By Nikki Ackerman
Staff Writer

When Helen McPhail passed away in 1993, her niece made a unique discovery when she opened a cabinet in her aunt’s Oklahoma home.
“I found two diaries and a scrapbook and I just started reading,” said Menomonee Falls resident Kathleen A. Reed, a web site designer who has two grown children with her husband, Gael.
Although Reed had been aware of her aunt’s two-month exploration of Europe that had taken place decades earlier, she did not know the extent of the adventure until she read the journals detailing the 1938 trip.
“Throughout my life she had mentioned incidents (from the trip),” said Reed, including a madcap exit from Paris as Adolf Hitler began his advance on Czechoslovakia, “but I didn’t ask her much more than that.”
“Now I wish I had,” Reed added wistfully.
Reed held onto the treasured journals for nearly 20 years and last year decided to publish her aunt’s “eyewitness account of history” through Amazon’s CreateSpace.
The book–“Touring 1938 Europe Unawares: Memoir of SS Normandie Sailing to Pre-WWII Europe Including Nazi Germany”–is hard to categorize as it is part history lesson, part memoir, part just plain fun-to-read novel.
“The book reads like a novel with a very exciting ending yet it also has the history,” said Reed. “You can see how the two aspects blend together and make for such a rich story. I thought people would really enjoy it.”
McPhail–the only sister of Reed’s mother–was 30 years old and single, working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington D.C., when she boarded the SS Normandie ocean liner to begin a tour of nine European countries–England, Scotland, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland and France–in August 1938. McPhail traveled with a friend, Margy, until parting ways mid-way through the trip. She traveled by boat and rail, enjoying days packed full of sight-seeing, and each evening she recounted the day’s events in her leather-bound books.
The “unawares” part of the title–which generally refers to an American traveler’s mindset in respect to a foreign culture–is meant to convey the 1938 tourist’s naivete concerning the impending war.
“If people knew then what we know now, how many tourists would have included Austria or Germany in their autumn of 1938 itinerary?” Reed asks in the book’s preface.
While one may relish McPhail’s run-ins with history-in-the-making–such as arriving at the Nuremberg train station on the eve of the annual rally of the Nazi Party–it is McPhail’s effervescent spirit that captures the reader.
“You can just see her expectancy of good, her outgoing attitude, the way that anyone she met–no matter how long she had known them–she considered a friend,” Reed said. “She had such a good rapport with people.”
Indeed, McPhail makes many friends along the way, including Austrian and German soldiers, and makes the best of even the most unpleasant circumstances, such as having to sleep in a freezing attic space in Germany when her room reservations are bumped.
“She always met adversity with a sense of humor,” said Reed.
A perfect example of this is how McPhail frequently loses track of her luggage yet never seems all that alarmed over such a circumstance.
“I went to Italy with her in 1985 and when we arrived in Rome, her suitcase didn’t show up and she just casually said, ‘It’ll get here’ and sure enough it did,” Reed shared with a laugh. “Then when I read her journal I saw just how many time she had been separated from her suitcase!”
McPhail continued her whirlwind–spending an almost-unbelievable total of just $344 along the way–until her unceremonious departure from Paris.
“It was such a hair-raising time when she was leaving Europe,” said Reed. “Things suddenly turned so strange.”
Back home, McPhail returned to her job in D.C. and 10 years later married a man who was in the Air Force and moved to Albuquerque with him. When he died, she remarried and spent the rest of her life in Oklahoma. She never had children–“my brother and I were like her kids,” said Reed–but she continued to travel and kept in contact with some of her European friends. (Letters they sent are included in the back of the book.)
“She took two major trips each year,” Reed said of her aunt. “She went to China, the Amazon, Bora Bora. She took a bush plane over the Arctic Circle.”
McPhail was unarguably a free spirit, said Reed, and very intelligent–the valedictorian of her high school class, she went on to earn a Master’s degree in mathematics as well as a high school teaching degree–but what she remembers most about her aunt is her kind heart.
“Everybody loved her,” said Reed. “You had to be careful not to admire something she was wearing or one of the knick knacks in her home because she would say, ‘You like it, you can have it.’”
While bringing the book to completion was often a tiring and tedious process–McPhail’s handwriting was not always legible, a letter written in German had to be translated, additional details and corresponding photographs needed to be worked in–it was a labor of love for Reed.
“I felt she would have loved it,” Reed said of McPhail’s likely reaction to the book. “My husband, son and daughter love it, and they were very encouraging the whole time.”
In fact, it was her husband’s idea to include a timeline of Hitler’s movement during the two-month period McPhail was in Europe, in order to give an accurate historical perspective.
“This was to show what was brewing at the time,” Reed said. “I wanted to be accurate. I owed that to the readers.”
Reed has spent the past year giving talks for local groups and at area libraries, and reception of the book has been amazing, she said.
“When I go somewhere to talk, I always sell a lot of books, and the Kindle version (priced at $2.99) is selling really well,” she said. “People are really being touched by this book.”
Those interested in obtaining a copy of the book can do so through amazon.com or by calling Reed at (262) 502-3649.