their bus with their German speaking Moroccan guide.

“What are they doing? They're acting drunk or stoned. Do you think they smoked some hash with that guy?”

He shrugs his shoulders and then says, “Bye bye.”

I turn to look at him and ask, “What do you mean 'bye bye'?”

He answers with three words that instantly chills me to the bone, “White slave market.”

“What !?!” I yell. I knew about the slave traders that have been operating here in Marrakesh for the last 800 years and had briefed my group about that danger. To lighten the mood I had also added that I thought my group was a little too old to attract the slave traders attention. Not so the youthful German group and here were two members of that group being led to a fate worse than death.

“Come on !” I yelled as I grabbed his arm and started for the staircase which would take us down to the square.

He digs in his heels and says, “Wait”, while again motioning with his chin. “Look.”

I quickly turn back to the square and scan the area where I had just seen the two women. They were gone! I look at Mustapha and he says, “You'll never find them.”

I'm stunned. I'm trying to comprehend what had just happened when members of my tour group materialize and start angling toward us. I'm obliged to put on my 'excited' face as I listen to their spirited discussions of their innocent adventures in the souks; forcing the harsh reality of what I had just witnessed into the far recesses of my memory. I looked at Mustapha and gave him a slight shake of my head. He understands not to mention what we had just witnessed. We still had four more hours here in Marrakesh and there was no sense creating panic and concern within the group.

It's now 8 pm and my animated group is sitting on the plane swapping stories while patiently waiting for the German group to show. Finally at 9 pm, an hour past our scheduled departure time, a very somber German group boards the plane and settles into their seats. I silently count heads and... yup... there's only 18. They're missing the two blonds.

Once airborne I see Dieter, the tour director for the German group head to the rear of the plane and I follow. I need the details.

He's devastated. Something like this has never happened to him in the 25 years that he's been leading tours. He tells me that he and his Moroccan guide had repeatedly warned his young group about the potential pitfalls and dangers of this ancient city, but the two women apparently thought otherwise.

I told him that I saw the two women with a Moroccan boy heading into the Souks and he replied that so too had some members of his group. But, by the time they had reacted to the danger, the women had disappeared. It all happened so fast. He said he reported the incident to the appropriate authorities but was left with the impression that this was not a rare incident and to not expect a happy ending.

By the time we landed in Tenerife the story had spread to my group. They really kept it alive for the rest of the week in Tenerife. I'm willing to bet that even today there are members of that tour group who still tell the story. Heck. I do.

I also wonder what life has been like, these many years, for those two women. The kidnappings occurred in April of 1975. If anyone knows please drop me a line. Erbitten.

                                                                    Never Will Forget 

It's Christmas in the Canary Islands. A great time to be here because everyone's in a good mood and feeling the spirit of the season while enjoying pleasant 80 degree temperatures.

Everyone but me.

I'm working the trip from hell. My tour group of 256 vacationing Bostonian school teachers does not have a guaranteed return flight back to the USA. Over the busiest travel week of the year I am scrambling to find 256 available seats from the Canary Islands back to Boston. But I'm not going to get into all that now. I'm just mentioning this to put my story into context. Instead I want to share with you a sexy, sexy memory from that wretched week.

At 2:45 in the early morning of January 2, my bags are packed and I am nervously pacing my hotel room. I am waiting for a call from Jean Pierre, my local guide, telling me that our buses have arrived at the hotel for my groups inhumane 3:30 am departure to the airport. I had performed a tentative miracle and had found the necessary seats to get my group home. Now I had to deliver.

My pacing and musing is interrupted by the sound of a ladys high heel shoes clacking on the concrete balcony outside my bedroom door. I know there's no one on my balcony so it must be the German babe who has been staying in the room next to mine for the past week. We share a very large balcony, separated only by a two foot tall flower box.

As tough as this trip has been for me, the German girl has only added to my nightmare. She is a beauty. Tall, blond and exquisitely proportioned. She was a knockout in her red bikini laying out by the pool during the day or dressed to hit the discos at night. She also had a boyfriend who shared her room and I could hear them passionately going at it for hours every night while I was either burning the midnight oil working to correct the many problems on my tour or burying my head in my pillow in a futile attempt to muffle her moans while I tried to grab some much needed sleep.

Her week was spent enjoying all that the Canary Islands were famous for while I spent every waking moment tumbling deeper and deeper into a bottomless black hole called work. She knew who I was because the whole Island was abuzz with rumors regarding the massive problems my group was experiencing. She and I had also made eye contact throughout the week, but only in passing because the boyfriend was always hovering nearby.

Now as I'm listening to her walking out on the balcony I realize that I haven't heard or seen him at all today. Maybe he's gone ? I'm thinking I should just stick my head outside and say “hi”. Can't hurt. Right?

I step outside and there she is. Alone...illuminated by a full moon. Smoking a cigarette. In high heels. And Naked. Oh. My. God!

I nod my head in greeting but before either of us utters a word my phone rings. I shrug my shoulders apologetically and retreat into my room to answer the phone. It's Jean Pierre informing me that the buses have arrived and would I please come downstairs immediately. I thank him and hang up while thinking that this is par for the course this week. I have a beautiful naked woman standing outside my bedroom and I have to grab my bags and leave. I'm also thinking that she has probably gone back inside her room...but...maybe she hasn't. Let me just take a quick looksie.

Damn. She's still there.

Only now she has moved closer to the flower box divider and has her left arm underneath her breasts which are pointed directly at me, while holding her cigarette with her right hand. I step out onto the balcony and walk to my side of the flower box divider.

She doesn't move.

I look into her eyes and recognize veiled desire. I gesture with my chin and then bend down and position my mouth inches from her left breast. When she still hasn't said anything I extend my head the last few inches and enclose her hard left nipple in a tongue probing kiss. I hear her take a quick breath and then a faint sigh when I open my mouth and release her nipple.

I shift my attention to her right breast because in my balanced universe if I don't pay the proper respect to the right nipple this poor woman will forever go through life favoring her left breast. When I sucked the right nipple into my wet mouth I thought it was going to burst, it was so hard. I circled it a few times with my tongue until I heard her whimper. I then released her right breast, stood up and looked into what were now smoldering eyes.

I made a circle gesture with the fingers of my right hand and she slowly pirouetted to her right knowing I was burning every line and contour of her body forever in my memory. When she was again facing me my eyes traveled one more time down and then up her body. I smiled, nodded in farewell and left her standing on that moon drenched balcony.

I'm willing to bet that whenever this lady, whom I never saw again but will never forget, was making love to her significant other and was having a difficult time climaxing, she only had to unlock this poignant memory to achieve blissful orgasm.

I should know. It's worked for me.

                                                                         Sciopero

Sciopero means strike in Italian. To an Italian a strike is an inalienable right. It's as fundamental to life as pasta e vino. It's in their DNA.

Subsequently it should come as no surprise that Italy has some of the oldest and strongest unions in the world. Mark Anthony's original soliloquy about Caesar read, “Friends, Romans, county men and union men lend me your ears.” After Shakespeare got hold of the speech the “union men” part got lost in translation. I know I'm being silly but I'm working on 3 hours sleep. I also know that you're getting my drift about how old and influential Italian unions are. These unions have been around so long that over time they have been able to negotiate the ultimate perk for their members. In Italy a union worker gets paid their regular wages even while out on strike.

Another perk is job security backed up by the National Police. Case in point.

I am the tour leader for my tour group. But if I were to walk on to one of my groups' tour buses here in Rome, pick up the bus microphone and talk to my people sitting on the bus, I could be arrested by the Carabinieri, the National Police. That privileged place of honor and trust is reserved for a licensed Italian Tour Guide only. One of which I'm not, admits this former mute human arrow.

The Italian Tour Guide Union is older than the Vatican and almost as powerful. To become a Tour Guide in Italy one must graduate from University with a degree in history/tourism. Then you must pass a most difficult aptitude test before being accepted by the union and handed the microphone. Subsequently you can generally take what an Italian tour guide says to the bank.

And more power to them.

I'm all in favor of their union. First it shows respect for the country, the profession and the individual. Secondly it protects the history and information that the traveler receives. Thirdly, it ensures work for the tour guide. But ultimately it helps to guarantee a great product, which is Italy.

By now you have to be wondering why I'm prattling on about unions. I'm babbling because I've been averaging 3 hours of sleep for the last 14 days. Unions, and the strikes that they have been staging, are the cause of my sleep-deprived nights.

For the last two weeks I have been escorting 250 pampered Americans through a spectacular Italian landscape littered with sympathy strikes randomly and locally organized by, it seems, every union in Italy. These sympathy strikes were meant to reinforce solidarity and demonstrate support by all Italian unions leading up to the granddaddy of all strikes, the “National Hotel Strike” that started at 12:01 this morning.

Today is also my departure day here in Rome. In a few minutes we are scheduled to leave our hotel, the five star Hotel Excelsior on La Via Veneto, for Fiumicino Airport and our flight back to the USA.

Charles (the AITS managing Director for Europe) and I have just finished loading all 360 pieces of my groups luggage into the buses and a luggage truck. The hotel bell staff went on strike at midnight and no amount of money would entice them to return to work. The buses are here because Charles paid double the contracted rate to ensure that they would show. He paid the luggage truck owners mortgage for the next two years.

So far we have all our contingencies covered but I'm not relaxing. There are still three hours before our plane takes off and I've learned over the past two weeks that a lot can happen in Italy in that short amount of time.

And it did.

When we arrived at the Airport we were informed that there was a bomb scare and that the caterers refused to approach our plane, a Trans International Airlines DC 8 stretch which had just arrived with an incoming AITS group.

The TIA Crew, under the outstanding supervision of Susan , elected to cater and clean the plane themselves.

Then the airport baggage handlers went on a three hour strike. I unloaded the luggage truck and buses and then reloaded all 360 pieces into our planes luggage compartment by myself (Charles stayed at the hotel to welcome and brief the incoming AITS group and Roxanne, their tour director). This luggage snafu delayed releasing the buses which were scheduled to transport the new AITS arrivals back into the Eternal City. This was a bad start for Roxanne and it'll only get worse for the remainder of her program.

There was a collective sigh of relief once we were airborne and heading home. Realizing that I wouldn't get a more favorable opportunity to “close the sale” on our Italian experience I got on the planes microphone. First I thanked Susan and her crew for correctly reading our cranky mood and swiftly turning around the plane. After the applause I quickly got down to business.

I told everyone that they should give themselves a huge “atta boy” for surviving what was being written up in the Italian newspapers as the strike of the century. I started listing many of the different strikes we had endured and how, in a few instances, we had even come out ahead.

I remembered the bus drivers, hotel cooks and front desk personnel strikes in Stressa; the gondoliers, hotel waiters and concierge strikes in Venice. We had no strikes in Florence because by then I had started throwing money at anyone that even hinted at striking. They all laughed when I reminded them about our bus transfer from Florence to Rome where all the Agip gas stations along the Autostrada went on strike every time our eight bus caravan pulled in. I had received a 3 am phone call alerting me to that strike so we were able to stock up on snacks before we left Florence.

Yes, our Rome hotel breakfast staff was on strike for the entire week we were there. But then I reminded them that I was able to negotiate with The Excelsior for an upgrade to daily room service and breakfast in bed, which everyone agreed was very special.

I chuckled about this morning and the envious look on the faces of that large Spanish group that wanted to know how we were able to get the striking hotel waiters to come in at 6 am and serve our final breakfast in the main dining room, but the Spaniards couldn't. I gave Charles credit for that coup. Finally I reminded them that today I had personally loaded their 360 pieces of luggage not once but twice. I then playfully awarded M/M B a bottle of champagne for having the heaviest piece of luggage.

Just before hanging up the mike I stopped, cupped my right hand behind my ear and asked them if they had just heard a scream? They all broke into raucous laughter when I told them that what I heard must have been Princess Roxanne, the tour leader for the AITS group that had just arrived. The scream was her reaction when she found out that she wasn't going to have maid service for the entire week in Rome.

I then walked down the aisle and let them throw money at me.

                                                            Vacation Travel Concepts

Towards the fall of 1983 I get a phone call from Vacation Travel Concepts. They are going to be operating a huge tour package to Rio de Janiero from the East Coast and they were wondering if I'd be interested to managing the program...in Rio. They wanted me to live in Rio for the duration of the 5 month program and supervise every aspect of the program. They didn't have to ask twice. I prepaid my rent on my Russian Hill apt, garaged my VW Bug and Vespa scooter and caught the next first class flight on Varig to Rio.

This VTC program was huge. 1500 snow-bound East Coasters flew on charters and regular schedule flights every week to tropical Rio. We had blocks of rooms in 12 four and five star hotels and nightly dinner reservation at 28 restaurants for our dine-around program. For five months as on-site manager for this huge program I owned Rio. In the film “Pretty Woman” Richard Greer went shopping on Rodeo Dr with Julia Roberts. Picture the shop keepers and managers fawning over Greer and his black credit card. That's me in Rio only my black credit card was 1500 spend-crazy Americans who are following my every suggestion and command. Every business owner knew of me and the word was “take care of this guy“.

I was giving five briefings a week. During these briefings, before I pitched our money makers, the sightseeing tours, I talked about our coming week in Rio. What to expect. Where to go. What to stay away from. Especially what to enjoy.

But no matter how rosy a picture I painted I still had to address the white elephant in the room. Rio had become a dangerous city for unwary tourists. Broad day-light theft was a huge concern and the newspapers back home dutifully reported the problem. My job in the briefing was to warn our guests about the dangers without scaring them to where they just stayed at their hotel pool and skipped taking any of our tours, which were our primary revenue stream. So I came up with a slogan. “Flash is trash, skin is in”. I told my jewelry loving East Coasters that here in Rio we don't wear our jewelry. We stick it in our hotel room safe and fogetaboutit. I told our female guests to buy themselves a thong bikini and show some skin just like the locals. I told the fellows to get a banana hammock and strut their stuff on Copacabana Beach.

I got a lot of laughs but they took the good-natured message to heart. During the five months the program ran in Rio we had one theft. ONE! And this happened to a guy who was getting too close with his camera as he shot thong bikinis sunning on Ipanema Beach. A jealous boyfriend confiscated his camera and tore out the film.

Our briefing sales were phenomenal. We had 20 – 30 bus loads for day time tours and half that at night. The night business needed a boost so I got to work on that problem.

I had heard about a local sightseeing company that was offering nightly tours to live sex shows. This tour visited 3 night clubs where studly men and shapely women enjoyed live uninhibited sexual intercourse with multiple partners on a stage surrounded by tables full of tourists sipping their sinful local drink, the caipirinha, while enjoying the action on stage. After one visit I knew we had to offer this tour to our guests. They'd eat it up. Plus in addition to the beautiful actors on stage there was this midget who was hung like a horse. I was told he performed twice a night seven nights a week. A record in anybody's book.

But I also knew that corporate VTC wouldn't approve of the tour. Rather than ask permission I decided to include it into one of my briefings to see what kind of response I would get. I figured I was in Corporates good graces after I had discovered our local DMC was taking the US dollars from our briefings and exchanging them on the black market for Brazilian cruzeros and pocketing the hefty vig. Thanks to me that vig was now going to Corporate. So if this new idea was a bust Corporate would just shrug. I was running a really tight program that was sending boatloads of cash back to the home office. If this new tour was a success? Well money talks.

That first briefing filled 12 sex tour buses. We had 100% sales on that first sex tour. From that day on it was our best seller. Corporate asked about this new revenue stream and when I described the tour they stopped asking questions but encouraged me to continue offering the tour. They just wouldn't mention it in their brochure. They did hint that on their next official visit to Rio they might want to check out the tour.

As it turned out the sex tour provided a silver-lining for me too. You see in addition to all the banging taking place on center stage, in the background there were beautiful naked dancers shaking it to samba music. Just a cornucopia of flesh. One of those dancers, a 6'1” Brazilian Amazon of a woman, caught my eye (I mean how could I miss her?) and she wound up staying with me at my 5 star Hotel Nacional for the duration of the program. She towered over me when in heels and my ego took a hit when she draped her arm over my shoulder and looked down at me. But oh was she a delightful woman. A doctoral student working towards her Phd. For me a rocking-chair moment that not even dementia will ever erase.

The 5 months I spent in Rio was like no other.

                                                Night Life Tours of San Francisco

In 1983 I thought the San Francisco sightseeing market was ripe for a pub crawl tour. I created a sightseeing company called Night Life Tours of San Francisco and offered a tour of the 19 most popular bars in San Francisco's thriving bar scene. The tour was up and running for less than a month when Rio called and I mothballed that tour.

But after 5 months in Rio I was really getting tired of the constant travel and was questioning the logic behind the fact that I knew I was living in the most beautiful and most entertaining city in the world, yet I was always leaving it. It was time to shuck the road and create something new for me to do in San Francisco. And I knew just what I wanted to do.

I decided to resurrect Night Life Tours of San Francisco. Only this time I'd offer a tour of Chinatown by Night. Gray Line had had a lock on that tour for almost 30 years and no one dared to go up against them. But after working the San Francisco scene for the past 15 years I knew every agent, concierge and player in San Francisco's vast sightseeing market. Over the years through great service I had earned their respect. I played a hunch that if I put together a really solid quality tour that they would support me. And they did. They couldn't help themselves. Guests were asking about the eye-catching NLT brochure they found in the racks. They liked what they read and wanted the agent's opinion. Which the agent readily gave because I had created and was operating a really good tour. We offered dinner on the Wharf at Bobby Rubino's, served complimentary wine on the bus, each guest received a personalized complimentary key-chain viewer (today there are grandparents around the world who are telling their grand-kids to “face the light” when looking into their NLT souvenir key-chain viewers) and we trebled Gray Line's paltry commission. On top of all that I gave a great Chinatown.

Let me take a moment here to describe for you how something as simple as a free key-chain viewer resulted in a phenomenal marketing tool. First the obvious, everybody on the Night life Tour of San Francisco received a high quality memento full color picture of their night on the town in San Francisco in the form of a key-chain viewer. NLT was engraved on the side so whenever someone looked through the viewer they notice the company name. This created word of mouth referral business from my guests. But where I really benefited was with my hotel agents. Early every morning I would drop off the previous evenings viewers to their respective hotel agents. This gave me an almost daily excuse to see and interact with my agents which was invaluable. They in turn looked through each viewer to remind themselves of which client they sold the tour. This invariably led to “I'd love to have one of these” which resulted in my reminding them to take one of my Chinatown tours as my guest and they would get a free viewer. But most importantly the agents were given another crack at selling the client another tour because the client had to come by the agents desk to collect their viewer. I would be in the lobby at times when the client came by to collect their viewers and the excitement was obvious. The client would stand in front of the agents desk and share their viewers with their friends while remembering the fun they had the night before. The agent would share in the fun and then wait for the inevitable. The client was obviously happy with the agents recommendation and was now primed for another tour recommendation from the agent. Everybody involved in the transaction benefited because of that colorful key-chain viewer. A fact that separated me from the other sightseeing companies and contributed to my healthy bottom line.

Within a month I'm filling a bus a night and by the second month I'm hiring guides and thinking about adding a second tour. Only this tour would be a Night Club tour similar to that very first tour I gave more than 15 years ago. The tricky part was designing this new tour so I could combine both tours on one bus on a slow night, thus saving me the cost of a bus and guide but still offering two very different tours. I designed the new tour so that everyone enjoyed the same experience except for the middle part. In the middle I would drop the Night Clubers at Finocchio's, our long running Female Impersonation Show, and then take my Chinatowners on a leisurely but super interesting stroll through San Francisco's historic Chinatown; after which we'd pick up the laughing Clubers and finish out the night.

I offered that package through the slow winter of '86 but by spring '87 we were up to a couple buses a night per tour. We were still ranked behind Gray Line Tours in night time ridership but we always earned higher approval ratings. I hired a full time hotel promotions gal who went out five days a week and talked to our hotel agents who accounted for 90% of our business. My hotel gal would deliver cash commissions and key-chain viewers and smooth over any ruffles. We promised “no complaints” and our agents liked that we would deliver. Come summer we were rocking and rolling. But I gotta tell you the high-light of '87 was the night my parents were my guests on my tour. I gave the best tour of my life as I directed my commentary exclusively to them. I saw my dad counting heads and quickly tabulating my take for the night. I knew he was very pleased. And my mother's joyful reaction to receiving her souvenir key-chain viewer the next day was priceless. I still have my viewer of that night. It's gonna be in my pocket when they bury me. Huge rocking-chair moment.

Let me give you a little background on the inexpensive way I structured the business. I registered NLTofSF as a dba with a PO box. I ran the business out of my home but carried all the required commercial liability insurance. The big fork-in-the-road is that I didn't own any buses. I saved myself the cost of buying, insuring and PUC licensing tour buses. Instead I chartered buses using my own guides on a nightly basis from a relatively new sightseeing company called Starlane Tours. Starlane only operated day-time tours and was happy for the night time revenue.

Starlane Tours (not to be confused with Star Line Tours of Hollywood) was owned by a shrewd rules-bending businessman named Fisal. Fisal was a Palestinian Jew born outside the USA but raised in America. He started Starlane right around the time I resurrected NLTofSF, and thanks to a “never sold out” policy, high commissions and plenty of luck, Starlane arguably became the 2^nd or 3^rd busiest day-time tour operator in The City.

Fisal and I had a non-compete agreement. Fisal only wanted to work days and I only wanted nights; we agreed that neither one of us would cross over. This agreement resulted in two phenomenal years of growth for both companies.

                                                                    Super City Tours

But in the spring of 1988, Fisal informed me that he was getting into the night club business. He saw how well I was doing and wanted a piece of it; to hell with the non-compete agreement. “But”, Fisal told me, “you can still charter my buses.” He added, “I'm a businessman and this is what businessmen do.”

Bull shit. That's what crooked businessman do. But he had me, temporarily, so I took my place in the barrel and kept my counsel.

I agreed to his terms so that in the near term there was no business interruption. Fisal figured to slowly build his night business to the point where he would eventually shut me down. But while Fisal was ramping up his night time tour, behind the scenes I was scrambling like hell. Fisal had completely misjudged me, my abilities, the market and my relationship with my agents who, when offered a choice, preferred dealing with me. Fisal was at times 'slow pay no pay' when it came to their commissions while I never questioned what I owed them and often times kicked in a little extra. And remember that “no complaints” slogan? It was the truth. You never heard a complaint about one of my tours. If there was a problem I took care of it before it saw the light of day.

My most immediate need was to find another reliable transportation company to supply me with buses. Not just two or three but 14 to 18 buses a day. You see I was going to show Fisal how stupid a business man he really was. Here I was very content operating exclusively at night with no desire to work days. Working nights gave me the freedom to enjoy all that San Francisco had to offer during the day. But Fisal got greedy and kicked a hornet's nest. He forced me into a move I had always considered but rejected because I was happy with my business the way it was. That move was to go big and open days. Compete against Starlane and offer daytime tours. Now I had no choice if I wanted to survive. But first proceed very quietly. My goal was to get legally established and up and running before Fisal had any inkling of my intentions. What a coup that would be. I was adding 6 tours: a City, an Alcatraz, a Wine Country, a Muir Woods, a Monterey-Carmel and a Super Tour. A monster move which I was able to accomplish in a rumor crazy town. Surreptitiously. In 37 days!

I ventured across the Bay to Oakland and secretly signed a deal with Peter's Transportation. I was willing to pay top dollar for his buses but he had to keep the deal quiet until we launched. No problem. A commitment for a minimum 15 buses a day was a sweet deal for him. Peter smiled when he sat down with his Chinatown bankers. His life changed forever when I walked through his door.

Next I registered my company name, Super City Tours and obtained my TCP 221S. Then I used Fisal's brochure as a template for my full-color brochure. The printer I hired was way up in Napa. Far enough away that word of my brochure wouldn't trickle back to Fisal. Then I hired Mark Reuben, a one time street photographer and friend I'd known since the '70's but who had by now become world famous, to supply all the 21 photos needed for my brochure. All except one. The cover picture I saved for myself. It was a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge that I had taken from below the bridge at Fort Point as waves crashed against the sea wall. I went the extra mile on the brochure because I really wanted it to pop. And boy did it. It jumped right out of the rack and into your hands.

So now I was legally registered with a name and an employer id number, had acquired full business insurance, had my buses lined up and a color brochure on order. Hiring guides I'd save for last. I knew I wouldn't have any problem signing guides. We'd been working the trenches together for years.

I started looking for an office where we could take reservations and dispatch the tours. And once again the gods were smiling on me. I found a vacant store front on Powell St, right around the corner from Starlane's Francisco St office and check-in location. One couldn't help noticing the huge smile on my face as I covertly signed the lease. I was picturing Fisal out on the street frantically counting my passengers and comparing my count to his dwindling ridership. I was going to be right up in his grill and loving every moment. Because every butt on my tour was a lost butt on his. We were going to be drawing from the same hotel agents. The same agents that I had been harmoniously working with for the past 16 years. I really was looking forward to this forced-upon-me move. And the longer I kept it a secret the more I would be able to accomplish without push-back from him. And I knew there was going to be massive immediate trench-warfare retaliation.

Once the lease was signed I waited until mid-night before going down to my new office and papering the windows. For the next two weeks my growing staff and I worked tirelessly behind those papered windows stealthily creating the brand new Super City Tours sightseeing company.

Two days before our early summer opening and still not a word on the street. Meanwhile Starlane had siphoned off, at most, half a bus load from my night business and was heavily discounting its price to achieve that. Word was Fisal intended to up the commission paid to vendors in a desperate bid to secure more night traffic.

Then came the big reveal. Two days before opening, every employee of Super City Tours papered every San Francisco hotel with our new colorful brochure. At that time the San Francisco sightseeing market was so fluid that a two day launch notice was possible. A gamble, but doable. SCT was banking on the excitement of a new quality product with double commissions to start as just the incentive for the agents to make the switch. Once they made the switch, they wouldn't be going back. SCT had hired my friends, the best tour guides in San Francisco to give the tours.

The day before launch there was still no acknowledgment from Starlane. We had asked all our vendors to keep it quiet so we could surprised Starlane. They all knew what Fisal had done to Night Life Tours of San Francisco and they were as excited as we were to see his anticipated volatile reaction. But I couldn't believe how successful we were. How could he not have heard anything? Was his marketing department asleep? Could SCT really go operational right under Fisal's unsuspecting nose?

Pretty close. The day Super City Tours went operational the opening day crew found hand prints and shoe prints on the dusty ledge jutting out from our office's papered windows. Someone the night before had stood on the outside ledge and tried to look through the cracks in the papered windows.

Yes, Fisal had finally gotten the word. The feeling among the crew was that he hadn't slept a wink the previous night once he found out. They knew that it was going to be the start of many sleepless nights for Fisal...and it was all his fault.

Super City Tours was an instant success. Full buses on every tour. After 30 days in operation, SCT had siphoned almost 50% of Starlane's daytime business and kept that ratio through the end of the busy 1987 summer season.

But in the fall of 1987 SCT's lucky streak ran into hiccups. The manager of our Night Life division threw a hissy fit and told the GM of the only restaurant on the night life tour to perform an impossible anatomical act upon himself. The GM immediately 86'd SCT from the restaurant.

An adequate substitution was immediately procured and then, on knee-pads, I made a beeline for my old supplier. I wanted to sooth over any hurt feelings knowing that eventually we'd work together again. Mission accomplished; we parted as friends.

I removed the manager from his Night Life position but keep him on the day time division. I had promised every tour guide that signed on with SCT and remained 5 years with the fledgling company an equity stake in the mature company and didn't want to deny the night manager that opportunity. After all he had been with me for almost 2 years and deserved a second chance. Just on a very short leash.

What I didn't know was that the former night manager had serious health issues and wasn't thinking past the next month, let alone five years down the road. He took the demotion hard and started scheming.

The first thing he did was covertly contact Fisal and offer all internal SCT operating and marketing secrets and strategies. That tactic didn't draw enough blood so he upped the ante by going public. He actively went to the vendors and sold against SCT.

While this was going on, Fisal was filing, almost daily, vexatious lawsuits against SCT. I hired a former St.Mary's College Rugby teammate as my legal counsel to parry the many lawsuits. Besides being a pit bull of an attorney, my buddy was a founding member and lead singer for the Bay Area legendary 50's rock & roll band Butch Whacks and the Glass Packs. Definitely a rocking-chair-moment.

But Fisal didn't limit his wrath to petty lawsuits. He also went after our guides. One of the best guides at SCT if not all of San Francisco was a 6' 1” redhead named Jackie. When we first started hiring, Jackie left a voice message at SCT bragging that “she gave great City”. That double entendre definitely got her an interview. But to her credit she dressed demurely a la Dianne Feinstein and carried a CV that included a masters in California history. She started the next day and became a fantastic tour guide.

Six months down the road, vendors started asking me about Jackie. Was she a boy or a girl? Apparently Fisal had started an attack against Jackie in an attempt to shame and discredit her, which he figured would also hurt SCT. One morning I surreptitiously eye-balled Jackie as she checked in her Monterey-Carmel tour passengers. On top she still wore a fluffy blouse under a woman's puffy jacket. But below the waist she had on baggy old blue jeans and a pair of ratty size 12 Chucks. And was that a shadow of a beard? OMG maybe she is a man. “But”, I thought “so what?”. I hadn't had one complaint from anyone about Jackie so who cared about her predilections. This was, after all, San Francisco. I went back to my vendors with just that message and they all agreed no big deal. Another Fisal attack foiled.

A few years after this incident I was standing on Jefferson St down at the Wharf talking to my buddy Dante when a stunning long-haired blond roared past on a Harley-Davidson hog. We both watched her park her bike in the parking lot and cross the street in our direction. She had to be well over 6' 3'' tall in her cowboy boots. She was going to walk past us when she glanced at me and her face lit up. She changed course and walked right up to me and surprised me with a huge hug. It was Jackie.

I hadn't recognized her, she had changed so dramatically. She was stunning. She pulled me aside and sotto voce said, “I had it done”.

I was confused for a second and then it slowly dawned on me. Jackie was now all woman. Now it was my turn to wrap her in a congratulatory hug because I knew how much this meant to her. Jackie then leaned in and whispered, “Wanna try it out?” I stuttered and stammered while turning beet red as I feebly said “Ah I don't think so” and then quickly changed the subject and asked what Jackie was doing down here on Jefferson. She pointed to the lobby of the Travelodge we were standing in front of and said that she was going to the Starlane desk in the lobby to get her paycheck. She had finally relented and gone to work for Fisal. But she didn't think it was going to be much longer because there was a rumor circulating that the IRS was knocking on Fisal's door. Jackie then placed both hands on my shoulders and stared down into my eyes and said, “Listen. I know what you did for me. Back in the day when I was working for you and Fisal was trashing me. You went to bat for me, yet never mentioned it to me. I'll never forget that. Thank you.” She then turned on her heels and strolled into the hotel. A proudly unique rocking-chair-moment.

The IRS rumors eventually turned out to be true but Fisal managed to escape the IRS wrath. He had placed his whole company in his girlfriend/mother of his children's name and she eventually took the fall. But by then I had sold SCT and was living in San Diego, far from the San Francisco travel scene. The 24/7 stress of the night manager's duplicity, Fisal's relentless attacks while operating a very busy sightseeing company with 35 employees had worn me down. The positive factors had dropped into negative range. Plus I was tired of the bone-chilling summers. After 20 years in San Francisco I was ready for a change. I wanted to look at some skin.

During the summer rush of 1988, I repeatedly turned down Fisal's many offers to sell SCT to Starlane. Today I'm glad I did because if I had accepted his offer SCT would have eventually joined the ever expanding graveyard of failed San Francisco sightseeing companies. Instead I negotiated a sale to Peter's Transportation and his wife Janie. I suggested they change the company name to Super Sightseeing Tours because Fisal was denigrating Super City Tours by calling us Super Shitty Tours and the nickname was sticking. So they changed the name. But only the name. The PUC operating permit, brochure, office address, phone number, tour guides, buses, accounting and marketing staff all remained the same. (In a moment of friendship I even let them use my employer id number after they begged me to do so for continuity sake so as not to interrupt business. Big mistake which resulted in almost 2 years of protracted litigation before my name was off their books).

The company that I had created had become a very strong brand in the San Francisco sightseeing market; our reputation was stellar. We were tied with Starlane for second place behind Gray Line for a few years until Starlane eventually folded. But Super Sightseeing Tours endured because our foundation was deep and solid; sunk deep into the San Francisco tour and travel bedrock.

Within 2 years Janie was suffering serious health issues and they decided to sell SST to their and my old accountant Cheryl. Cheryl ran SST into the ground during the years she was at the wheel. She managed to hide her companies shortcomings because the marketing staff that I had assembled and trained did a remarkable job of hiding SST's flaws.

In 2001, Ray and Anne Sargoni bought this dog of a sightseeing company (most of the buses could barely run) but which still had a deep and solid foundation, reputation and faithful following. Over the next twelve years they built Super Sightseeing Tours into the best sightseeing company in San Francisco. In 2013 Super Sightseeing Tours was awarded the Gray Line Franchise License for San Francisco. Super Sightseeing Tours (ne Super City Tours) had become the number one sightseeing company in the number one travel market in the world. All because I was forced to parry the greedy attack of a dishonest business man.

Meanwhile I had escaped the chilly San Francisco fog and followed a pert little blond down the coast to the sunny climes of San Diego. Where, over the next two decades, I had a blast revolutionizing the San Diego sightseeing market with The Loop Tour and dominating the transportation sector with my Number One ranked Dial A Van.

                                                      But that's a story for another time.