Time Capsule #12: the International Herald Tribune

The Europe on $5 a Day exhibit reminded me of another travel artifact: the International Herald Tribune newspaper for sale in train stations and city news kiosks.

Serious political types like Aylwardl would have been reading it for updates about Nixon and the war, while others among us were checking the sports scores and doing the crosswords.

And if you were in Europe in '74, you'd definitely have grabbed a copy of this issue:

In Salamanca fall term '68, it was almost impossible to follow news about current events in Spain. With Franco's regime censoring all media, the national dailies like ABC had articles written in code. If you weren't clued in, you couldn't understand a thing.

Several times that fall, for no apparent reason, there would be no copies for sale of an American publication like the IHT or Time. You'd ask the kiosk guy if he'd sold out, and he'd just shrug. We found out later that there'd been an article critical of the dictator or too informative about the ongoing human rights abuses in Spain, so the issue was confiscated.

By the time I bought my first IHT on Paris, the girls in the famous Herald Tribune t-shirts (like Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle) were gone. But having seen the Godard film in Spaulding freshman year, some of the super-cool glamor of Belmondo, Seberg, Paris, and the Herald Trib felt like it was rubbing off on 18-yr.-old me.

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