In the last six decades, many things have changed in Los Gatos, and throughout it all, businessman Ed Stahl has been a community anchor. The Brooklyn-born Stahl moved to California following a stint in the US Army to work as a regional manager for Shell Oil, building gas stations, including California’s last wooden one. He established Travel Advisors of Los Gatos in 1961.
Los Gatos was a bucolic suburb of fewer than 10,000 residents in an agricultural area that more than tripled its population over subsequent decades. Leisure air travel was still in its infancy. Travel agents hand-wrote airline tickets on multi-layer stock that transferred information in red pigment to the copies below.
Stahl raised a family and traveled to, by his count, 137 countries. He made multiple trips to Greenland and the Taj Mahal. He visited Antarctica four times, where he bonded with penguins. The Haida Gwaii islands, off British Columbia, are one of his favorite destinations.
Stahl considers himself the “luckiest person in the world.” In 2022, he became the Guinness World Record record holder for oldest person to visit the North Pole, a month shy of his 91st birthday.
Stahl’s generosity is legendary, and a list of civic projects he supported would take volumes to recount. He joined the Los Gatos Rotary Club in 1966 and worked with fellow Rotarians to build a carousel at Oak Meadow Park. In 1982 he was a founding investor in the original Los Gatos Weekly, after the established newspaper declined under out-of-state ownership. He helped found the Bank of Los Gatos.
Brick-and-mortar travel agencies were prosperous businesses for many years, found in every city and town in the 1970s and 1980s. That all changed in the late 1990s as the Internet opened travel databases to the public for direct booking. Travel Advisors became a specialist in the cruise industry, helping Los Gatans plan their adventures on the high seas.
By the 2010s, the number of U.S. travel agencies had dropped by more than half from their 1990s peak, though Travel Advisors of Los Gatos persevered, supported by loyal customers and a dedicated staff. Last month, its team of advisors transitioned to All Cruise Travel, and the office ended scheduled hours (an office manager follows up on current bookings).
(Photo by Dan Pulcrano / Processed with Lensa with PT6 filter)
Stahl, now 94, still stops by the office to chat with people who drop in to visit.
“He’s never going to retire,” his longtime girlfriend MarLyn Rasmussen, a former Council member and Town clerk, says.
“I may be forced into it,” Stahl interjects.
