The contribution of Roy Wolfe (1917–2014) to tourism geography

Roy Wolfe, Professor of Geography Emeritus, and one of the pioneers of tourism and recreation geography, died in Toronto on 15 November 2014. He was a transportation planner with the Ontario Department of Highways for several years before accepting a position at York University, where he remained until his retirement in the early 1980s. However, he has provided a substantial intellectual and personal legacy, especially in the area of second homes, which has seen his work cited more in the decade prior to his death than any time previously. This short note seeks to outline both his personal and professional contributions to tourism geographers and tourism geographies.

Roy taught courses in transportation planning and the regional geography of Canada, although he is best known for his teaching in tourism and recreation geography. Teaching was long a part of Roy's passions, having begun as a high school biology teacher in Northern Ontario before joining the Department of Highways. His commitment to learning earned him the admiration of countless students and several teaching awards (and has been remembered by the Canadian Association of Geographers creating a teaching award in his name). Although popular, he was not an easy teacher, holding students to high standards of logic and writing. Given that he had profound hearing loss, clear and elegant written communication became essential for him to connect with others. He devoted long hours to editing and marking student essays, frequently covering the page with red ink – ‘made the pages bleed’ one student recalled. He eventually compiled a seven-page guide for students based on frequent problems in students’ writing. The guide, written in his inimitable language, was given the title that captured his own style: ‘Hints, Admonitions, and Downright Threats from a Jaded Reader of Too Many Sloppy Essays’.

In addition to teaching and research, Roy worked as a planning consultant in Canada and the USA on transportation-related issues. He was an early adopter of computers in research to facilitate statistical analysis. While an active user of statistics in his work, he emphasized the importance of asking good questions, careful data collection and using statistics only in a decision-support role. He felt that over-reliance on number-crunching was not only lazy thinking, but could lead the analyst into trouble. For example, he reviewed one of our (Smith) early submissions to a journal in which the author attempted to develop a statistical model to identify optimal locations for new urban parks. Roy recommended against publication on the grounds that ‘the type of mentality that would do this sort of research is what got the US involved in Vietnam!’ (a position that also reflected his criticism of the work of Herbert Kahn on thermonuclear war! (Wolfe, 1961)).

Roy was born Israel Wolbromski in Staszow, Poland, on 19 November 1917, and came to Canada via Germany in 1922. He received a BA degree in biology from McMaster University, in 1940, and an MA degree in biology, in 1947, from the University of Toronto. During his war service with the Army Medical Corps, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police blocked his promotion from the ranks to officer because he had belonged to a communist organization in the 1930s (Globe and Mail, 2014). He had a lively and wide-ranging curiosity that included mathematics, history and poetry. He had committed long passages of Shakespeare to memory, which he enjoyed reciting given an excuse. Despite being profoundly deaf since about 1947, music, from Bach (the Brandenburg concerti were particular favourites) to Gilbert and Sullivan, remained a passion. To the end of his life, his prodigious memory meant he could ‘listen’ to his favourite composers whenever he chose in the privacy of his mind.

Roy enlisted the aid of others to take notes for him during conversations, lectures and presentations. This role was frequently performed by his devoted wife, Rosemary, who usually travelled with him, as well as by students in his courses or colleagues. This form of one-way communication could be effective, but it sometimes frustrated him because it restricted his ability to actively engage in spontaneous interaction. On the other hand, it allowed him time to formulate his thoughts and critiques. He was also adept at lip-reading, which he could do not just in English but also in German, French and Yiddish. To facilitate his distinguishing similar spoken sounds, he would sometimes put his hand on the throat of the speaker to pick up vibrations – a technique that was effective for Roy but could be unnerving to the speaker the first time they might experience it.

His sense of humour was well developed. He enjoyed joking, and telling and hearing amusing stories. He also loved to debate with anyone who could offer thoughtful, articulate opposition to his ideas. However, he had little time for people he thought were fools. His wife told a possibly apocryphal story about Roy's deafness. She explained that he had grown so tired of people who would not listen to reason that he decided to just stop hearing anything.

His stubbornness was manifested in a delay in the completion of his dissertation in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto. His chosen topic was the evolution of cottage development in Ontario. Cottaging is a popular form of tourism in Ontario, with perhaps one out of seven households owning a second home, and a still larger portion of families renting cottages for vacations. He was interested in the pattern of cottage development and use, and planned to track changes over time. However, his doctoral committee refused to approve the subject because, at that time, tourism and recreation were not seen as appropriate subjects for ‘serious’ research. After unsuccessfully arguing with his committee, he dropped out of university and spent the next year running his parents’ boarding house. Eventually, his committee relented and asked him to return to his studies and research, which he did. His work on cottages as well as patterns of auto travel to them became a major theme for his early research.

Smith (2010a) described Wolfe as the godfather of many tourism geographers. This was perhaps not only because of his nurturing and encouragement of people but also because he could be a battler, especially with respect to legitimizing research on tourism. However, as Smith (2010a, p. xii) rightly points out, ‘Roy's significance as a geographer is not that he fought for and won the right to study tourism; rather, it is in the pioneering scope and depth of his scholarship on recreation migration, tourism flows, development, demand systems, and his remarkable review of the landmark collected reports of the US Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission (1962)’. Smith (2010a) noted that Wolfe's seminal scholarship inspired many geographers in his generation. However, in the age of Internet browsing and encouragement to cite only recent scholarship, it may be apt to highlight Wolfe's contribution to a younger generation of readers.

Although Wolfe's publications were of an age well before demands of not only ‘publish or perish’ became standard in academic careers, but also diktats as to what should be published and where, a brief citation analysis of some of his more frequently cited works offers some suggestions as to the main thrusts of Wolfe's influence (Table 1). Three main areas of interest for tourism geographers can be identified. Arguably by far the most visible contribution of Wolfe to tourism geography is in the area of vacation and second homes. Wolfe's (1951, 1952, 1965, 1970a, 1970b, 1977, 1978) work, together with that of Coppock (1977), undoubtedly laid the foundation for English language scholarship on second homes. Wolfe's work was not only well cited in the first wave of holiday and second home scholarship in the 1970s but has come to be appreciated by more recent scholars (Hall, 2014; Hall & Müller, 2004; Müller, 2002). Arguably, this has been not only because of the range of different perspectives Wolfe brought to consideration of second homes (Wolfe, 1978), but also because of his utilization of quantitative methods in consideration of time–space issues and an overt appreciation of what would now be termed multiple-dwelling and mobility (Hall & Page, 2014).

Table 1. Citation analysis of some core Roy Wolfe publications.

Article	Date	Google Scholar citations	Web of Science citations
Summer cottagers in Ontario. Economic Geography	1951	97	27
Wasaga Beach: the divorce from the geographic environment. The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien	1952	66
Recreational travel: the new migration. The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien	1966	65	16
Perspective on outdoor recreation: a bibliographical survey. Geographical Review	1964	64	15
Summer cottages in Ontario: purpose-built for an inessential purpose. Second homes: Curse or blessing	1977	46
The inertia model. Journal of Leisure Research	1972	43	20
Transportation and politics.	1963	43
Discussion of vacation homes, environmental preferences and spatial behavior. Journal of Leisure Research	1970	35	10
Recreational travel, the new migration revisited. Ontario Geography	1982	24
Transportation and politics: the example of Canada. Annals of the Association of American Geographers	1962	22	3
About cottages and cottagers. Landscape	1965	19
Parameters of recreational travel in Ontario: a progress report	1966	12
Vacation homes as social indicators: observations from Canadian census data. Leisure Sciences	1978	11
A theory of recreational highway traffic	1967	10
Vacation homes and gravity model. Ekistics	1970	6	3
Effect of ribbon development on traffic flow. Traffic Quarterly	1964	5	1

Note: Search conducted 24 November 2014.

Indeed, Wolfe's interests in theorization and modelling combined with the empirical data from research on second homes provided the basis for his second major area of contribution on the effects of distance on travel and the significance of inertia for gravity models (Wolfe, 1970a, 1970b, 1972). This literature, which was also connected to his time working in the provincial Department of Highways (Wolfe, 1964a, 1966a, 1967), has been well cited not only in tourism and geography, but also in marketing and the regional science literature and arguably connects with a continued interest of tourism geography in spatial analysis and modelling (Hall, 2012). Some of Wolfe's writing in this area was grounded in his earlier contributions on the politics of transport (Wolfe, 1962, 1963) with this and related work (Wolfe, 1961) also significant for later geographical work on concepts of space and time in geography (Ullman, 1974) and economic and transport geography (Dicken & Lloyd, 1990; Taaffe, Gauthier & O’Kelly, 1996). Indeed, Wolfe drew strongly on some of the early writing on distance and spatial interaction (e.g. Stouffer 1940).

The third major contribution of Wolfe, and which is arguably somewhat less tangible, is with his synthetic papers that brought together the then current states of knowledge on tourism geography (Wolfe, 1964b, 1966b). These works were the first substantive reviews of the tourism geography literature and provided extremely important benchmarks that have allowed the changing foci of the field to be traced and also served as important source material for tracing the genealogies and histories of tourism geography (Hall & Page, 2009; Mercer, 1970; Pearce, 1979; Smith, 1982; Wolfe, 1982). Indeed, some aspects of his contribution potentially require more study. For example, Wolfe's command of German and French as well as his international intellectual connectivity meant that he was a conduit for some important works into North American geography (e.g. Wolfe, 1968, 1970c, 1971, 1973), while his correspondence with Lewis Mumford is also revealing (Wolfe & Mumford 1961).

The work of Roy Wolfe undoubtedly provided a firm intellectual foundation for much of the research in contemporary tourism geography. However, like many disciplinary foundations, it is unseen unless one starts digging (Hall, 2013; Smith, 2010b). Roy contributed enormously to tourism geography through his research and teaching and his legacy is remembered especially in North America. Roy once, in a private conversation with Smith, minimized the importance of overt publicly proclaimed recognition and fame, and suggested that the quiet reputation one has among one's peers and colleagues is a true measure of a scholar's reputation. It is to be hoped that this brief note not only serves to remember Roy's place in tourism geography but as a broader reminder of the intellectual legacies from which present-day researchers benefit and continues quiet (and public) recognition among today's scholars.