Passing the Torch: Innovation & Growth Throughout Road Scholar's History
Road Scholar's first employee, Mike Zoob, relays his memories of Road Scholar's early days in his own words.
As Road Scholar’s 50th Anniversary celebration draws to a close, my mind naturally turns back to the early days — when we were still known as Elderhostel. I vividly recall our bookkeeper looking at me one morning and saying, “You guys don’t know what the hell you’re doing, do you?”
She was right.
We knew what we wanted — to create transformative educational experiences for older adults and promote lifelong learning — but how to do it was anyone’s guess.
Back then, we held programs only in the summer, in a handful of states and always on college campuses. Rooms were shared — sometimes the bathrooms, too. A sign hung on the door that could be flipped depending on who was inside. I’m quite sure that wouldn’t fly today.
Each state, or region in the case of New England, published its own catalog. If you wintered in Florida, heard from a friend about a program in North Carolina and another in Pennsylvania, and wanted to attend both on your drive back to Boston, you had to write to two different offices, get two different catalogs and follow two different sets of registration rules. It was crazy.
As the saying goes, “necessity is the mother of invention,” and that necessity led to the development of a national catalog — something none of us had the slightest idea how to publish. But we learned, sometimes painfully, because we had to.
Our first president, my old friend Bill Berkeley, used to say that building Elderhostel was like “shoeing a horse on the dead run.” He wasn’t wrong — and it still feels that way today.
The Great Arizona Pivot
At first, Elderhostel programs ran only in summer. Then one year — around 1979 — a university in Arizona agreed to host a program in August. Two weeks before it began, we got word that the dormitory we planned to use needed emergency repairs. No dorms meant no program … or so we thought.
We jumped on the phone with our program director at the university. Two hours later, he called back with a solution: a local hotel had agreed to provide rooms and meals, and he’d even persuaded the university to loan us a bus to shuttle students between the hotel and campus.
It worked beautifully. The participants loved the comfort of the hotel and — best of all — private bathrooms!
That’s when the lightbulb went off. We didn’t have to rely on campus housing. We could hold programs anywhere — and bring the instructors to our participants. That simple change opened the door to year-round programs at presidential libraries, national parks and historic sites across the country. Our academic experiences became richer and more diverse, and our participants’ intellectual horizons grew wider. Who knew that one day we’d even host programs on ships?
Lessons From a Crisis
Was all this the result of careful planning or special insight? Hardly. It came from responding to a crisis — and seizing the opportunity it created. We were lucky to have both the flexibility and the passion to serve our participants, whatever the challenge. That’s been the story of Road Scholar ever since.
And I’m sure it will be for the next fifty years, too.
There will always be new challenges. That’s life — for people and for organizations. But I have no doubt that Road Scholar will continue to rise to each occasion. The new generation of leaders and staff have shown me, time and again, that they have the creativity, the smarts and — most importantly — the devotion to our mission and to the people we serve.
The torch has been passed, and it’s burning bright.