This week, the Avid Cruiser takes a look back at some of old, but still relevant, stories. “Travels with Cathy” originally was written in 2001 for ASTA Agency Management, formerly the official trade publication of the American Society of Travel Agents.

“Over the years, I’ve grown very fond of travel agents, and now I find myself wondering how on earth are these poor people going to stay in business,” she says. “It seems as though the travel industry is doing everything to drive travel agents out of business.” – Cathy Guisewite

Regular readers of the comic strip “Cathy” are familiar with the strip’s sympathetic take on travel agents. But they may not know that creator Cathy Guisewite began the travel agent strips, which run periodically in the “Cathy” cartoon, because she was the “world’s worst customer.”

“When I was single, I would book 12 tentative itineraries based on meeting my hypothetical boyfriend by the time I left,” says the Los Angeles-based cartoonist. “I couldn’t commit, would change my mind, would hate to make decisions.

“And then after the travel agent had invested all this time into putting together a trip for me, I would call up and ask if I could use up all my frequent flyer miles for the hotels and plane travel. Nobody actually screamed on the other end of the phone, but I always felt it was happening once I got off.”

So Guisewite began sketching Mabel in the role of a travel agent who faced such daily adversities as fickle clients, unstable pricing, commission cuts and other assaults on the travel agent’s livelihood. “I started thinking about what that job entails,” Guisewite says. “And I guess I did those first strips because I wanted travel agents to have a little voice through me.”

And indeed many travel agents do feel they have that tiny voice through Guisewite – or at least some comic relief from their daily frustrations. Guisewite says she receives regular fan mail from travel agents. “They tell me that I am speaking for them,” Guisewite says. “Or that it was like I was standing in their office when I created a particular strip.”

Truth is, however, that Guisewite has not even set foot in a travel agency – at least not for a “very long time.” Nor does the creative source for her travel agent strips, syndicated to more than 1,400 papers worldwide, come from an industry insider or shadow travel agent (ironically, she has yet to meet her own travel agent face-to-face – but more on that later.)

Rather, what Guisewite knows about the industry comes from her own experience of dealing with agents and from research. She routinely clips newspaper articles about the industry woes. But, of course, the real genius of the strip is Guisewite’s own brilliance and her understanding of people. “She just has this innate ability of getting into people’s hearts and minds,” says her publicist at Universal Press Syndicate.

“I inherited all of my indecision skills from my mother,” Guisewite says. “So to go away for two days, I need to pack seven pairs of shoes.”

Hat Tricks

A display attached to a hat reads:

First class-$240

Business class-$140

Full coach-$90

Saver-$80

Super Saver-$75

Superduper Saver-$70

Red Eye-$60

Rock Bottom-$48

“How much is this hat?” Cathy asks.

“That depends,” replies Mabel, the sales clerk.

“Depends on what?”

“We’ve decided to sell hats the way airlines sell plane tickets. Every hat in the store has been given up to 20 different prices at any given time that change weekly, daily or sometimes minute to minute. How much you pay for your hat depends on how desperate we are to unload it versus how desperate you are to buy it. Hats purchased 21 days in advance of hat season are, of course, cheaper than last-minute hat buys, and all prices are lower if you plan to keep the hat over a Saturday night.

“Once you’re paid, any exchange of the hat will be a minimum $50 fee,” Mabel continues, “even if all we have to do is say, ‘Here’s another hat.’ ”

“I don’t care what it costs!” Cathy bursts out. “”Just sell me the hat!”

“Oops,” Mabel says. “Sorry the last of our hats were reserved while we were chatting.”

That strip was based on a real-life episode with Guisewite’s travel agent, Sheila Laituri of Pepp Travel, an ASTA member in Encinitas, California. On the phone, Laituri was searching fares for Guisewite when the two veered off subject. “I had the lower fare, but while we were talking, I lost it,” Laituri says. “I had to call her back and tell her. She was good about it. She understood, but that’s where the cartoon came from. I thought it was clever that she could take something like a classic airline reservation and make something so funny out of it.”

Guisewite sent Laituri the strip on hats, but the cartoonist has never actually set foot into Pepp Travel’s office. Nonetheless, Guisewite understands the travel agent’s plight perhaps better than those who spend “too much” time in agency offices.

“We do enjoy working with her, because she understands the industry so well,” Laituri says. “She understands about fees and would rather pay them than try to find a cheaper fare on the internet. She understands the joys, frustrations and craziness of this ever-changing business.” (As a demonstration of her gut intuition, Guisewite warned us that her agent would say nice things about her. “Don’t believe them,” Guisewite says. “We drive them crazy.”)

Nagging Mother

Born in Dayton, Ohio, on September 5, 1950, Guisewite attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She walked with a B.A. in English in 1972, then went to work as an advertising writer. Rising the ranks, she became a vice president in the advertising industry.

But all along the way, her romantic life was unfulfilling. On nights when she wished she were dating, she sketched cartoon strips and routinely sent them to her parents. Her mother nagged Guisewite to send sample strips to a few cartoon syndicates. Caving to her mother’s desires, the devoted daughter sent drawings of her “miserable love life” to Universal Press Syndicate in 1976.

“Chances are the world isn’t screaming for a new comic strip as loudly as I’m hoping,” she wrote to Universal Press Syndicate Press that year. “But I have an idea for new comic strip that the world might like a lot if someone besides my mother ever got a chance to see it. So here it is. It’s a strip about being single in a pretty unusual time. About being a woman in a pretty unusual time. Mostly, I guess, it’s a strip about just being a person at any time – the most marvelous thing that every happened to anybody.”

The letter included several sketches about a female character whose circumstances were remarkably similar to Guisewite’s (later she begged Universal Press Syndicate to let her call the strip anything but “Cathy.”)

“If you’d like to see more,” the letter continued, “I’d be happy to send some more. If you’d like to talk about my idea, I’d be very happy to talk – any day, any place. If you should think I should concentrate my spare time at vacuuming instead of drawing cartoons, I won’t be happy . . . but I guess I’d like to know that too.”

Within a week, she had signed a contract with United Press Syndicate. The first “Cathy” comic strip made its debut in a few dozen newspapers on November 22, 1976. Striking a chord primarily among single women, the strip was an immediate hit.

“Cathy” even spawned 21 books, including The Child Within Has Been Awakened but the Old Lady on the Outside Just Collapsed; Thin Thighs in Thirty Years; Wake Me Up When I’m A Size Five; and A Mouthful of Breath Mints and No One to Kiss. The newest, Shoes: Chocolate for the Feet, was released this fall.

Quarter of Century and Still Going Strong

Now in her 25th year of “Cathy,” Guisewite says she has no plans to slow down. Though she married in 1997, she says she can relate to single women, because she was single for so long. “A lot of what I write about, even if Cathy is dating, is just male-female relationship stuff, and if anything, I have a lot more fuel for that now because I’m actually with a guy, so I’m not just reading about guys in a magazine anymore. I actually know what one is like up close.”

Also unlike Cathy, Guisewite is a mother of two (a four-year-old son through the recent marriage and an eight-year-old daughter who she adopted in 1992). Motherhood has made the shift to Cathy’s mindset more difficult. Guisewite now leaves her home for a nearby office to help make the transition. “I spent the first hour this morning arranging play dates, getting the weekend set up, getting my daughter’s school pictures ordered,” she says on the day that we called, “so it’s quite different.”

She counts her lucky stars that the strip was successful. The fact that she is able to work on it daily is therapeutic, she says. “It is a great way for me to get out all of my anxieties,” she says. “Travel is a great example. With the strips I’ve done about the travel agencies, I’m trying to be empathetic about what I’ve put these people through as I make my own plans.

“But also there are a lot of frustrations that everybody deals with in travel,” she adds, “with delays, with packing, with how big the carry-on can be, with other people who carry on too much stuff, with the food on the airplane, with waiting on shuttle buses and all that stuff that everybody gets mad about. I get to get mad about it and then go home and write about it and make a living at it. So it’s a great way to voice all that frustration.”

Because of such frustrations, however, Guisewite enjoys travel less now than she did in the early days of her career. Nowadays, she travels primarily for vacations. The devoted mother seldom boards a plane for business.

And she’s the first to concede that she’s not the ideal traveler. “I like to get somewhere, but I hate to make the arrangements,” she says. “I hate to decide when I’m going and I hate to commit. I hate this system now where you have to commit weeks and weeks ahead to get a good price. It defies everything that I love, which is waiting until the last second.”

She pauses: “And of course, I can’t stand to pack.”

Too bad. Because Guisewite would be a travel agent’s dream client. Certainly, she would not ask her agent to redeem frequent-flier points for the flight and hotel.

And if you were her agent? She would know that she is lucky to have you as her agent, rather than the other way around. “Nowadays,” Guisewite says without a trace of insincerity, “I’m always groveling for mercy when I call the travel agent because I know all that they have to go through.”

Cathy on Cathy

In the early days of Cathy, cartoon Cathy bore a striking resemblance to her creator. Over time, however, Guisewite has turned around her own life.

Cartoon Cathy was (and still is) short and roly-poly, about 50 pounds overweight. Guisewite is 5? 2? but only about 100 pounds. She was 50 pounds heavier in college.

Cartoon Cathy eats an entire cheesecake to deal with her problems. Guisewite eats only half the cheesecake.

And although Guisewite has married since beginning the strip, she vows that “Cathy” never will. “I feel like that’s a voice that needs to be heard in the paper,” she says. “I know what it’s like being single and everyone around you being married. You feel as if you’re stranded alone. I would hate for Cathy to abandon those people, especially older women who still are single and need a friend.”