It started with my father, Martin Lazar:

...............testing.............not sure that I want to do this, Nov 11, 2015

My father was born in Taicha, Hungary in 1896.  At the age of 18, he and all of his male classmates were offered gymnasium graduation (high school) if they joined the Austro-Hungarian army.  They would not have to take tests for graduation and they would become officers.  It was the beginning of WWI.   As I understand the story, they all accepted, became officers and in very short order were captured by the Russians (the White Army) and were sent to prison camp in Siberia.   After one week in camp my father was sent to a pharmacy in the local town.  He was to be a free helper to the family that owned the pharmacy, on loan from the prison camp.  Not long after, the Red Army swept by and the pharmacy owners were taken away and my father stayed on in the pharmacy.

In 1918 the war ended and my father learned he was no longer a Hungarian - we was now a Czech and had to go back into the army.  Instead he came to America to Evanston.  After a few jobs he became a bank teller (Kaufman State Bank), was earning his bachelor's degree in accounting at Northwestern University and was writing research papers on South American minerals (copper) but slowly drifted into European currencies.  In those days, when an American citizen applied to bring a relative to the United States for the purposes of immigration, it was necessary to buy the steamship ticket in European currency;  for my father's clients that was Hungarian Pengos and German Deutschmarks.

In 1926 he was approached by Northern Trust Bank and was asked to form a foreign exchange company which Northern Trust would support, sending their clients to my father,  as these currencies were too speculative for them to become involved with.  Soon after a steamship company, I believe North German Lloyd, offered  an agency agreement to my father, to sell one way immigrant steamship tickets from Bremerhaven to New York.  Later, the Nickle Plate Railroad asked the same...if you are sending people to New York, why not put them on the Nickle Plate Railroad, through  Canada to Chicago.

Thus was born Nortown Travel, at that time named Globe Travel and located at 108 North LaSalle Street in downtown Chicago.

Dick Lazar

I never intended to become a travel agent.   I received my bachelor's in engineering at the University of Illinois in 1960 and my master's in economics (MBA) from the University of Chicago in 1965.  But I was a full fledged, hard working, over-worked, under paid,  travel agent by 1965 and there I stayed.

Fast forward 55 years....2015.... hard to believe.  I am still here.  Just to keep the record straight, Nortown moved "into Sentinel Travel in 2006 and I operate as an outside contractor.  But we are still a corporation, still Nortown Travel Service, Inc. in the state of Illinois.

Travel Blog -Why?

 

As many of my wonderful and loyal clients and friends know, earlier in my life I did not travel too much.  There was my sailboat, my dear Susan who was sick for so many years and all the other things in our "normal" lives that keep us from doing what is in our heart and mind.  I have been very lucky and I now have a wonderful and perfect, like-minded friend (we shall call her Anita) and we are traveling....

A caveat here.   We are traveling the way we want to travel, not the way Anita and I have traveled earlier in our lives and in spite of what I write in the previous paragraph, we have both traveled quite a bit.  But now we travel as old people who can walk and walk and walk, really walk a lot. We are not in a hurry!!!!   And we love to look....it is delicious and I am going to write about what we have done.   Caveat II - I am not sure most people would want to travel like this, nor is this even a wise way to travel.  We get lost!  We waste a lot of time.  We spend a great deal of time researching, before we go, but when we actually depart on this well planned trip, we are not quite sure just what we are going to do.   

have to stop here and figure out how to Link......

Germany and Poland

Driving across the Canyonlands of Utah

Madrid

Marrakech


not sure what else, maybe how to rush through Italy and Greece while on a ship.

coming next?   Maybe Japan.   Maybe Paris.