Halfway through his recently completed eight-month tour of Europe, Associate Editor and Foreign News Writer Sam Welles received the following cable from his boss, TIME's Foreign News Editor Max Ways:
"Keep on being a tourist, Sam. The intelligent American tourist is a greatly underrated creature."
Welles, a trained journalist, could be expected to see more and to correlate it better than the average American abroad, but those of you who have read his dispatches in TIME* may have noticed their accent, not on the big newsmakers of Europe, but on the people themselves. This was by design, not by accident.
TIME's editors have long been accustomed to leaving their desks periodically for refresher trips to the areas of the world they write about, and Welles was due for just such a trip. He had last seen Europe in 1944 as a wartime member of the U.S. State Department in London, on leave from TIME. Moreover, he wanted to resume his own kind of globetrotting, which began when he went to Oxford University in 1935 on a Rhodes scholarship from Princeton and, in the course of acquiring an honors degree in modern history, stayed abroad for 39 months and logged more than 100,000 miles from Connemara to Constantinople.
That excursion ended with Munich and with Welles joining TIME's editorial staff in 1939. This time he headed first for Moscow and the Foreign Ministers Conference. Under the occasion's relaxed censorship and heightened hospitality Welles found that, with such exceptions as picture-taking in Red Square, he could move about with comparative freedom—and did so. He visited markets (where potatoes were selling for 56 cents a pound) and department stores (where "a pair of shoes was priced at $125"), dropped in on a musicale which turned out to be Dmitri Shostakovich at the piano with his own string quartet, saw a "three-dimensional" movie of Robinson Crusoe, prowled side streets and alleyways.
When Welles discovered that he could hire an automobile (at $3.50 an hour), he began making side trips out into the country where, he found, the farther he got from Russia's bureau cratic capital the more freely and eagerly people talked to him. Elsewhere, in the ensuing 16 countries he visited, Welles followed the same plan: get a car and start motoring, gather your impressions tourist-style by avoiding the good hotels in the capital cities, stop wherever things look interesting and ask questions.