Promoting pedestrian viewpoints

People who take Boston by Foot tours tend to get into them, but most are not as engaged as a particular man in his late 50s who was on Eugenia Grigoris's tour of Victorian Back Bay last year.

''I did have one touree who got so excited about the John Hancock Building that he had to jump in front of me and more or less give the tour of the building," Grigoris recalled in a recent interview. ''He said everything I was going to say."

That kind of enthusiasm, though not entirely welcome that particular day, mirrors the passion of the approximately 200 volunteers who staff Boston by Foot, a nonprofit organization in its 29th year of offering walking tours of the Hub of the Universe.

Like Grigoris, who grew up in Arlington, most of the tour guides don't live in Boston. For them, the city technically isn't home, but it is a passion.

Kevin Kelliher, a retired telecommunications manager and consultant who lives in Reading, started giving tours last year. Kelliher, who grew up in Everett, has never lived in Boston proper, but he feels a part of it, and giving tours of the city helps him maintain his connection to it.

''I like it because of the interaction, and also you're kind of a goodwill ambassador for Boston," Kelliher said. ''People read about it from all over the world, and they come here expecting to get an understanding."

Boston by Foot is the creation of Polly Flansburgh, who got the idea in 1976 from a woman who gave comparable tours of Chicago. Hard as it is to imagine today, what with Duck tours and trolleys and formerly metered parking spots set aside for tour buses, there were few organized tours of Boston at the time.

Flansburgh, a Lincoln resident, developed a tour-guide course based on lectures from experts, books on Boston history and architecture, and actual tours.

Today the organization offers 90-minute tours from May through October of Beacon Hill, the North End, Victorian Back Bay, Literary Landmarks, Boston Underground, and The Heart of the Freedom Trail, along with a Freedom Trail tour designed for children. There are also specialized tours-of-the-month developed by guides.

About 10,000 people a year take the tours, most of which cost around $10. Revenues cover expenses, which run about $100,000 a year and include advertising and promotional materials.

The training is rigorous, bordering on intense. Guides-in-training attend five-hour sessions on five consecutive Saturdays during the spring. The sessions include a two-hour lecture by an expert on some facet of Boston's history and buildings, followed by small discussion groups and then a 90-minute training tour.

Students must complete four papers during the course, which culminates with a two-part final exam: a written test featuring slides of buildings followed by a tour test, during which each student is picked to give a short presentation from memory on a particular building.

Guides-in-training pay $95 for the course, not including materials. And they're not done once they pass -- to keep their standing, each guide must give at least six tours a year.

The training, while hard, ensures a certain standard of knowledge.

Rob Radloff, chairman of the Boston Foundation for Architecture, a nonprofit organization that supports Boston by Foot with grants, said the guides provide valuable information about the city's buildings.

''It's a well-thought-through explanation of the architecture, but in understandable layman's terms," Radloff said. ''They really spend time to get the message right."

While the course requires a fair amount of reading, many of the veteran tour guides do far more on their own. Guides not only prepare for their tours, they also try to anticipate questions, a never-ending task.

Carrie Conaway, a Medford resident and deputy director of the New England Public Policy Center, a policy research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, is in her second season giving tours. She recently read Stephen Puleo's book ''Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919" (2003).

''I don't give the North End tour, but you never know when somebody is going to ask you about that," Conaway said.

Betty McCarthy, a retired history teacher and Chelmsford resident who has been giving tours since 1980, estimates she has 50 to 60 books about Boston.

She said it's typical for Boston by Foot tour guides to study the subjects of their tours all the time, because they become objects of love.

''They're willing to put the time in because they're interested, and they get more interested the more they learn," McCarthy said. ''People stick with Boston by Foot because they get more out of it than they put into it."

Most of the guides have war stories, such as giving a tour in wintry weather, which occasionally persists even through late May. (Most of the tours run rain or shine.) There are the John Kerry sightings in Louisburg Square, when whole groups of people disappear to gawk.

Most of the people who take tours are serious about them, the guides say, but some, of course, are more informed than others. Boston is known for being walkable, but some out-of-towners are a little optimistic.

McCarthy remembers a time during the late 1990s when she was giving a tour of the North End.

''And this woman came running behind me and said, 'Now when do we see Plymouth Rock?' " McCarthy said. ''So you can see how people can take the tour and get things sorted out."