Travelogue

This is the story of a by-gone era of entertainment. Before cable television and video, people packed auditoriums to see travelogue films hoping to learn about places they wanted to visit and relive memories of past trips abroad. At its peak, there were thousands of live-lecture travelogue film series in the United States and Doug Jones was one of the stars. He gave over six thousand travelogue lectures, all of which he narrated live from the stage. He got to his shows by flying his own twin-engine Cessna, logging over three thousand hours in the air and sixty coast-to-coast flights. Growing up in Kansas City, he traveled the world on his father's flight privileges as a Trans World Airlines engine inspector. College trips took him to Bangkok, Bombay, London, Cairo, Honolulu, Paris, Hong Kong; all the destinations TWA flew, and he put himself through university playing banjo in Kansas City jazz clubs. He shot film in sixty-eight countries, sailed around the world on the Queen Elizabeth 2, and traveled on every form of transportation. His film The Great Canadian Train Ride drew sell-out crowds in auditoriums and theaters and sold over 1,000,000 copies on home video and DVD. He lived his life openly and was a part of the LGBT rights movement from Stonewall, through the AIDS crisis, to his own marriage in 2008. His story covers an array of observations about everything from travel to Broadway, aviation to show business, and the relationships and colorful people he has known. It is told with honesty and humor: a life well lived.