Cruising - the new Fad

Maybe it isn't new o you but it was to my wife and me in 1990. I was working in public tv and radio at that time and I notoed several tv friends, who were wellknown figures on the air, going on cruises. They would commit to giving a number of lectures and the whole thing was free - all of which appealed to me very much. I thought to myself : you ought to be smart enough to figure out how to make such an arrangement. I talked to my good friend Paul Duke , the well-known host of WASHINTON WEEK IN REVIEW. He volunteered to recommend me. He said you only want to cruise on the best ships and the best is Seabourne. Paul was a fine advocate and I soon had a call from SEABOURNE: Would I be interested in a cruise from Israel thru the Suez Canal on out past India to Singapore - 19 days and five lectures. Well, we jumped at the opportunity. I had never been on vacation for that long a time. We met a number of wonderful people on that ship. I cam e to know that Seabourne passengers were almost always the knid of people you'd want to spend time with..............................................What did I lecturn on? Well, at that time we had just completed the broadcast of Ken Burns' CIVIL WAR which I had helped with and which had had a huge audience. So I talked about how that program was made , how public television came to be, many of the personalities involved: Jim Lehrer, Bill Moyers, Julia Child, Fred Rogers and so on. I had also brought with me tapes of the CIVIL WAR and so we replayed that series in the wonderful small lecture room which had been newly fitted out with the latest sound equipment. Anyway we had a great time on this voyage and the other passengers seemed to enjoy my talks . We had four more voyages on Seabourne which at that time had three ships, each carrying about 125 passengers. We went on trips across the Atlantic and the Pacific. I am not much for what I call shopping cruises where the ship stops every morning and people go ashore for the day, come back for dinner and the ship moves through the night towards another port. I like the days at sea and there were plenty of those on Seabourne... more about our other cruise at another time.