Mary Moore Mason

Goodbye Hoop Skirts - Hello World! Mary Moore Mason

The life story of travel writer Mary Moore Mason is an unusual, colorful and sometimes hilarious account of adventures and upheavals, creativity and tenacity. The descendant of a courageous survivor of American Indian captivity, Mary Moore was brought up as a potential (if ultimately rebellious) Southern Belle in the racially segregated American South. She maneuvered her way into the previously all-male newsroom of a Virginia newspaper dedicated to the preservation of racial segregation - and then regularly attended mixed-race parties. She flew to Paris to reignite a summer romance with a handsome young Frenchman - and then decamped with his Sicilian-American friend to become a travel writer in Athens. She then moved in the late 1960s to "Swinging London" where she eventually married a trendy photographer known for his photos of the Beatles and such iconic American jazz musicians as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington - and helped rescue him from two misadventures. She traveled the world writing about places as diverse as Thailand, Kenya and Oman, became a pioneer in the promotion - via airlines and tourist boards - of transatlantic travel to the USA, launched the first UK travel magazines exclusively covering North America - today she remains the editor of "Essentially America" - and was elected the first American chairman of the British Guild of Travel Writers. Not only were there triumphs but also traumas ... some may make you laugh out loud.