BY THE TOLLMAN FAMILY
Dear Traveler,
There are times when we can actually see the curve of history unfolding around us. 2020 has been such a year, and by no means easy. Most painfully, many have lost loved ones to this awful pandemic. Many others have lost their jobs and face difficult hardships, including colleagues who started the year with us but are now, unfortunately, unemployed. For those of us who love to travel, it has been filled with delays and disappointments brought on by Covid-19. Suffice to say, while all of us at The Travel Corporation began 2020 with great anticipation of celebrating our first century as a family owned and run business, this was not the year any of us had imagined.
And yet, even bad years can bring good things. While physical travel was more limited than at any point in our lives, we have nevertheless traveled tremendous distances through time and memory. It has been our great joy each month this year for those of us at TTC to look back over this past century and share with you tales of how we began, who we have become, and why we do what we do.
Thus, anxious as we all are to turn the page on 2020 and to begin a gradual global recovery in 2021, we invite you to join us as we look back over the stories we’ve told this past year, so beautifully narrated by Vicki in our videos, and through the voices of guest writers in this series of blogs.
While this year was not how we had envisioned the start of our second century, those of us at TTC know well that great journeys do not always have easy beginnings. That was true for our founder, Solomon Tollman who, as a boy of fifteen, was forced to leave his home and family in Lithuania to escape oppression of life under the Czar. After being smuggled out in a train, he eventually arrived in London with nothing more than the few gold rubles his mother had sewn into his clothing. Six months later he traveled steerage class on a steam ship to Cape Town, South Africa. There he survived the last pandemic – the Spanish Flu of 1918-19 – and made his way up South Africa’s rugged west coast to the sleepy fishing village of Paternoster.
