Mensans Love to Talk : Lively Repartee Easily Cracks These Eggheads

At the first Mensa meeting Traci Owen attended, a coven of white witches who were Mensa members healed an ailing canary.

Owen, then 14 and the youngest Mensan present, was enthralled.

“High school in North Carolina was a fairly airy and empty experience for me,” she remembers. “Mensa gave me the chance to enjoy some meaningful and unusual conversations.”

If there’s any one thing that many Mensans say they have in common with one another, it’s talking. About almost anything.

“I’ve never met a Mensan who wasn’t a talker,” said Owen, a 22-year-old graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who now attends Surface Warfare Officers School and is assigned to the destroyer tender Acadia. “I’ve met all kinds of Mensans, and most of them are eager to speak their opinion.”

“Heated discussions--that’s one of the most interesting aspects,” said Steve Weller, a 35-year-old former policeman who holds a “Baby Boomers” party each month at his home in Clairemont for fellow Mensans. “You meet other people who can give you a good argument.”

“A Mensan will talk about anything under the sun,” said member Linda Read, a brunette in her 30s wearing tiger-striped stretch pants and a red flower in the buttonhole of an oversized jacket.

Mark Ogilvie, a 29-year-old computer programmer who since June has been president of the San Diego chapter of Mensa International, described a typical Mensa discussion and the sort of segues that are apt to occur: “You’ll be in a social conversation, having a beer and talking about sports, and suddenly the conversation moves into quantum mechanics.”

“At a Mensa party, any off-the-wall comment I might make will be picked up by somebody,” agreed Larry Hoppis, 53, an electrical engineer who joined Mensa three years ago, after he was divorced. “It’s amazing how often in straight society I’ll throw out something and it will fall with a dull thud. Here I can relax and be myself.”

Hoppis, tall, bearded and wearing a baseball cap and a baby blue T-shirt covered with adjectives proclaiming him as “valuable, good, courageous, smart. . . . (‘I think it even said “Thin” here’), defines a typical Mensa event as “a horde of people noshing and yakking.”

What is Mensa? It was started in London as a round-table group, for the purpose of solving the world’s problems. (The name derives from the Latin word for “table,” not from the Mexican slang equivalent of “dumb chick.”)

Mensa has since evolved into an international social and cultural organization. The membership is a diverse assemblage of men and women--close to 1,500 in the local chapter, nearly 100,000 in about 100 countries around the world--who are eligible for membership simply because of their standardized test scores. They are among the 2% of the population who score in the 98th percentile and above. They may have qualified with an IQ test score of 132 or above, or with high scores on their college boards, Scholastic Aptitute Tests, law boards, Graduate Record Exams or other standardized tests.

Many members say that Mensans themselves are the first to belittle the IQ test, and to try to erase the popular misconception of Mensans as intellectual snobs. Perish the thought of the ivory-tower egghead.

“I find Mensa is less an elitist group than most social organizations,” said Bruce Ford, 39, a member since 1966. “We only have one criterion for membership, a high score on a standardized test. It’s a very impersonal thing. We don’t discriminate on the basis of race, religion, creed, financial status, political beliefs--all of those things we don’t care about. That’s what makes us such a diverse group. We only have one silly, little unimportant item which makes it basically a group that is very sharp and quick to understand anything that’s discussed.”

Ford, a safety officer for the water pollution control facility at Point Loma, first learned about Mensa in a Reader’s Digest article. He met Mensans around the world while serving in the Army, but he has been particularly active in the organization since his divorce 10 years ago. He is activities chairman for the local chapter and one of its most visible members, often turning up at five or six Mensa events a week. Ford, who estimates that 99% of his social life revolves around Mensa, organizes member trips to Mexico, and heads up several Mensa SIGs, or special interest groups, including a target-shooting group and a regular party dubbed the North Park Dilettantes.

Ford named more than 50 other San Diego Mensa SIGs--groups devoted to everything from pizza pig-outs to “Star Trek” and Monty Python, from political and philosophical discussions to baring all at Black’s Beach, from flying, board games, investments, theatergoing, semantics, wine tasting, speaking French, movies, nostalgia, shooting pool, singing, scuba diving and science fiction to computer technology and software trades.

“Mensans like to breeze from topic to topic,” Ford said.

And, some members say, though they’re reluctant to generalize about the group, many Mensans are more educated in their avocations than in their careers. Owen and Ford both say many Mensans are not successful.

“Most Mensans I know are under-achievers,” Owen said. “Lots of them are very dissatisfied with their jobs. They can’t get along with management and have a very hard time. There are the few who are top-of-the-line, everything you expect Mensans to be, but to be frank, there are so many Mensans who are losers.”

“We have such a strong insight into our potential that we’re never satisfied,” Ford added. He said Mensa is something like a fraternal organization for many members who, while they may be disappointed in their jobs, blossom in a social situation.

“In Mensa, everyone is accepted, pretty much,” he said.

Ogilvie said that the Mensan who has not fully realized his or her potential is probably commonplace, and he blames it to some extent on education.

“Our school system seems to target the gifted student a little differently than I feel it should,” Ogilvie said. “Personally, I feel in my own travels through the educational system the word ‘under-achiever’ was used a lot, even when there wasn’t much more I could do.”

Members of the chapter work as advocates for gifted students, he said, and have established a scholarship fund. A mentor program is also being developed.

Linda Read agreed with the assessment that many Mensans are out of step.

“They do their own thing,” she said. “But in a conversation, if you jump around from subject to subject, they can stay with you.”

Read, whose career has jumped from jobs in public relations, galleries and arts organizations, and at rocker Todd Rundgren’s video studio to work as a stewardess and organizing poetry series--along with intervening stretches of unemployment--first attended Mensa meetings in Philadelphia during high school with a boyfriend who had been a member since grammar school.

“When I arrived here in 1971, San Diego was a cultural oasis. It was like a Novocaine bath,” she said. She said she valued Mensa as a way to come in contact with stimulating people then, and still does.

“It has more or less been a real safety net, as far as being able to meet people interested in a lot of things,” Read said. “People seek friends at their own level.”

When Read recently returned to San Diego, she needed help moving.

“A half-dozen Mensans, some I didn’t even know, showed up to help,” she said. “It was like a barn-raising.”

Owen also recalled Mensans who have come to her aid. During her first spring break at the Naval Academy, she needed a place to stay.

“The first contact I had with any Mensan at all in Maryland, I was asking a big favor,” she said. “And there it was answered. It’s been the same thing here in San Diego.”

Owen, who is the local group’s membership officer, said the San Diego chapter includes many military people, many people in technological fields, many computer buffs.

“Surprisingly few are in the upper managerial levels,” she said.

About 300 of the 1,500 members actively participate in local Mensa parties and groups, and most of those are in their 30s to 60s. Owen said there is a real shortage of “available” women: While most of the men are single or divorced, most women members are married.

Read said she is gratified by the fact that many of the men in Mensa are feminists, who treat her no differently in a discussion or argument than they would treat a man.

Though Mensa was originally started to save the world (“If indeed the world is interested in being saved,” Ogilvie said.), the San Diego chapter is not particularly active in community service. Compared with Mensa chapters on the East Coast, the San Diego group seems unusually inclined to partying, repartee and fun.

One recent get-together was dreamed up in response to the November issue of Playboy and its pictorial layout of several “Women of Mensa.” The purpose of the party was to select a San Diego entry for a possible article on the men of Mensa, and the local Mensa talent was standing in line to take a crack at such glory.

As one naked Mensa man stood stroking his chest with an ice cube and revealing his sexual fantasies in detail, Susan Nikolai, a computer systems manager, talked of her fun-loving SIG called WACKO, dedicated to Wild and Constantly Krazy Outings--grape stomps, grunion hunts, you name it.

But she added, there’s more to Mensa than that. She too finds it refreshing not to have to downplay her intelligence when she’s at a Mensa event.

“Every singles group has something in common,” Nikolai said. “But in Mensa the only thing that all these people have in common is intelligence, which is next to nothing. So it’s never dull. And it’s wonderful to meet men who aren’t intimidated by an intelligent woman.”

DR, STEVE LOPEZ / Los Angeles Times