Travels With Mr. D
Film Artist Bob DeLoss has written an enjoyable memoir on his travels and early filmmaking adventures. Travels With Mr. D also relates Bob’s earlier life as a Midwest radio announcer and pioneering television broadcaster — where he earned the nickname Rapid Robert for his speedy word delivery. One of the highlights of that career — while still a college student — was his coverage of the tumultuous 1959 visit of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to Iowa. Much of his memoir relates his 35-year career as tour organizer, guide and promoter of travel trips he took with his students and others. He writes: “I have taken well over 6,000 students to the far corners of this nation and around the world.”
He said he got the travel itch when he read Frank Buck’s Bring ‘em Back Alive books and saw the Clyde Beatty Circus and his jungle movies.
DeLoss traveled early as a youth from his Sioux City, Iowa, hometown. One trip he took to Yellowstone with a college roommate, Bob Morris, was memorable—although he didn’t know it at the time. The young men had pitched their tent in a park campsite to spend a miserable night in rain and sleet. Later, a camper pulled in next door. The camper’s owner, a scruffy, unshaven fellow named John, invited them over for coffee. Lying on the camper floor was John’s trusted dog Charley. A sleepy DeLoss finally left early for some sack time. A couple years later Bob Morris excitedly told DeLoss that “the old guy they had had coffee with in Yellowstone” was the noted writer John Steinbeck, whose book, Travels With Charley, had just been published. “So much for spending time with a world-famous author,” wrote DeLoss. “Neither Bob nor I were mentioned in the book,” he noted dryly.
It was only after the author graduated and began his career as a science teacher that he started his more organized traveling—as a tour leader of students—with many exciting moments: Encounters with a marauding bear, a flood or two, and other near disasters.
He later began a third career—as a filmmaker. His first travel film was on Alaska, which he shot on Kodachrome. He soon learned a bitter lesson. He had made no print and used the original film for projecting. “Not a great idea,” he wrote, “as the film quickly became scratched. So much for the lack of film knowledge.”
After his marriage to his great love JoAnn, a young hometown nurse, he decided to make a film on the Galapagos Islands, still relatively unknown in those days. This time his camera was a new professional Arriflex.
He took his new wife with him on what he called a “second honeymoon.” His film, called Enchanted Galapagos, showed sea lions, sea iguanas, and a Galapagos hawk, among other island wildlife. Many of his American audiences were Audubon members.
The films that followed included Ecuador, the Amazon, Africa and the States. He also picked up an agent, Franklin Film Artists, to book his shows around North America.
One of the most touching parts of Travels With Mr. D was the death of his beloved JoAnn of cancer. During her last hours he wrote that he felt they were in a time capsule from the death scene in the movie, Love Story. “To this day the haunting music and dramatic events of that film remind me of my time with JoAnn.”
Readers should enjoy traveling with Mr. DeLoss in his delightful memoir.
Editor’s Note: Travels With Mr. D is available at Amazon.
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