The American Dream

From touring with The Beatles to reviving the Renaissance— Ed Freeman has done it all.

- Ishan Singh

Aeroplanes looked different in the 1950s—the golden age of flying, as we now know it. Back then, travelling through the skies was nothing short of a grand affair. In fact, almost 70 years on, Ed Freeman still remembers his first journey. It was 16 hours from Boston to London. That’s almost 10 hours more than it’d take today—I imagine because we no longer need to stop at Nova Scotia, Iceland and Ireland to refuel. “Pretty primitive,” Freeman describes. “Of course, we didn’t know any better. We thought, right, I can fly to London instead of taking a boat, wow!”

He was 16 at the time when his parents handed him a passport and a bit of cash and sent him off to see the world—in hindsight, an experience which he’d wish upon every teenager. The experience of a lifetime. “It affected me profoundly,” Freeman shares. “I went to France and Spain, which, of course, was more challenging back in those days. No one spoke English, there was no internet, no international phone calls. I was pretty much on my own. It was...” he pauses in search of the right words. Panic attack-inducing, I think to suggest to him but instead, he proffers: “...exciting.”

That reveals why Freeman set off on a third trip across the ocean while enrolled in university. “Just curiosity,” he reasons. “I wondered what Burma looks like, what Borneo looks like.” At this point, photography was still a hobby for him—he’d have a career in music and contemplate linguistics before making it a profession. “I probably shot like three rolls of film, so 36 pictures [that entire trip]. Nowadays, I shoot 36 pictures before I get out of the airport.”