People go on long trips for all kinds of reasons: exploration, pilgrimage, adventure. Sometimes it’s a drive for redemption or cleansing, as what compelled Cheryl Strayed to hike from Mexico to the Columbia River on the Pacific Crest Trail, then write her 2012 bestseller Wild about it.
In 1919, young radio operator Jay Quinby set out from New York City on Ida, a beater, ex-Austrian tramp steamer. The decrepit coal-fired vessel passed through the Panama Canal and picked up and dropped off all kinds of cargoes at ports around the Pacific.
Left is Ida tied up in San Francisco.
Jay Quinby trained as an electrical engineer. Engineers have the reputation as being great at math and physics, but terrible writers, so how were this New Yorker’s English skills? You decide, based on an excerpt from his book:
Having reached the age of discretion, if my four-score years so qualify me, I feel the urge to record some of the romances of my experience. Most of the enamoratas involved here have passed from the scene so that I need fear no repercussions from them. Regarding the others, my remarks will be discreetly guarded.
Enamoratas, Jay?? Quinby’s writing style was sometimes so ponderous his autobiography sat on my shelf, mostly unread, for at least a decade. Then I finally plowed through it.
Tabarnaque, what a story! Not only did this guy experience an amazing string of adventures, when it comes to straight physical descriptions, Quinby was pretty articulate (this is what engineers get: X makes Y do this, which results in Z.)
Chapter four of Jay’s self-published tome is called Madness at Vladivostok. Fantastic title, vastly better than the whole book’s yawner name, Ida Was a Tramp (tramp steamer, get it?)
Most important, Quinby was part of the world’s analog electric transformation. (Digital came later. Thanks, Claude Shannon and of course many others.) Quinby worked a long time for Radio Corporation of America (RCA.) David Sarnoff, the Belorussian-born Jew who ran RCA (and who went to university with Quinby) said, “I was lucky that at an early age I hitched my wagon to the electron.” The same applied to Edwin Jenyss Quinby.
