We begin with a few words of advice from Russell Elman, wanderer:

"Go," he says. "And keep on going. I mean that."

No one ever had to tell him. He started early, couldn't stop.

He is compact and wiry, 110 pounds all his adult life. No extra baggage, good for travelling.

Elman -- boy adventurer, Oxford grad, Columbia grad, newsman, teacher, author, community activist -- turns 75 next month. His travelling has lessened lately, though it was not so long ago that he walked from his home in downtown Hamilton to Brantford.

It all began in London. When Elman was about seven, he loved to explore the Tube alone. He knew all the stops -- Green Park, Hyde Park Corner, Piccadilly Circus. He always came home, so his parents didn't mind.

In 1940, the war under way, mother and Elman and his sister boarded the Samaria for Canada. Father stayed in England and Elman never saw him again.

They crossed the Atlantic in a convoy, and the U-boats torpedoed one of their number off the port bow.

In New York City, young Elman gazed in wonder at the Empire State Building, then boarded the train for Montreal.

At war's end, it was back to England. Elman got through high school. Along the way, there was much travelling on the cheap around Europe.

He insists he was no scholar, but did study history at Oxford. Prior to his last year, he returned to Canada for the summer and got work as a cost accountant, of which he knew nothing.

Come the fall, he travelled home to England on a cargo boat and bunked with a fellow who wrote for British United Press. "By the time I got off that boat," Elman says, "I knew I was going to be a journalist."

He finished his degree and moved to Canada. There was a summer job at the Montreal Star, then short stints at the Chatham Daily News and the Sarnia Observer. Elman would board a Greyhound on weekends off to see cities such as Detroit and Pittsburgh.

Then persistence got him into graduate studies at Columbia University's journalism school in New York City. He milked that for more travel, visiting the homes of classmates in Boston, New Orleans, Key West.

While studying in New York, he had a part-time job with Canadian Press. CP then offered him full-time work. "If you can offer me a chance to see Canada, sure," Elman said. He was posted to Regina and from there would dart off on his own time to Las Vegas, San Francisco, L.A.

In California, he stumbled over lots of Saskatchewan farmers passing the winter away at the oceanside. His reportage on that was not popular with the provincial government, then trying hard to persuade Ottawa that Saskatchewan's agricultural sector was crippled and needed federal help.

Elman later took a long leave for some serious touring -- Africa, India, Pakistan. In Ceylon, he met Hamilton nurse Clara Graham, there on a foreign-aid project. They danced that night, married the next year and embarked on a six-month honeymoon -- half of it an overland trek through South America.

Eventually, the couple did settle down here, and in 1967 Elman became a journalism professor at Mohawk. That didn't slow the travelling -- China, Soviet Union, Samarkand and more.

But Elman held a deep passion for his adopted home of Durand, the piece of old Hamilton between Queen, James, Main and the Escarpment.

In the early 1970s, developers were knocking down fine old homes and running up a forest of slab highrises. Through the efforts of the Durand Neighbourhood Association and committed people such as Elman, the onslaught stopped.

Elman wrote about that, in the book Durand: A Neighbourhood Reclaimed, published in 2000. Then his thoughts turned to Hamilton Harbour. And that got him thinking about water in general, and travels, and great figures in literature who had written of their water travels.

Thoreau along the St. Lawrence. Twain on the Ganges. Dafoe on the Thames. Elman has made all these journeys himself.

And for the past five years, he has worked on a book that knits the elements of water and travel and literature, his being the connecting voice.

He's on a second draft now and is shopping it to publishers. While they ponder his work, he goes for walks. Long ones.

StreetBeat appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

pwilson@thespec.com

905-526-3391