Carlton Van Doren was Professor Emeritus of the Department of Recreation, Parks, and Tourism Sciences, Texas A and M University, College Station, Texas where he taught courses on conservation of environmental resources, history of recreation, tourism and travel, research methods, introduction to tourism, and tourism planning and policy. He had guided more than forty graduate students to advanced degrees and been active in many professional associations and academies. He had edited two major journals in their infancy and co-founder of one of these. He was a founding member of the Academy Leisure Sciences, the Travel and Tourism Research Association, and the International Academy for the Study of Tourism. He was also a Fellow of the Society of Park and Recreation Educators. He was a recipient the Roosevelt Research Award from the National Recreation and Park Association.

A Roaming Geographer on the Loose in the Academy

My father was the first person who influenced my decisions. He had followed an academic and research career, so this, in effect, may have predestined me to do the same.  I was born an only child in 1933, the middle of the Great Depression, in Urbana, Illinois.  My father obtained his doctorate in agronomy the summer of that year.  He was fortunate to obtain a position as an instructor of soil sciences in 1934 for the tidy sum of $600 per year.  In 1935, he was one of the first research soil scientists to be hired by the new Soil Conservation Service.  I am certain that I gained my appreciation of the land from him.

Throughout my formative years, there was latent pressure to excel in school and sports.  I joined the Boy Scouts and did a lot of camping around the US Middle West.   However, I soon hungered for variation in the landscape.  The Prairie cornfields did not have much attraction for me.  I kept recalling a trip we made in 1939 to the West Coast and back.  Even at six years of age, I was fascinated by the large rivers, rolling hills, and dryness of the American Northwest.  I still remember the sequoias in what would become the Redwood National Park in California and driving our automobile through a tunnel in the trunk of one of the trees.  I also vividly remember San Francisco, its 1939 World's Fair and, in particular, driving across the high Rocky Mountains.  During World War II, I was an avid follower of the geographic locations of the battles and pored over the pictures in Life magazine.

In 1951, I graduated from high school with no particular idea about what I wanted to study in university.  That same year, my father and mother went to Peru where my father directed an agricultural research station in the Amazon basin.  I enrolled in speech therapy at the Champaign-Urbana campus of University of Illinois.  However, I did not do very well in my freshman year.  My choice of majors was largely by default.  I had been very active during high school in speech and drama, and when I was asked what major I wanted, all I could think of was speech therapy.  It was not a good choice.

The summer of the following year, 1952, provided me with my first real experience in traveling abroad.  I flew to Peru with a childhood friend.  That trip also demonstrated to me that my one year of Spanish language education didn't work very well!  My father met us in Lima, and we drove across the Andes to Tingo Maria in the Amazon basin.  I had never experienced such high mountains or narrow roads.  Not surprisingly, I began having breathing difficulties at 12,000 feet.  That drive took two days; on future trips, we flew on DC-3s that seemingly dragged their tails between the 20,000-feet peaks.  That flight, however, was only 90 minutes, considerably faster and shorter than driving.  We used oxygen tubes in the unpressurized cabin when breathing became difficult.  There were few passenger airplanes at that time with the pressurized cabins of today.  Tingo Maria was my first shocking experience in a Third World environment.  Only then did I realize what a sheltered and bountiful lifestyle we had in the United States.

We traveled by train and plane to Arequpia and Cuzco, and visited Machu Pichu.  By now, I was hooked on traveling and also on airplanes and flying.  When I returned to Champaign-Urbana, my parents and friends asked me to show them my slides of Peru.  One of these friends was the Assistant Registrar at the University of Illinois.  After he saw them, he asked me what my major was.  I told him I was in speech therapy but that I did not like it.  He suggested I think about geography, and within a week, I was enrolled as a geography student.

I found studying social science courses more to my liking and I discovered I could get better grades.  I could easily relate some of the topics I studied with what I had observed in the physical environment, and the social and economic conditions I had witnessed in Peru.  I had also visited a lot of places in the United States, including national and state parks, and major cities in my travels with my parents.  As a result, I found could I could now better understand what I had observed during those family trips.

Part of my reason for remaining in Champaign-Urbana and going to the University of Illinois was a young lady I had met in high school.  We took elementary geology together when she was a freshman and she did better than I did, which was somewhat of an embarrassment.  More about her in a minute

During the summer of 1954, and with the help of a high school friend who knew the ins-and-outs of getting jobs in Yellowstone National Park, I signed on for a summer job pumping gas at the service station at Old Faithful Geyser, one of the iconic sights at Yellowstone.  Fortunately, I had an automobile so I was able to see much of the Park, to do some hiking, and see some places outside the park that were of interest.  I also found I was interested in photography so I took many pictures of the park to add to the pictures that I had taken in Peru in 1952.

Sometimes my fellow workers in the service station and I got bored and created some mischief.  For example, Old Faithful Geyser was clearly in sight of the service station.  As a result, some customers at the service station would ask us when Old Faithful was going to erupt.  We would tell them that it would not be for a quite while because they had not turned it on back at park headquarters!  We would laugh when they decided they were not going to wait and simply drove away.  In retrospect, this was mean and uncalled-for.  We were denying them the opportunity to witness one of the earth's rare events.  I also imagine it was natural for some tourists at that time who wished to see everything from their car and keep on traveling.

I also found that, while working in the park, I was very interested in its history as well as its physical characteristics.  I later learned, through my course work, that this interest was known as historical geography, an interest I carried throughout my career and in much of my recreation research.

It was during my time working at the service station in Yellowstone I decided to ask my then-girl friend, Sharon, to marry me.  I am still teased by my friends about having to shout in the phone booth of the lobby of the Old Faithful Hotel so she could hear my proposal.  Fortunately, she replied, "yes."

I made excellent grades during my senior year at the University of Illinois.  I married Sharon in the afternoon, after the graduation ceremony in the morning.  We then drove to Yellowstone Park for a working honeymoon.  One of the professors at the University of Illinois, Al Booth, had done some work in recreational geography.  He steered me to some courses my senior year so that I could discover for myself what made a recreational area an attraction.

I started my Masters degree at the University of Illinois in the fall of 1955.  Now the question became what could I do with a Masters degree in geography.  There were jobs with the US Army Map Service, located in St. Louis, but I was not really interested in drawing maps.  I interviewed for a job with the CIA, but not being a veteran disadvantaged me.  Further, during my interview, I mentioned I liked to talk about my work.  This was a big no-no for the CIA.  Coincidentally, later in life I would have a son-in-law who worked for the CIA.  He never talked about work and I never asked him.

I wanted to work for the National Park Service but there was too much demand by veterans at that time for those jobs.  I had started networking, writing job applications that finally led to my first job at the University of South Dakota in the Bureau of Business Research as a research associate, and an instructor in business statistics.  With only one semester of statistics behind me in college, I really learned statistics that first year.  I also taught a course in economic geography.  I had a great deal of freedom for three years there, working on topics that were of interest to me.  One of these was a survey of the motel industry of South Dakota.  This study provided me with experience in designing mail questionnaires.  Many of my studies were published as bulletins by the Bureau.  In addition, the bureau exchanged publications with many other bureaux.  Many of these publications dealt with recreation attractions. One non-Bureau publication was from Resources for the Future written by the economist, Marion Clawson, on the growth of outdoor recreation.  This leads to an important connection that I will describe later.

In the early 1950s, large reservoirs were being completed by the US Army Corps of Engineers on the Missouri River for flood control.  These also offered boating and recreational opportunities.  I initiated a study that included interviews of visitors to Gavins Point, and Lewis and Clark Lake, a recreational site on one of the reservoirs.  The supervisor of the reservoir was aware of my study and, when I completed it, asked me to speak to the Chamber of Commerce in Yankton, South Dakota.  This connection led to a more complete visitor survey, not only of Gavins Point but of a larger reservoir, Fort Randall, in the center of the state.

My interest in an academic career grew and I decided to go to Michigan State University to pursue a doctorate in geography.  Before I left South Dakota in the summer of 1960, a new book by Marion Clawson and his collaborator, Jack Knetsch was published, the Economics of Outdoor Recreation (Clawson and Knetsch, 1960).  I had previously sent the authors a copy of my survey results.  I was pleasantly surprised to discover the authors had used some of my information to support or illustrate some of their arguments.

During my work in South Dakota, I was becoming more and more aware of the importance of recreation geography in helping us understand the physical, economic, and social conditions that made areas attractive for recreation.  One reason for selecting Michigan State for further graduate study was a faculty member whom I remember only as Professor Profit, was teaching a course in recreation geography.  I took this course my first year at Michigan State.  Unfortunately, cancer took Professor Profit before I began to seriously consider a dissertation topic.

I had, by the time I moved to Michigan State, developed regular contact – through the courtesy of friends – with other geographers interested in recreation.  One, in particular, was Bob Lucas with the US Forest Service in Minnesota.  He shared a very lengthy bibliography of recreation research done in many disciplines, not just geography.  I found this most helpful in expanding my own knowledge.  In fact, I looked forward to a possible job with the US Forest Service which at that time was doing a lot of research related to the need to preserving the country's forests.  Recreation was one of the arguments for advancing its preservation agenda.  I worked with a number of graduate students at Michigan State, who would go on to teach in recreation management programs around the United States.

Thanks to a US government grant, I obtained a research assistantship as a member of a group studying Michigan's state parks.  My supervisor was Les Reid who had assembled a multidisciplinary group of students to research travel patterns and activities of visitors to Michigan's state parks.  I had been vaguely aware, from my reading in marketing, of something called a gravity model.  This model suggests the attraction of a site is inversely proportional to the distance of that site from the user.  This eventually led to directing my dissertation to an examination of what made Michigan's state parks attractive to visitors.  I gathered all the survey information of users of state parks that was available as well as the characteristics of the parks in terms of trails, campgrounds, water resources, and size of the parks.  Examples of the water resource data included the type of beach that was available for swimming, the lake bottom gradient, and water temperature during the summer season.  I used factor analysis to group similar attributes and to provide estimated weights for each park's attraction.

With data of this type, I developed a numerical attraction index for each park.  I then measured the time-distance between the centers of every county in Michigan to each of the 55 state parks.  In those days, before the Interstate Highway System, most of travel was still on two-lane state highways.  I estimated time using the assumption that the average car speed was 50 miles per hour.  I then ran a model to predict the number of visitors to the parks.  This was before the days of high-speed computers.  I remember hauling 10 IBM boxes full of punched cards to the computer center to run my model.  Each run of the model took 12 minutes.  A computer today would do it in seconds.

I tested my model using data from a 1964 survey of state park visitors that included a question about the county origins of the visitors.  The model was semi-successful.  One of our team members on the project, Jack Ellis, was an electrical engineering doctoral candidate who used some of my data to run a model that drew an analogy between electric currents and traffic flows.  His model allowed more subtle simulation of some travel-related variables.  For example, at the time, it cost $4.85 to cross the Mackinac Bridge connecting the lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan.  For people coming from the Lower Peninsula to state parks in the Upper Peninsula, this toll was sufficiently high that it might deter some motorists from going to the Upper Peninsula.  Jack's model was able to incorporate this effect as an analogy to electrical resistance in this part of his network.  His program was somewhat more successful than mine.  Later we published a paper comparing the models in the Journal of Regional Science (Ellis and Van Doren, 1966).

After graduating, I took a position as a visiting professor in the Department of Geography at Ohio State University.  I enjoyed my three years there as a faculty member, teaching courses in physical geography and a seminar on recreational geography.  I teamed up with a colleague in the department, Barry Lentnek, and obtained a grant from the Natural Resources Institute at the University to study recreational use of the lakes in Ohio.  We spent the summer of 1966 going to more than a dozen different lakes, interviewing users as to why they selected the lake, what kind of boating they were doing (such as water skiing, fishing, swimming, or sailing), noted the weather during the days we interviewed visitors, and recorded the condition of the water in terms of temperatures and turbidity.

In 1966, we submitted a paper on the recreational use of Ohio's lakes to all of the major journals in geography.  None were interested.  About that time, the National Recreation and Parks Association and its affiliate, the Society of Park and Recreation Educators (SPRE), started the Journal of Leisure Research.  The editors of the first volume liked our paper and also confirmed that the maps and illustrations we used would be included if published.  A willingness to publish one's illustrations and maps always gladdens the heart of a geographer.  The paper was accepted and published the following year (Lentnek, Van Doren, and Trail, 1969).  The mandate of the Journal of Leisure Research was to publish papers from any discipline that provided education and research in recreation management and planning.  It was a pioneering journal for the emerging field of leisure studies. 

In 1968, I was contacted by my former Michigan State project director, Les Reid.  He had been appointed the head of a new Recreation and Parks Department at Texas A & M University.  Les was organizing an interdisciplinary department with economists, a landscape architect, a sociologist, a forester, and a state-wide extension program.  He offered me a job as an Associate Professor.  I did not hesitate to accept his offer because I would be able to broaden my knowledge in recreation and recreation planning, thus helping me further my interests in the spatial study of recreation sites.  I left enthusiastically for a new environment at an interesting and dynamic university.

I enjoyed meeting professionals in recreation and park management departments, both city and state, around the nation.  During my first visit to the Dallas Parks Agency, I noticed a crude wall map with dots indicating the numbers and origins of visitors to each of the city's parks compiled from a survey.  Wow!  What a find for a geographer!  I asked for and obtained a copy.  My students and I had been learning to use SYMAP, one the first computer mapping programs.  This program allowed us to show some of barriers that hindered visitor access to parks such as Interstate highways and rivers.

Exchanging information about other academic programs was accomplished by joining the National Recreation and Parks Association and becoming a member of SPRE.  This group was responsible for editing the Journal of Leisure Research. The journal had functioned with a revolving editorship for about a year and a half when they put out a call for somebody to volunteer to provide more stable leadership.  Eventually, they offered the position to me and I accepted.  As editor, I was also able to expand my knowledge in other areas of recreation planning and management.  In 1973, my term as editor expired and I persuaded my close friend, Rabel Burdge, a sociologist at the University of Kentucky, to take over the job.

My own research interests expanded dramatically during my first five years at Texas A & M.  I taught a seminar on recreation to a variety of very good graduate students who eagerly provided spirited educational exchanges.  I might add that Steve Smith was one of these students.  We had a large group of masters as well as doctoral candidates, and the intellectual environment was very stimulating.  After I had relinquished the editorship of the journal, one of these students, Michael Heit, and I wrote a paper on the discipline of authors who contributed during the first four years of the Journal of Leisure Research (Van Doren and Heit, 1973).

In the summer of 1972, I was selected to go to Oregon State University to participate in a National Science Foundation seminar for geography teachers.  The topic of the seminar was systems planning where I gained many fresh methodologies for future research.  I confess to having a large variety of research interests at that particular time.  For example, during the energy crisis in the early 1970s, we did a spatial study of state parks in Texas that were within 50 miles of large metropolitan areas.  The idea was that visitors could travel to these sites on one tank of gas and return home the same day.

In 1976, the National Recreation and Parks Association decided to cease its financial support of the Journal of Leisure Research.  The Bureau of Outdoor Recreation in Washington, DC, supported the journal for a while but was unable to continue when the bureau was closed by the Carter Administration.

Rabel and I decided we had too much invested in the journal to let it die.  We contacted a publishing company that published a number of different journals on natural resources; this company agreed to start a new journal entitled Leisure Sciences.  I became the first editor for a three-year period.   Rabel edited for another three years.  Fortunately for recreation, the Journal of Leisure Research continued publication.  Our tenacity in starting a new journal at the same time we were supporting the older journal is one of our proudest accomplishments.  As of 2009, both journals are still in operation.

In the 28 years that I taught at Texas A & M, I pursued a number of different interests – one of them being the historical development of recreation in the United States.  I had always remembered a publication of Resources for the Future that I had access to in South Dakota, entitled Statistics in Outdoor Recreation by Marion Clawson.  It included national park and national forest visitation data, as well as estimates of the number of participants in activities such as golf and tennis.  In 1985, with the help of many colleagues in the Department, I undertook an update of those statistics.  I contacted Marion Clawson who, by that time, had retired from Resources for the Future.  I sent him a copy of our work and he convinced the foundation to do an expanded publication that would include his original one and the one we had assembled.  This monograph, too, was entitled Statistics in Outdoor Recreation (Clawson and Van Doren, 1984).

I mentioned previously that I also had an interest in the history of recreation and an amateur interest in aviation history.  I believe that one of the papers I most enjoyed writing was a paper entitled "Pan Am and Its Legacy to World Tourism" (Van Doren, 1994).  Pan Am had been a leader in the development of methods of international ocean travel and of aircraft to fly long distances over oceans.  I felt a connection to the airline because I flew my first trip to Peru on Pan Am and one of our daughters had been a Pan Am flight attendant for a few years.

In the mid-1990s, one of my doctoral students, Roger Riley, and I studied the economic impact of moviemaking on-site at different locations.  We did this by using visitor figures for several years after the movie was completed and by talking with attraction operators or members of the local Chambers of Commerce.  In some cases, we used national and state park visitation data if some scenes featured a specific park.  This was a very intriguing and satisfying interest for both of us.  Together we published several articles on the subject (Riley and Van Doren, 1992; and Riley, Baker, and Van Doren, 1998).

One of the highlights of my career was being a visiting lecturer at the Bournemouth Institute of Higher Education in Bournemouth, England.  I am particularly indebted to my friends, Pat Lavery and Graham Brown, for the opportunity to do this.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that both our daughters graduated from Texas A & M, one from the Department of Recreation and Parks.  Moreover, our youngest daughter's husband graduated from the Texas A & M College of Business, giving us a long and lasting connection with the university.

During and after the completion of my academic career, my wife and I had the opportunity not only to visit in England for several trips but also to visit, among other places, Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, and Turkey as guests of my daughter and her husband who were stationed in the capitals of these countries.  Of all the places we visited, though, my favorite geographic location would have to be Yellowstone National Park – indeed all the US national parks.  As well, though, I love Western Europe.

I would like to emphasize that the persons I have named are not the only ones who have been important to me.  No one makes any advances in their personal or work life without the assistance and encouragement of friends and colleagues.  I would like to pay homage not only to the people I have mentioned who offered guidance and academic help along the way, but particularly to some graduate students in whom I have developed and maintained very close friendships over the years and, I believe, a position of mutual respect.  You, Steve, are one of those students, along with Larry Gustke, Graham Brown, Roger Riley, and a graduate student, who later was a professional colleague in my department – John Crompton.  Other gentlemen for whom I have the greatest respect and affection are Clare Gunn; a fellow graduate student at Michigan State, Clifford Tiedemann; and the late sociologist, H. Douglas Sessoms.