This is the first day of spring break where I live.
A lot of our school friends and neighbors are traveling this week, and I have a feeling at least one household near ours is headed to the classic school spring break destination… Washington DC.
There’s a story behind why so many students have spent so many spring breaks in our capital city, and it starts with a single teacher.
That teacher was Phil Wendel, who was teaching social studies at a junior high school in Highland Park, Illinois.
In 1964, he and another teacher led about 100 students on a class trip to Washington.
They used a tour operator to manage the visit, but when they got back to Illinois, Wendel thought that he could’ve set up a class trip that was just as good or better.
So he started his own company, Lakeland Tours, and started reaching out to other schools to offer his services.
Wendel’s timing couldn’t have been better: the world of museums was starting to encourage everyone to visit, not just highly educated or well-off people.
And the travel industry was ramping up, especially airlines.
While high school students in the turbulent, protest-filled late 1960s weren’t always excited to head to the nation’s capital, middle school students were still into the idea.
Not only was that the grade level at which Wendel had already been teaching, middle schoolers were less likely to have spent much time away from home than older students, so they were a little easier to manage.
Wendel’s company also headed off potential middle school mischief by jam-packing each group’s daily schedule with activities, and by hiring chaperones for the students’ hotel floors, some from the military.
By the time Wendel sold Lakeland Tours in the late 1990s, he estimated he’d helped about a million students come to DC, and companies just like his saw the potential of selling educational trips to schools and families.
So if you spend time in Washington and you see those big buses shepherding dozens of 12 and 13 year olds around the National Mall and Arlington Cemetery each March, you know who to thank.
Or if you don’t like the crowds, you know who to blame (!)
Today in 1944, the birthday of R. Lee Ermey, a decorated Marine who famously played the hard-charging drill sergeant in the movie “Full Metal Jacket.”
In Palmdale, California, there’s something called the R. Lee Ermey Musical Road.
If you drive over the pavement in just the right way, your car and the grooved road will sound like the “Marines’ Hymn.”
I hope the road never has any major malfunctions!
This One Guy Made the Washington DC Field Trip a Middle School Rite of Passage (Thrillist)
City of Palmdale Opens Musical Road on R. Lee Ermey Avenue (City of Palmdale)
