Arthur Frommer was profiled in the Seattle Times by Jay Boyar of the Orlando Sentinel.
“We lived very close to the bone,” Frommer recalls. Still, to hear him tell it, life in Jefferson City was largely carefree. When he was 14, though, his father found a better job and the boy moved, “kicking and screaming,” to Brooklyn.
On his second day in New York, young Arthur snagged a job as a copy boy at Newsweek. Soon, he became the editor in chief of The Dutchman, the student newspaper at Erasmus Hall High School.
Hoping to become a journalist, Frommer enrolled at the University of Missouri. But when his mother took ill, he moved back to New York and transferred to NYU, where he majored in government. Deciding on a career in law, he attended Yale Law School.
But immediately upon graduation in 1953, in the midst of the Korean War, he was drafted into the Army. “It was,” he reveals, “what changed my life.”
In the service, Frommer dutifully went through basic training and advanced infantry drills, fully expecting to be sent to war. He might well have been if he hadn’t spoken Russian, which he picked up from his mother and studied at NYU.
Evidently, that was enough to get him assigned to Army Intelligence in Germany. Propelled by an irresistible impulse, Frommer was determined to use whatever time off he had from his military duties to explore Europe.
Frommer came to see things differently.
As the elder Frommer was finishing his hitch, he wrote a small book, “The G.I.’s Guide to Travelling in Europe.” On the red-white-and-black cover of that 74-page publication is a simple drawing of a soldier with a small bag and a camera. The cover copy promises, among other things, the inside scoop on “G.I. Gasoline Discounts,” “How to Speak 7 Languages,” “Military Train Reductions” and “Living on a Shoestring.”
The price was 50 cents and the author’s name is given as “Pfc. Arthur Frommer.” On the back, there is this advisory:”Not for the civilian on a luxury tour but for the smart G.I.
“It benefited from the fact that it was never copy edited,” he says. “I’m convinced, to this day, that if I’d handed it to a publishing house in New York City, it would have been given to some young English major, who had just graduated college, who would have destroyed it — taken out all the voice, all the personality.”
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