A dozen friends and family members gathered for dinner on Oct. 2 at Mentor Harbor Yacht Club to celebrate the 104th birthday of Arline Kneen. As a family friend for decades, I was among them.

Best known locally as the travel agent founder of Traveline, an Erie Street anchor in Willoughby that sold a few years ago, Kneen was elegant in a reversible silk jacket, her long white hair uplifted in a chignon atop her head.

The attire was perfect for a trip.

Cake closeup (Janet Podolak )

As guests exchanged memories of their long acquaintance with Kneen, she recalled her earliest travels.

“I was 8 when I lived in New Orleans for a year with another family,” she said.

That was in 1925, and her parents brought back to Ohio the 8-year-old daughter of friends for the school year after taking Arline by train to that Southern city.

“They really believed that travel was the answer for the prejudice in this country,” she recalled.

On that trip and during her months in the Crescent City, young Arline experienced a world of separate restrooms, drinking fountains, accommodations and travel for Black and white people.

The experience began for her a lifelong curiosity and commitment of empathy for others.

She founded Traveline in 1963, the pioneer woman business owner piloting it to become the state’s largest travel agency. Much of her earliest business was in helping to plan special-occasion trips, including honeymoons.

Judie and David Crockett, her first customers in 1963, gifted her with a photo taken during Kneen’s own 1940 honeymoon to Havana, Cuba. Then in her early 20s, she was perched on a boat wearing a wide-brimmed hat, her lifelong elegance already apparent.

A photo of Arline Kneen in Cuba on her 1940 honeymoon was a gift shown off to the gathering. (Janet Podolak)

Kneen helped plan the Crocketts’ own honeymoon to Bermuda 50 years ago.

“Back then, I had never been out of Ohio or on an airplane,” said Judie. “I thought Bermuda and the Bahamas were the same place.”

Judie and David Crockett were Arline Kneen’s first Traveline customers when they booked their Bermuda honeymoon in 1963. (Janet Podolak)

But the Crocketts, recently returned from a Mediterranean cruise and time spent on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, have traveled often since then. Many of those journeys have been arranged by Kneen and her colleagues.

Rob Kneen, who at 67 is Arline’s youngest son, recalled a childhood of being exposed to travel, art and literature by his parents. The family hosted foreign-exchange students from Colombia, Japan, Argentina and Chile throughout his youth. One student, a Chilean woman they called Teddi, has returned to visit Arline and the family many times.

Rob Kneen’s wife, Nancy, recalls the couple’s own wedding reception at Mentor Harbor Yacht Club. Despite being part of a professional travel family, they weren’t immune to the bumps in the road of journeying.

“We had such a good time we overslept the next day and almost missed our honeymoon flight to London aboard the Concorde,” she recalled. The supersonic Concorde, which was retired in 2003, made the transAtlantic crossing between New York and London in less than three hours.

After spending some time in Florida this winter, Arline Kneen’s next European trip will also be to London in the spring — this time with daughter Jill, who was ill and couldn’t attend the 104th birthday party. They’ll be accompanying Jill’s daughter, Kristin, to her new job in that city.

Granddaughter Lindsay Archibald, a physician living in Columbus with her veterinary-student husband, Wiley, calls Arline “Nanny.” She’s Rob and Nancy’s daughter.

Lindsay, who honeymooned in the Galapagos, recalled for the group a 2009 trip with her grandmother to South Africa where their driver had to chase baboons from their car with a baseball bat.

Arline spent her earliest years in Cleveland, growing up on East 114th Street, near Bob Hope’s family. They attended the same East Side dance school and although he was quite a few years older, she recalls dancing with him as a teenager.

Arline continued to dance into her senior years, celebrating her 73rd birthday along the Stuart Highway in Australia’s vast Outback.

That was in 1990, and my husband, Ted, and I had joined her for the three-week trip along with five others. So I told a story from that trip to the gathering:

“Our lodging place was also a restaurant, gas station, air strip and general store, so far away from anywhere that our hosts had to make arrangements for our visit by flying to get provisions. The bar room was not a large one, so when our hosts learned it was Arline’s birthday, they placed a wooden platform over the pool table so she could dance.

“And dance she did.”