#1: A 1961 Passport and a Little History
How a schoolteacher who grew up in rural Iowa became a world traveler
This is the first entry in the Travels with K series. Here’s a little background on the project.
The first passport I have for K—aka Katharine Boylan, aka “Auntie K”—was issued on Jan. 9, 1961. She was 54 years old and living in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where she was a first-grade teacher.
In a memoir, she describes her first trip to Europe as a “Grand Tour” with Elinor Agricola—who appears to have been a fellow teacher in Shaker Heights. Page 7 of the passport has a series of stamps from July & August 1961—Ireland, England, France, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria—that are likely from this trip.
In 1963, she took another trip to Europe with several friends, which you will read about in future entries. But first, I wanted to provide a little history about K that might explain why she had such a great curiosity about the world and the gift for sharing her stories. Here are three factors that I believe played a role:
Ancestors on both sides of the family had emigrated to the US—from Ireland and Switzerland—and traveled to the midwest to settle. I imagine that the stories of their journeys made traveling across oceans and continents seem like a fairly normal part of life.
Katharine’s family had a long tradition of capturing their stories and writing letters. Her mother kept a daily journal (which is the subject of a second project I am working on), but long before that her Boylan ancestors were capturing their stories in letters, journals, and scrapbooks—I have documents that go back to at least 1880.
K’s mother Emma was very active in the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which sent women to India, China, Korea, Japan, and a number of other countries starting in the late 1800s. At their meetings and conferences, Katharine was exposed to many role models of independent women who had traveled to distant lands as teachers, medical missionaries, and more. (And, in fact, I believe that her teaching roles at international schools in Iran and Thailand were set up under the auspices of the Presbyterian Mission Board.)
K was overseas for many of my early years, and I remember receiving exotic trinkets and presents from around the world, including bags of pistachio nuts she would send from Iran at Christmastime. It’s been great fun for me to learn more about her experiences and stories, and I hope you enjoy them as well.
