I Search for Adventure

Almost all the travel-adventure shows on television sprang from the original Douglas format, which started with the true-adventure series, "I Search for Adventure."

Let's go back to the late 1950s and very early 1960s. The early years of the television era, but not the very earliest. I'm 10 years old, and hooked on television, and since my mother teaches piano in the home in the afternoons, I'm blessed with unlimited access to the television for its best and highest use: a free babysitter. I'm in a major urban area, we have 4 television stations, beaming entertainment out to us from 6am to 11pm, and then - a miracle! - the Channel 2 through Channel 13 VHF band is joined by the till-then-unused-in-my-area UHF band and we get a fifth station! It's independent! It's starved for material! They'll try anything they can get cheaply: Wrestling, bowling, and the bullfights from Mexico, and a new network that was there one month, broadcasting cheesy Vegas lounge acts, and then gone forever. But like hundreds of new little stations all over the country, they're looking frantically for more material, very much as cable would do in later years, and suddenly producers of syndicated shows were selling truckloads of film and looking for more.

And among the producers who were ready with film to sell was Jack Douglas, creator and host of "I Search for Adventure", which mined the great pool of existing footage available from speakers who traveled the lecture circuit narrating 16mm films of their travels to exotic locales. These men and women took their cameras and trunks full of 16mm Kodachrome to Hawaii or Bora-Bora or Argentina and brought back hours of film to edit into an evening's two-hour lecture anywhere a paying engagement could be booked. The public would still go out of its way and pay to see exotic curiosities in bright color on a big screen, narrated by a good lecturer. And all that film made spectacular television at almost no budget. And "I Search for Adventure", its handful of episodes running again and again on the new local UHF channel, is where I was particularly captivated by one of their regular guests, Romain Wilhelmsen, known in the "travel biz" as "The Legend Hunter".

Wilhelmsen was the Indiana Jones of the travel circuit. Movie-star handsome and a compelling storyteller, he went on his own to the wilds of Mexico and South America against all advice, first following the legend of Pizarro who scoured the deserts and mountains of Peru 500 years ago looking for the gold of the Incas. Pizarro found his gold, but he passed over empires that had long since been buried in the jungles and sands, civilizations forgotten by all but a handful of the locals.

I was riveted by Wilhelmsen's tales about finding the remains of lost civilizations to which he was led by reluctant, fear-filled Indians - his films showed overgrown cities in the jungle, built over dark passages into the mountains, especially a scene that lingered to show a stone stairway leading down into the darkness, and my imagination raced dreaming about the treasures and horrors just out of sight, my dreams made even more vivid by his statement that he was unable to explore the tunnels, unable to descend the staircase, because of his limited resources and his skittish guides. What was hidden down there? What was lurking? We'll never know, but I'll always remember the mystery, because ... how could I doubt? There it was in living color!

I was fortunate enough to meet Romain Wilhelmsen once, when he was lecturing at the largest auditorium in Richmond Virginia, about 1970. I only had a moment backstage to shake his hand and thank him for some vivid childhood dreams from his appearances on "I Search for Adventure". He was amazed that anyone remembered.