Never-Ending Journey : Youth Railway Pass Fed Art Importer’s Wanderlust, Began His Life of Travel

When Harry Lawrence was a boy walking his dog along the beach at Belmont Shore, his attention would fasten on the freighters and passenger ships setting out for Asia. Mesmerized, he vowed that someday he would be on one of those ships.

Unable to shake his wanderlust and too young to board a ship, at 12, young Harry got a railway pass from his father and began a lifelong pursuit of travel. By 18, he had visited 42 states.

“I crossed the country,” said Lawrence, a Laguna Beach art dealer who for the past 30 years also has led tour groups to faraway places, collecting furniture and art. “That gives you the traveling bug. It’s a disease, this traveling business.”

At 81, Lawrence does not seem to be in any danger of slowing down.

On Feb. 4, he will be off for a tour that will include scheduled stops in Bali, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar. When he is not off on another adventure, Lawrence spends most of his time at his business on Coast Highway, Warren Imports Far East Fine Arts Inc., where he still works 6 1/2 days a week.

It is a blending of work and pleasure that has enabled Lawrence--who had just $250 in his pocket when he left the Navy in 1945--to amass an impressive accumulation of rare Asian art that draws buyers from around the nation, Europe and Asia.

“A lot of people would be bored, the number of times I’ve been everywhere,” Lawrence said. “But I love every trip every time I go.”

Lawrence was born in San Bernardino, and his family moved to Belmont Shore in 1922. When he was 12, Lawrence’s father, an accountant for the Santa Fe Railroad, gave him a railway pass. By 14, he was traveling alone to Arizona and New Mexico, eventually pushing on to Washington, Florida and Maine.

When the railway pass expired on his 18th birthday, Lawrence caught a passenger steamer and worked as a seaman to see the wider world.

After falling in love with Japan, China and Southeast Asia, Lawrence came home and enrolled in Woodbury College in Los Angeles, where he fell in love again, this time with a young woman, Maxine, whom he married in 1939.

When Pearl Harbor was bombed, Lawrence enlisted in the Navy. During his four-year stint, he worked as a naval intelligence officer and was captain of two amphibious landing ships.

After the war, a Laguna Beach couple offered to sell the Lawrences their business, Warren Import Gift Shop. Lawrence said he took three months to mull it over. In the fall of 1946, they moved to Laguna Beach.

“I thought, maybe I won’t amount to much in Laguna Beach,” Lawrence remembers thinking, “but it would sure be nice to live down here.”

The couple worked “shoulder-to-shoulder” seven days a week to build their business, Lawrence said. They had one daughter, Susan.

In 1954, they began taking annual trips around the world, exploring the bazaars of Tehran and Baghdad, collecting copper urns and serving trays and other goodies as they went. Lawrence began leading the tour groups about 30 years ago.

About 1965, the Lawrences bought a home on an acre of land at Moss Point, a lush oceanfront community, for $200,000.

Also around that time, the Lawrences opened Warren Imports--their current store--about five blocks from the gift shop, which closed about nine years ago.

Today, Lawrence said, about two-thirds of his inventory at his shop is fine Asian art, such as Buddhist altar tables and the pair of Ming cabinets, bathed in red lacquer, that he just sold to a buyer from New York City for about $10,000.

Lawrence, whose wife died in 1994, has been busy in the community almost since the day he moved here.

He has logged five decades of community service in Laguna Beach, working with the Chamber of Commerce, the Beautification Council, the Rotary Club, the Opera Pacific and a host of other civic and cultural groups.

His life, Lawrence said, has been “like a dream come true.”

“This is what should be inspiring to many young people,” he said. “If you settle on some realistic dream, it can be done.”