The first foreign trip Richard Logan (BSBA ’48) ever took, he got on a Greyhound bus, went to the Mexican border and didn’t come home for 28 days. “I didn’t speak any of the language and lost my dictionary,” he says.
He had only a small camera, two shirts, two pairs of underwear, four pairs of socks and some pants. But Logan says he never had any problems.
In fact, it marked the beginning of a lifelong love of traveling.”I took a train to see all the Mayan ruins,” Logan says. “I found out how to get to local places, rode the local bus and learned how to put my hand up to flag down a bus.”
Since that trip in 1958, Logan has traveled to more than 70 countries with his wife of 47 years, Faith. Among the destinations were Kenya, Iran, Egypt, Australia and Greece.
Logan says he made many of his traveling decisions based on the Sunday section of The New York Times. When somewhere sounded interesting, he went.
Many of his trips were for months at a time. “One time I just called up American Airlines and asked, ‘How far can I go with this mileage?’ They said Istanbul.” So for 23 days, he traveled all over Turkey.
It’s all very simple, Logan says. If you want to go somewhere, you go.
Logan uses the same can-do attitude in life—just look at the variety of jobs he’s held: a military officer, photographer, aircraft mechanic and a journalism professor.
“There’d be a job opening and I’d take it,” he says, noting that he tried to work just nine months of the year so he could travel during the rest. “You do this and you just enjoy life as it goes along.”