“Think of traveling in your own Private Pullman Train, with congenial people, stopping at high-class hotels, enjoying the best sightseeing trips, freed of all the little vexations of travel, nothing to worry about, just enjoying God’s great out-of-doors,” Mr. Rochester pitched to potential travelers in January 1931. I don’t usually collect memorabilia from third-party touring companies, but the Canadian Pacific menus shown in the last few days intrigued me about E.R. Rochester’s tours.
Click image to download a 2.6-MB PDF of this brochure.
Rochester offered a 39-day tour (the one that the menus of the last few days were used for), two 16-day tours, and a “special 51-day tour” of Europe for a “small party.” The two shorter tours focused on Colorado and Yellowstone or Colorado and Bryce-Zion-Grand Canyon. Since both 16-day tours left and returned the same dates, I suspect they operated together on the Colorado portions of the tours.
Rochester himself guided the two longer tours. “I have personally conducted my parties across this continent each summer for the past 31 years, and when you travel with me you are under the care of an experienced travel manager, one who knows what there is in the West to see, and how best to see it.” The upper righthand corner of the first page of this brochure lists the major stops on the 39-day tour, including stops in Colorado, California (with a “side trip to Grand Canyon or Yosemite”), the Northwest, and the Canadian Rockies.
The interior pages of the brochure are a collage of more than 70 photos of various tour stops. At the center of each page are photos of two people, one the distinguished looking E.R. Rochester and the other his wife, Mrs. Rochester, who accompanied the European trip “as Hostess.”
According to a brochure I found on line advertising Rochester’s 1928 tour, the cost of the 39-day tour for those starting from Washington was $525 for an upper berth and $575 for a lower berth. In today’s money, that’s roughly $9,600 to $10,600 or about $250 to $275 per day.
I can’t find much information about E.R. Rochester on line. There was an Edwin Rolla Rochester who was born in Iowa in 1867 and died in Silver Spring, Maryland (a DC suburb) in 1958, which would make him about the right age for the person in the photo.