Jerry Hulse, 77; Times Travel Editor

Jerry Hulse, the gentleman traveler who introduced millions of Californians to the wider world through his weekly articles as editor of the Los Angeles Times Travel section from 1960 through 1991, died Friday morning of complications after surgery. He was 77.

Hulse died at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank. He underwent double hernia surgery several days ago, family members said.

In the course of a career that took him around the world more times than he could count, on conveyances from cruise ships to the Concorde, Hulse won honors from admirers ranging from the proprietors of Gray Line bus tours to French President Francois Mitterrand. And in the process, travel industry veterans said, Hulse played a crucial role in the shaping of American thinking about travel.

“The power he had, in other hands, could have been a dreadful thing,” said James Murphy, chairman of Chatsworth-based Brendan Tours.

“He started at a time when Americans were beginning to use their passports for the first time,” Murphy said. “He could get to the everyman, and motivate them to travel. And people took his word as absolute gospel. When we started operating in Ireland in 1973, Jerry put a little piece in the [Sunday] paper. We took over 3,000 telephone calls on that Monday. All from just a sentence or two.”

His peers remembered him as a fastidious researcher, a chronic worrier, a great lover of the tropics and a writer who suffered quietly in the creation of prose that seemed graceful and carefree.

Hulse was “a romantic writer, but he was absolutely honest,” said Ed Hogan, who as a pioneer in Hawaiian travel and founder and chairman of the Westlake Village travel firm Pleasant Holidays dealt with Hulse over four decades.

“And, like Michener, like Mark Twain, he was a great wordsmith, like Jim Murray getting you excited about a sport. [Hulse] had that ability to put you in the ring, so to speak.”

In 1970, a Columbia Journalism Review article reported that Hulse was “widely considered to be the best travel writer in the country.” In 1987, he received the French government’s highest award, the Legion of Honor, for his contributions to the outside world’s understanding of France.

Hulse’s most widely admired piece of writing, however, took him not to an exotic foreign land but to Fort Wayne, Ind. In the early 1970s, Hulse set off on a search for the birth parents of his gravely ill wife, Jody, who had been adopted. The Hulses, looking for medical history information that doctors said would be crucial to Jody’s treatment, succeeded, and his wife’s life was prolonged. Hulse told the story in “Jody,” a 1976 book that was published in 15 countries and made into a TV movie. She died in 1995.

The son of a butcher, Hulse was born in Grand Junction, Colo., and moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was 3. He attended North Hollywood High School.

After Navy service during World War II, he studied at Los Angeles City College, worked for the now-defunct Valley Times, then joined the Los Angeles Times as a general-assignment reporter in 1952.

His early assignments included the 1955 opening of Disneyland, and in 1960, when top editors sought an editor and columnist to lead a new Sunday travel section, Hulse landed the job.

It was an auspicious time to start. The airline industry had only recently introduced the wide-bodied jets that made transatlantic flights affordable for millions of middle-class travelers, and Hawaii had just received statehood the year before.

When Hulse took over, the nations of Western Europe together received 861,000 American visitors a year, and Hawaii drew 296,517 visitors annually. By the time he retired, more than 7 million Americans were visiting Europe yearly, roughly one in seven of them from California, and more than 6 million were visiting Hawaii, roughly one in five of them from California.

Georgia Hesse, who served as San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle travel editor from 1963 to 1982, remembered meeting Hulse on her first trip as a travel writer, at a conference in Indonesia in 1963.

“He was already very famous, and I was so afraid, because I was in my 20s and meeting all these people,” Hesse said. “And he was the first to come over and say hello. He was just the soul of politeness and cordiality. He would open doors, and pull out your chair, and stand up when you came to the table, which among newspaper people is not necessarily the usual practice.”

On later business trips, Hesse recalled, “He would lie on the beach for an hour in the tropics, and just get absolutely black. And we would take pictures of him and send them back to The Times and say that he wasn’t working, he was just lying on the beach. But I think they knew how good he was. They didn’t take it seriously.”

William F. Thomas, editor of The Times from 1971 to 1989, called Hulse “a model of rectitude--an honest guy who traveled economy just so he could tell people how it went.” (Until the 1980s, Times policy allowed reporters to travel first class on trips of 1,000 miles or more.)

Thomas noted that throughout Hulse’s tenure in the job, it was routine for travel writers at many American newspapers and magazines to accept complimentary travel and lodging from companies they wrote about--a practice that Hulse never joined in, because it created the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Instead Hulse traveled at The Times’ expense, often logging 100,000 miles per year.

Along with columnists Jack Smith and Jim Murray, Hulse was among a handful of writers whose voices endured over decades in The Times. Smith died in 1996, Murray in 1998.

“As a traveler, he was very inquisitive, critical but fair, and very much a perfectionist and craftsman in writing. He had a tremendous influence. He really popularized Hawaii,” said Jack Adler, a friend and fellow travel writer for decades.

When Hulse began his travel writing career, “people in the West, they thought of Vancouver as going abroad,” said George Hern, who served as director of public relations and advertising for the French Government Tourist Office from 1970 to 1998. “He made them think of London, of Paris, of Rome.”

After his retirement, Hulse divided his time between Los Angeles and Kauai, where he rented a condominium in the community of Kapaa. In 1998, he contributed his last piece for the Travel section from there:

“It is dawn and save for the sound of ocean waves washing beneath my window, my world is as silent as a shining star,” he wrote. “Last evening it rained so that today the sky is as blue as a young girl’s eyes. All would be well if only that infernal rooster would stop crowing at midnight.”

Hulse is survived by two sons, Richard of Simi Valley and Bo of Marina del Rey; and two grand-children.

Plans for a memorial service are pending.