Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2008 - (Page 38)

A Tauck’s tourism business has taken him from white castles on the Rhine River to the White House. Second photo from top, Tauck and his daughter Robin accept the Preserve America Presidential Award from President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush. Arthur C. Tauck Jr. ’53 had been with the company full time for only a couple of years on that morning in 1958, but he’d already shown the same knack for inventive thinking that had inspired his father to create the world’s very first motor coach tour 33 years earlier. In fact, just a few months before, young Tauck had come up with the idea of chartering a tourist flight to Nova Scotia every Sunday—also a world’s first. The only other way to get there was by car, so a plane ride would save a week’s travel time. His father, however, had been less than enthusiastic about the idea. “He said I was going to put us out of business,” Tauck remembers, “because at that point only 5 percent of the American public had ever been on a plane.” To make matters worse, the company had to fight for special dispensation from the Civil Aeronautics Board to run the charters, because it wasn’t a regular passenger carrier. Fortunately, Tauck has since seen some vindication for his efforts. Today, a half-century later, the Nova Scotia tours are still running and profitable. Only now the company is called Tauck World Discovery, and Tauck has transformed it into one of the largest and most prestigious tour operations in the United States. TO THE TOUR BUSINESS BORN Although Tauck had been working full time for only a few years when he took over the company, he wasn’t exactly a newcomer to the travel business. In fact, it had been an ever-present part of his childhood in South Orange, N.J. By the year of his birth, 1931, his father had already launched a number of motor coach tours that took travelers from New York City to New England and back, mostly over hundreds of miles of back-country dirt roads. He had established the routes while selling the first aluminum coin trays (which he had invented) to banks all over the Northeast. He ran the tour business out of their home. “My mother used to answer the phone and took the bookings,” Tauck recalls. “My father drove the tour bus. He’d stop in a town—say Portland, Maine—and he’d tell people where to go for lunch and what sights to see. While they were out doing these things, he’d run around to the local banks and sell his coin boxes, which he’d stowed on the roof of the bus along with the guests’ luggage. By the time I came along, the business had grown, and he was doing very well.” Unfortunately, the good times didn’t last. Like many businesses, Tauck Tours struggled during the years of the Great Depression, and by the time it began earning

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Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2008 Contents From the President's Desk Mailbox On Campus Research Arts & Culture Sports Cover Story: The Dalai Lama at Lehigh Heart of a Champion Around the World in 80 Years Fighting for Children wth Autism Keepers of the Flame From the Publisher's Desk Alumni News The Last Word

Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2008

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