Gearing Up for Rush Around Two !
A couple months ago, I presented a paper to the Newburyport Study Class, a 105-year-old women’s writing group I was invited to join 5 years ago. Newburyport boasts the ’Men‘s Fortnightly Club’ and the ’Tuesday Night Club‘ (which meets on Wednesdays) of men who have been together for more than a century (not the same men, obviously), writing papers and delivering them to one another on a monthly (or fortnightly) basis. My group votes on a topic, then the members write papers about that topic over the course of the year.
It was my turn to write and present in October. And the year’s topic is: The Rest of the Story. My friend Sally wrote a wonderful paper about the guy who made ‘and that’s the rest of the story’ a famous radio sign-off: Paul Harvey. And I wrote about somebody whose name you probably know, but... Who was she?
Nellie Bly was her nom de plume... a pioneering New York City reporter who was a foreign correspondent, one of the first investigative journalists, and (because she was in Europe on the eve of WWI), one of the first women war correspondents.
But I was interested in her because, in 1889, 25-year-old Nellie had figured out she could do better than Phileas Fogg’s jaunt ‘Around the World in 80 Days.’ Already a well-known reporter, she convinced her publisher at the New York World — a guy named Pulitzer — to let her try to beat the fictitious Fogg’s time. She promised she could circumnavigate the globe in 75 days... New Jersey to New Jersey... and she did it in 72! All along the way, she sent reports back to the World, whose readers followed her adventure — by steamship, train, burro, sampan and rickshaw — from Hoboken to Europe, Egypt, Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Japan, San Francisco and back to Jersey.
You know, by now, that I sweat my packing. What will I take? What will I jettison? Well, I am ashamed to show you the photo up above: This was how Nellie Bly traveled around the world for 2-1/2 months... besides the clothes on her back, everything else she took fit into that ‘gripsack.’ She did not want to be bothered with excess baggage during what the World referred to as ‘Nellie’s Rush Around.’ When she returned, triumphant, to Jersey City, she was met by fireworks and thousands of fans who had followed her globetrotting adventure in the World.
She turned her voyage into a bestseller, Nellie Bly’s Book: Around the World in Seventy-Two Days, wherein she wrote: ‘The only regret of my trip, and one that I can never cease to deplore, was that in my hasty departure I forgot to take a Kodak.’
Don’t worry, I will pack my ‘Kodak’ — my trusty iPhone!
Speaking of packing... 28" red Tommy (né Hilfiger) and 30" blue Sammy (of Sammy’s Soft Goods Co.) are lurking in my upstairs closet, muttering to one another: ‘When is she gonna start packing? We wanna get outta here! We got places to go!’
Soon, boys. Soon. #
