You might know him as our “visiting professor.” News reporter and editor, Lou Salome will be at the Louis T. Graves Memorial Public Library on Thursday, November 14 @ 5:30 pm to talk about his new book, Two Hundred Miles from Bagdad: Cultures, conflicts, and the lost art of hitchhiking.”  Copies will be for sale and signing after the discussion. No registration is required.

In September, 1958, Lou Salome hurried past Barney McNeil’s blacksmith shop to the town’s blinking traffic light and began hitchhiking to college.  He was seventeen.  Decades later his hitching experience led Salome through deserts and hostile zones in Asia, Europe, and Africa.  At the end of his International life, he thumbed in the New Hampshire woods to gauge how times had changed.  This is his story of the adventures, risks and fun he embraced while engaging in a lost art.

A New Englander by birth, Lou Salome holds a bachelor’s degree from Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts where he was a classmate of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s. He also has a Master’s Degree in American History from Boston College, and a Ph.D in hitchhiking and news reporting on four continents. Mr. Lou, as he was known in foreign climes, hitched to college for two years in the late fifties, hitched into and out of battle zones in Asia, Africa, and Europe in the nineties, and hitched for fun, but with little success, in the New Hampshire woods in 2004 while writing books. A newspaper reporter and editor for thirty-five years and an author since 2010, Lou has written three books, the latest about his hitching experiences, the lost art of hitchhiking, and the social and economic changes that doomed the art. As the editorial page editor of The Miami (FL) News, Lou Salome won numerous journalism prizes. In 1981 and 1984, he won the National Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award for Editorial Writing. In 1984, he won the Jamaica Daily Gleamer Editorial Writing Award given by the Inter-American Press Association, In 1987, he won the first annual Thomas Jefferson First Amendment Award given by the Cultural Action Network.

The Louis T. Graves Memorial Public Library is located at 18 Maine Street, Kennebunkport.  Please call is for details (207-967-2778).