Judy Dever is a retired CPS teacher, a lifelong resident of Canaryville, and an avid traveler. She’s also a fan of classical music: “My only radio station—besides Saturday-morning Irish radio—is WFMT,” she says.
She pulled over to write down the phone number, and called Symphonic Voyages, the Chicago-based company putting the cruise together, for information. By the time she decided to sign on, in the fall, she’d had several “very pleasant” conversations with the president, Eric Stassen.
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Dever was out the $2,098 she’d paid Stassen, plus the $319 for trip insurance—which apparently doesn’t cover bankruptcy of the booking agent. But the thing that really pissed her off? “Eric never called me or sent me something to say that it’s all off,” she says. “That creeped me out. I thought I was totally scammed.”
“He said, ‘Did you get the bankruptcy notice?’
“I sat down and apologized to the woman who had had to hear this. She went on a cruise the first time in her life two years ago, so we talked about that, and I stuck around for about a half hour, and that was that.”
