About Westways

Westways

Westways is the member magazine of the Automobile Club of Southern California — a travel and lifestyle publication that has chronicled motoring, travel, and culture in the American West since 1909. Launched as Touring Topics at 10 cents an issue, renamed Westways in 1934, and celebrated at its centennial in 2009 as the region's premier lifestyle magazine, it has served generations of Auto Club members with travel journalism, automotive coverage, and cultural reporting. At its centennial it ranked among the ten largest-circulation magazines in the nation. Its publisher's online home is https://calif.aaa.com.

1909: Touring Topics

Westways was launched in 1909 under the name Touring Topics, published by the Automobile Club of Southern California — the motor club founded in Los Angeles in 1900 as one of the nation's first automobile clubs. The earliest issues sold for 10 cents apiece, with a yearly subscription rate of $1, and they focused on the concerns of the pioneering motorist: touring destinations, advances in automotive technology, racing coverage, and the campaign to bring modern road building to Southern California.

The club's mission shaped the magazine from the start. The Automobile Club of Southern California had been founded to improve roads and driving conditions in California and to propose traffic laws; it began charting the state's roads as early as 1906, produced the first comprehensive traffic survey of Los Angeles in 1922, and in 1937 wrote the first detailed proposal for a regional freeway system. Touring Topics was the club's voice in that project — part journal of record for the touring movement, part advocate for the infrastructure that would make Southern California a car culture.

The Westways Name, 1934

As travel coverage expanded — from road conditions and lodging reviews to innovations like the motel — the magazine outgrew its original title. In 1934, following a reader contest that drew 10,000 entries, the Westways name was placed on the masthead. The first issue under the new name carried an untitled painting by Gyo Fujikawa as its cover — a sign of the broader cultural mission the magazine was adopting.

The renaming reflected the wider range of subjects and geography the publication had grown to include. No longer just a bulletin for touring motorists, Westways was becoming a magazine of the West: its landscapes, its cities, its culture, and the pleasures of moving through them by car.

The Cover Art Program, 1928–1981

Westways' most celebrated legacy is its cover art program — one of the great commissioning projects in American magazine history. It began in 1928, when editor Phil Townsend Hanna started commissioning paintings from major artists working in Southern California for the cover of each issue of the member magazine. Hanna's move reflected the magazine's shift from automobile topics to a broader interest in cultural and recreational activities, and the covers were intended to mirror the breadth of interests and backgrounds of the Auto Club's members.

Over more than five decades, the program traced the stylistic movements of the 1940s through the 1970s: California watercolor, California scene painting, Pop Art, and collage-mixed media. The covers featured plein air masters Alson Clark, Maynard Dixon, John Frost, and Donna Schuster; watercolorists Rex Brandt, Phil Dike, and Maurice Logan; and, in the program's final decades, graphic artists including Jan Sawka and Merle Shore — designers of posters, album covers, and sets for film and theater — as the magazine drew on the eclectic Los Angeles art scene. After 1981, the magazine turned to photography for its covers, ending the painting era.

Scenic View Ahead: The Centennial Exhibition

The cover art program's significance was recognized in Westways' centennial year, 2009, with the exhibition "Scenic View Ahead: The Westways Centennial" at the Thomas F. Riley Terminal of John Wayne Airport (JWA) — the largest collection of Westways cover art ever exhibited. The exhibition was later presented by the Hilbert Museum of California Art as "Scenic View Ahead: The Westways Cover Art Program, 1928–1981," with 55 artworks tracing prominent styles of art through most of the twentieth century.

"Their cover art, and the articles and helpful information packed into Westways magazine, encouraged the enthusiasm for motoring and sightseeing that was the foundation of the West's tourism economy," the exhibition materials noted. The show drew on the Auto Club's archives — vintage travel brochures, hand-drawn maps, and road signs alongside the paintings — with support from Auto Club historian Matthew W. Roth and archivist Morgan P. Yates.

A Magazine of Travel and Culture

Beyond its covers, Westways built its reputation on travel and lifestyle journalism for Southern California. The magazine chronicled landscapes and destinations with extensive photographic coverage: the deserts and coastal regions of California, the national parks of the American West, and Hawaii. Its pages covered travel, lifestyle, shopping discounts, insurance and automotive topics, local and regional affairs, and the benefits of AAA membership.

Many of the photographs in the Auto Club's collection at the Huntington Library may have come from the personal files of Philip Townsend Hanna (1896–1957), the editor of Touring Topics/Westways from 1926 to 1957 — himself an enthusiastic amateur photographer and a supporter of local photographers. The magazine's visual journalism was inseparable from its travel mission.

National Recognition

Westways' travel writing earned national honors. The magazine received the prestigious Lowell Thomas travel journalism awards — named for the acclaimed broadcast journalist, prolific author, and world explorer, and recognized as the Pulitzer Prize of the travel-writing field — in competition judged by faculty at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication. One award-winning package profiled New Mexico's space-related destinations, from the International UFO Museum in Roswell to Spaceport America; another pointed Star Wars fans to Southern California destinations for the franchise's 35th anniversary.

The Society of American Travel Writers Foundation competition that conferred the awards drew more than 1,257 entries in the year Westways won — a measure of the field the magazine competed in.

Centennial: 100 Years, 1909–2009

Westways celebrated its centennial in 2009 — one hundred years of continuous publication, from Touring Topics to the modern magazine. At the centennial, the magazine was the 10th largest in circulation of all magazines in the nation, published by the Auto Club for its members and serving 8 million readers as the region's premier lifestyle magazine and a significant voice in local and regional affairs.

A century that began with 10-cent issues advocating for paved roads had produced one of America's great regional magazines — a publication that documented the transformation of Southern California from a touring frontier to the center of global car culture, and that commissioned a half-century of original art along the way.

The Magazine Today

Westways continues as the member magazine of the Automobile Club of Southern California, published for AAA members from the club's Costa Mesa headquarters. It remains the largest regional lifestyle and travel magazine in the nation — the publication that inspires Southern Californians to experience their region and the world, covering travel, food, and life in Southern California and beyond.

From Touring Topics (1909) to Westways (1934–present), the magazine's arc is the story of the automobile in the American West — and of a motor club that understood, from the beginning, that drivers needed not just roads but reasons to travel them. Its publisher's website is https://calif.aaa.com.