By Donna Campbell, First Club President
It’s October, 1983, and for the tenth time I’ve been told, “Sorry, our membership is full, but we’ll be happy to put you on our waiting list.” How wonderful! Only thirty people ahead of me, and it seems that the only openings that come up are when someone dies or moves.
What do I do? Obviously the best, if not the only, solution was to start a new book review club! So I invited my three closest friends, Trula Bentley, Shirley Frasher, and Irene Cook (all of whom I had met at Prestonwood Newcomers Club), to tell them of my idea. Presto, we have the 4th Wednesday Club. Well not exactly…we contacted several other friends to help organize the club and to serve on the first board. Then we had many meetings where we outlined the kind of club we wanted. We used our experience as officers of Prestonwood Newcomers Club and other organizations to form the new club. We borrowed yearbooks from some of the established book clubs to help write our by-laws. It was definitely a team effort with each organizing member putting in many hours finding places to meet, checking prices and menus, lining up book reviewers, filling out forms to meet the non-profit status and IRS requirements, etc.
For variety, the original plans included having luncheons and coffees on alternating months and one evening meeting per year to include spouses. We would have nine regular meetings, excluding the months of June, August and December.
The first meeting was held on May 14, 1984, at the Hilton Inn in Richardson. Eighty-eight ladies came to hear Joy Davis review Sold by Nan Lyons, a story about the missing Faberge eggs. Joy’s review was so good that she had all of us convinced it was a true story. Perhaps that is why all of the ladies who attended joined our new 4th Wednesday Club. This gave us more members the first year than we planned but we felt it wouldn’t be fair to exclude anyone who had attended our first meeting. The following year we amended our by-laws to increase the membership to eighty-five. Unfortunately, we still must tell guests, “Sorry, our membership is full, but we’ll be happy to put you on our waiting list.”