A Life of Travel With Jerry Dunn

Jerry Dunn has a dream job - maybe THE dream job - traveling and writing about it. He worked with the National Geographic Society for 35 years and has written hundreds of articles for magazines and newspapers, large and small, from the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune to our own Ojai Quarterly. Jerry is also the author of eleven books, including "Tricks of the Trade,” “My Favorite Place on Earth,” and travel guidebooks for Nat Geo and the Smithsonian. He joins the podcast to talk about his peripatetic career as a journalist and author — living in India, where he acted as an extra in Bollywood movies, interviewing Muhammad Ali, Jane Goodall, George Lucas, Brian Wilson, and many other accomplished people. (He also learned the secrets of a carnival age-and-weight guesser and how to train champion jumping frogs.) Jerry grew up in Los Angeles, then attended Stanford and a year of law school before deciding that following his father into a legal career was not the best bet. He bought a round-the-globe airline ticket and set forth on a year-long trip to experience the world and share those experiences with readers. He's also an accomplished magician and mentalist and has lived in Ojai since 1987. We talked about the craft and art of writing, the importance of making genuine contact with other cultures, and about his incredible family — wife Merry, and sons Locke and Graham. We did not talk about the Seven Years' War, the electoral college or coral bleaching.