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CHAPTER XIV

CARDS AND CHARACTERS

FROM THE VERY BEGINNING of the Club, the wardrooms always have been a sanctuary for members. For one thing, never, under any circumstances, is any woman permitted to cross the threshold. Further, guests are not admitted; only members may play or kibitz. Playing cards attract a variety of individuals. There are those who merely desire to divert themselves for an hour or two; others are impelled by a deeper devotion.

The Club management, under instructions of the Games Committee, has provided small taborets which conveniently can be set beside a player's chair. There his meals are served and he can play the clock around without taking his eyes off his cards or his opponents, becoming so adept that he lunches and dines, aye, and sometimes breakfasts by the sense of touch alone!

Any cardroom in any club will generate remarkable individuals. Perhaps the one remembered here for the longest time was Frederic Haskin. His system consisted largely in incessant talking which, in the case of newcomers at least, had so hypnotic effect that they became Mr. Haskin's easy victims. He earned the fond nickname Gabby. Nevertheless he invariabiy insisted that his opponents were reducing him to mendicancy!

A long remembered player was Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole. He was elected as Hawaiian Delegate to the Fifty-eighth Congress beginning March 4, 1903. In those days there were no drives for Statehood and, indeed there was very little for a Delegate to do. This gave him ample time to spend in the Club and almost all of it was devoted to the cardroom.

Fred DuBois was one of the first Senators of Idaho when the State was admitted to the Union and it is doubtless accurate to say that he was the first United States Senator to haunt the wardroom. Ht remained a fixture there for many years, much beloved. Harvey Jacob, Harvey Jester, Graham Nichol, Avery Marks, Joyce O'Hare, James William Bryan - a long list of men each, in his way, what might be called a character in almost any other club. Each had his special manner of play. Henry Flynn and Stephen Walter, at a later period, found it expedient to distract other players by loud and inconsequent conversation and song, while they gathered in the pots.

Valentin Ivonov, press attache of the Soviet Embassy, ponders his move while the Club's chess champion, Albert W. Fox, puffs his pipe and waits.

In the cardroom there were also facilities for other games than cards. Dominoes was the game of Charles Michelson when he battled with Leo Sack of the United Press, later Minister to Costa Rica, with Ben Hall Lambe of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, Harvey Jacob and many other devotees. The cardroom built up quite a group of chess players of more than average skill. Joe Dear, Monty Sutherland, George Zielke, Lu Warren, Daniel Ring, James Haggerty, Michael Hudoba and others.

In the spring of 1958 a notable chess tournament was played, the games extending over several weeks. After elimination games, the final contestants were Albert W. Fox, former newsman and later a lawyer, and Valentin Ivanov, Press Attache of the Russian Embassy. While the tournament was entirely a Club affair, inevitably it took on the character of a friendly international struggle. Mr. Ivanov won the first two games handily. The next two games fell to Mr. Fox and on the tense evening of May 8 Mr. Fox won the final game and the tournament.

The Games Committee fixes cutes and limits amounts of bets. Fancy variations have sometimes permitted stakes to rise higher than men on newspaper salaries can afford. When that occurs, the Games Committee steps in with a stern reminder and, if necessary, a new rule.

From its inception, the Club has had a pool and billiards room. In the Albee building, the billiard room was especially popular with emphasis on Kelly pool. For a period after lunch each day the tables were surrounded by players and spectators who joined often in the betting. In the new building, Kelly seems to have been forgotten. Walter Green, Louis White, Newman Wright, Hobart Rowen, Ewing Scott, Burt Mills, Henry Flynn, Mark Beeman, Colman Barrett. John Whittles, Glen Bayless, Jack Wilson, Wil Redmond, William Drake - a long list of doughty cue-men demonstrated their widely varying skill. In the days of Eugene Leggett and Lee Poe Hart betting ran high but later was very strictly limited to ten cents a game. Two or three times a year an expert exhibition player is retained to give brief lectures and show how points are made. Burge McFall and a few others playad billiards but some form of pool, often accompanied by almost riotous glee, is the usual game.

While, perhaps, under the general jurisdiction of the Games Committee, there are other activities of a seasonal nature which are served by their own officials. From early times, there has been a golf tournament open only to members. As the Club has no rural links, each year some golf or country club in the suburbs of the National Capital accords the privilege of its facilities - Burning Tree, Kenwood Chevy Chase, Woodmont, Columbia or some other. There is a National Press Club Cup, a George R. Holmes Cup and other prizes annually striven for.

Eight ball in the corner pocket, says Robert Tate Allen to his opponent, Grey Leslie, in the Club's billiard room.

The George R. Holmes Cup was donated by Basco Timmons in honor and memory of the man who for many years was chief of the International News Service Washington bureau. President Franklin Roosevelt, hearing the cup had been offered, said he would like to design it. He made a sketch which was followed in the making of the cup.

While the Club has produced no champions, it has numbered excellent golfers and of course there are entrants known for other activities such as President Harding, Vice President Nixon, members of both Houses of Congress, judges and officers from the military. Here are a few names which have appeared repeatedly on many Club tournament rosters: Edward B . McLean, Robert J. Bender, John E. McClure, E. A. Merkle, Fred Perkins, Joe Gambatese, Maury Long, Lieut. Gen. Floyd Parks, Frank Dennis and Joe Dwyer.

Each year a tennis tournament also is played at the courts of some hospitable country club with the usual cups and prizes competed for by members. In recent years Courtland Ferguson, Earle Brown, Alphonso Smith and Burke Wilkinson have been among the more agile members of this set.

THE NEWS CAULDRON OF THE WORLD is the title of an article in Nation's Business, March 1946, by Carlisle Bargeron, in which these caricatures appeared. In this panel, from left: Junios Wood, W. M. Kiplinger, President Truman, Sir Wilmott Lewis, Paul Wooton, Lord Halifax, The Duke of Windsor, Cardinal Pacelli, Robert Wooley, Homer Dodge, Lawrence Sullivan.

The first panel above: Paul McGahan, Charles Gridley. Final panel: Frank Albus, Frank Warfield, Emil Hurja, Joyce O'Hara, Howard Suttle, John O. Williams, Constantine Chekrezi, William Hammers, Bill Doherty, Richard Seeley Jones, Harry Lourie, Ben Stern, Norman Baxter, Bob Watson, Charles Wood, Leo Sack, Jack Edwards, Jim Hood.

There is also a bridge tournament, for the Club boasts some very notable masters of that intricate game. There was a comparatively brief period under the protection of Frank Lord, a bridge devotee, when weekly bridge meetings were held within the Club quarters with wives or other women guest players taking part. This invasion did not long survive. Some of today's bridge enthusiasts are : Dave Sentner, Ned Brooks, Leo Farrell, Orville Crouch, John C. Davis and Jack Foxe.

Every club in the course of its existence develops types of members regarded as "characters." One of the most notable in Press Club history was James Grice - Judge Grice to everyone and for so long that few knew he had a Christian name. He belonged to an old Georgia family, and in Washington was a lawyer specializing in income tax practice. He had some distinguished clients and a number of very wealthy ones. Briefs he had filed in tax suits in court with a successful outcome were quoted in law text books. In a word, he was an authority when income tax matters were in question. Then he grew tired.

The "hat doctor" was Clifton "Doc" Watson, the Club's first pensioner, who never gave the wrong hat to the right face. No checks necessary with "Doc".

No one ever quite knew the cause of his weariness but it was deep enough to induce him to renounce what must have been among the more profitable income tax practices in Washington. Thereafter he spent all his time in the Club. Day in and day out he sat in the Club very seldom even glancing at a newspaper and sometimes sitting for hours alone. He dozed a good deal; in fact he was observed to have mastered the quadrupal art of sleeping standing up, like a horse!

Of a wholly different type was John Lorance. Before coming to Washington as a correspondent for New York and New England papers, he had worked as a ship news reporter covering New York Harbor in the days of sail well before the Spanish American War. He was a mature man when he became a Charter Member of the Club. A quiet man, of much dignity, he was an avid reader of newspapers and could be found in the Club every day devouring all editions. The years passed, the sixties, the seventies. At one time when he was Chairman of the Library Committee, he called a Club porter and instructed him to take many of the books and throw them away. This work was fairly well started when a staff employee came to a member and told him that "Mr. Lorance was throwing the library away." This seemed incredible but proved all too true. When asked why he had taken so drastic an action, Mr. Lorance explained that the authors of all those books were dead and were no longer making news so there was no use in keeping them!

As the years advanced, so did his infirmities and he had a number of medicine caches around the Club. In the library, he had hidden medicine bottles behind certain books rarely used by other members. However, sometimes an unsuspecting member would consult, for example, a volume from Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf and disclose a very pharmacist's store of nostrums. Then, too, the noises of the pool and billiards room, near to the library and the writing room, annoyed him. So at night he would hide the balls. A day or two might pass before the balls were discovered behind the books.

The "Bascom Timmons Bandwagon" didn't last long as the 1906 Maxwell. "Tim" stands in here, but Jim Farley launched the brief boom at the 1940 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The men in the picture are, left to right: Barney Kilgore, Mike Flynn, Lacey Reynolds, Bill Kennedy, Carlisle Bargeron, Tim, Ed Jamieson Harold Brayman, George S. Holmes. Timmons got one vote . . . but lots of cheers.

William J. Dwyer earned a niche among the "characters." He had been associated with William Jennings Bryan in both the practice of the law and the newspaper business. The Silver Tongued Orator of the Platte had fully convinced him in the issue of free silver - indeed apparently effected a more lasting conversion upon Bill Dwyer than upon himself for Mr. Dwyer continued to talk of nothing else whatever, whereas Mr. Bryan could spare time to oppose Evolution and to favor Peace. A charming and erudite man, upon that one subject he became burdensome, so much so that Sir Willmott Lewis posted a sign over a door in the cardroom (which Mr, Dwyer frequented) reading "Exit in Case of Dwyer.''

Another "character" was Charles Stewart, the Young Pretender, as some gently called him.

It became his practice to descend from the writing room, where he did his daily stint, to the taproom every fifteen minutes to take a glass of port. Asked why he did not have a bottle at his desk, he explained that such an arrangement would cause him to drink too much.

Ranch foremen for the Club's Western-style outing at Fort Hunt were, left to right: H. R. Baukhage, Ed Kelly, and Carter Barron.

H. O. Bishop instantly assumed the role of a "character" in almost any place he entered. A Pennsylvania Dutchman, he looked as though he had been painted by Rembrandt. He never used his full name although he confided to at least one member that the initials (he usually was called H.O. or Bish) stood for Horatio Olympus. Having spent some years in Texas, many people had the impression that he was a Texan, an impression he did nothing to discourage.

Not a tall man but with a vast breadth of solid muscle and bone, he pervaded a room and any company with his genial presence. He was a news and magazine writer, chiefly on American historical subjects but also entered the public relations field. It was Bish who publicized "Chessie," the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad cat when he represented that company.

Always he carried a stout walking stick but never one of a conventional design. Only the late Sir Harry Lauder could have competed with him in the variety and crookedness of his canes. Everything about him exuded individuality. For years he presided over the "Bishop's Table" at the Club with a large circle of friends. In the Club library is a small bronze of his seated figure, the work of the sculptor Max Kalish.

Had Don Quixote married Mother Ella Reeve Bloor, a conceivable offspring would have been Gardner Jackson, reporter and publicist with Dean Swift and Titania or the Lost Lenore as godparents. To him hard-ship was a banquet and he spent an active life and his personal fortune attempting to cope with it. To watch him and John O'Donnell of the New York Daily News in discourse was like observing a wasp and a firefly. And the grave and earnest Laurence Todd, the dynamic Ben Marsh; the rollicking philosopher Charles Erwin - the Club overflows with eager, articulate saviors of mankind. Some are gone; others ever are ready to free the breach. Their conversations cover everything in any phase. One may see them strain at Nazis and swallow Communists; pile Pelion on Ossa in one breath and remove such mountains in the next!

A special and very gay Club delegation journeyed to the New York World's Fair in 1939. Here they debark from the train at the Fair station.

It was Henry Flynn of the National Catholic Welfare Conference news service who, with the help of H. R. Baukhage and others established Hermits, Ltd. The product of a rainy afternoon, the enterprise was designed to do things for people averse to personal effort. It started when some member, weary of the indignities of existence, said he would like to be a hermit but could not spare the time from his bread-winning. So Mr. Flynn had the inspiration that others, at a fee, could do his hermiting for him.

That became the basic idea of Hermits, Ltd. The group would do nothing which required physical effort. It would worry for people. It would beware of the dog. It would beware of imitations. It would use no hooks. It would think nothing of it. Its triumph came when it agreed to refrain from flushing toilets while the train is standing in the station! All this could be accomplished without stirring out of the Club.

The Club never will lack notable individuals from such early ones as William Warwick Corcoran of the Washington Post, who became a Consul General of the United States, to Bernard Capehart, a Puck in bow tie whose wealth of humor is a Club fixture and Robert I. Berger, equally at home singing hymns in Seth Parker's Sunday evening sitting room a generation ago and cornering statesmen in the Rotunda of the Capital today!

There have been others - James J. Butler, Jay Jerome Williams, William D. Hassett, George Edmonds, John Boyle, Henry Eland, Hector Fuller to name a few. Of these there are not enough to go around. Men, not buildings, make clubs!

Clubs-within-the-Club have a way of springing up, some of them ephemeral, some lasting. They consist of coteries of members with their own special interests. For example, there is the Clear and Opaque Club, organized largely by Joseph A. Bors, long with the International News Service. Every member is a president of the club and its motto is: "Yes. I know that."

The Tuesday Musical Club, composed chiefly of aeronauts, meets on Fridays for no especial reason, having no business of any kind. Mr. Burton English or William Boyle or somebody or nobody presides.

In February, 1958, the Mafeking Society of Washington was given a final organization after an initial start some years earlier. It takes its name from the accident that inspiration for the society manifested itself to Aled Davies, Paul Scott Rankin and one or two others on Mafeking Day, the date of the relief of Mafeking in the South African War in 1900. Robert W. Cooper of The Times of London is president. It consists of British Empire correspondents, including Douglas Wills, Frank Mitchell, Richard Brett-smith, Donald Ludlow, Jack Broadbent, Ed Hadley and others.

An example of an inner club which flourished but has passed was the Turf Club. Elsewhere in this testament it has been stated that the National Press Club was dry during Prohibition, as it was, but after removal to the new building, members fell into the custom of using a little room, originally planned as a barber shop, and which came to be known as the Paddock, as a place to deposit personal (not Club) property in the form of ardent spirits - some home-made, some right off the boat! Not more than ten people could occupy the room comfortably yet there were occasions when 20 to 30 congregated there. There were lockers and there was a basin for running water, usually filled with cracked ice.

Not all the merrymakers at the Family Frolics are kids. Here is the Frolic committee in 1956: standing, left to right: Joe Davidson; John Baer; clown; Steve Walter; Ed Jamieson; Al Zappeloni; clown; Gib Sandefer; Jim Montfort; Frank Kuest; Don Burke; John Cosgrove. Seated in the Bantam: Chairman Ed Kelly, at the wheel; Club president Frank "Buck" Holeman.

This isn't Univac, but as "Cavinu" it's funnier. Charles Collingwood of CBS News pulls the levers and the thinking machine does wonders at the inauguration party for Lu Warren in 1955. The gunman attached to the arm is Jack Doherty, part of the machine not built, as was the rest of it, by Cab Phillipsand Lew Shollenberger.

The Turf Club had no officers, no minutes were kept. But that narrow space knewmany of the leading spirits of Washington journalism. Among members as well as guests were distinguished legislators, holders of high office, jurists. A political party was formed there; that is, a Press Club political party. It was tinged with liberalism and was opposed in principle to "the ins." In time this Turf Club Party bore one of its number triumphantly to victory as president of the entire Club!

In its first year, the Press Club saw the formation of a group to become enviably famous in later history. August 22, 1908, Jerome S. Fanciulli, a Charter Member, arranged for a meeting at the Club which resulted in the organization of the Aero Club of Washington. At the meeting, a dinner (the first formal affair ever given in the Club), appeared Capt. Thomas S. Baldwin, Augustus Post, Gen. Allen, Chief Signal Officer of the Army; Prof. Albert Zahm of Catholic University; Orville Wright, Lincoln Beechey, Maj. George Squier, head of the Army Air Corps in the First World War, and Lieuts. Frank P. Lahm, Benjamin D. Foulois and Thomas E. Selfridge of the Signal Corps. Gen. Foulois later headed American air arms and Lieut. Selfridge, (after whom Selfridge Air Field is named) was the first Army air casualty.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Some characters are always growling!