Attending This Club Is a Must--Sometimes
For several years, I’ve belonged to an Orange County group of communicators of various types called the Dutch treat club, west (the de rigueur lower case will be explained later), which meets once a month for good talk and to listen to an impressive assortment of speakers. I’ve been a lousy member, full always of the finest of intentions but attending only intermittently and feeling both guilt and irritation with myself as a result.
I tend to treat the Dutch treat club much as I do the splendid pile of books on my bedside table. I find great comfort and considerable pleasure in knowing that they are there, waiting to be read. But I don’t read them nearly often enough.
Many of the speakers at the Dutch treat club meetings come from the membership, all of whom can draw on fascinating histories. One such recent speaker was John Weld, a vigorous octogenarian, who has packed a dozen mostly flamboyant careers into a single lifetime--and he makes it clear that he’s far from finished yet. Weld is completing his eighth novel this summer, and his autobiography, called “Fly Away Home,” is scheduled for publication in the fall. If it’s half as fascinating as the talk I had with him the other day, it should be headed for best-sellerdom.
Weld--who landed in Orange County more than four decades ago--is an Alabama boy who was given $100 on his 17th birthday by his widowed mother and told she could do nothing more for him. It was all the push he needed.
After failing with a vaudeville act in New York and building up a stake by crewing for a year on a freighter, Weld and three friends drove a Model T Ford across the United States to Los Angeles (it took 12 days). An accomplished swimmer, he got a job as a combination nanny and lifeguard for a group of 40 girls needed as swimmers in an epic movie called “Dante’s Inferno.”
While they were filming at Santa Cruz Island, the script called for one of the principals to dive off a 40-foot cliff into the water. The stunt men wanted more money than the producer would pay, so Weld--then 19--volunteered to do it for $60. It got him 12 stitches in his scalp and a brief career as a stunt man that involved--among many other things--parachuting out of the first airplane he ever flew in, a World War I Jenny.
When the movies fell on hard times, Weld went back to New York, got a job as a newspaper reporter and covered Charles Lindbergh’s flight to Paris in 1927. He was the only reporter to hang out with Lindbergh for the three weeks he was in Paris after the flight, and he remembers Lindbergh as “very introverted and impossible to warm up to.”
He returned to Hollywood in the early 1930s, became a screenwriter and helped found the Screenwriters Guild. He also met a woman in Laguna Beach who “married the wrong man.” But Weld waited her out, and he and Katherine have now been married for 54 years.
Weld tried to get into Wild Bill Donovan’s spy group (the OSS) during World War II but ended up instead at Ford Motor Co., where he became director of publications and later chief apologist for old Henry Ford who, says Weld, “put his foot in his mouth every time he opened it.” After the war, Weld got caught in the internecine fight for control of that company and left Detroit gratefully to return to Laguna Beach to own and operate a Ford agency. When he tired of that (“I never liked the auto business because people were always saying I was trying to cheat them”), he founded and operated the Laguna Beach News-Post for two decades.
His closest friends were always newspapermen and writers and, in 1972, he joined with 10 others--the mover and shaker was an ex-Associated Press columnist named Hub Keavy--to form the Dutch treat club, west. The lower case is to distinguish it from the original Dutch Treat Club in New York, founded in 1905 so that writers and artists could bounce irreverent talk off one another. Like the original, the Dutch treat club, west has no bylaws, officers or official status. This has made it very tough for Brad Atwood--former UC Irvine public information director who presently wet-nurses the group--to find a bank in which to keep the organization’s funds. The banks refuse to deal with Atwood because he isn’t an officer and are completely baffled when he tells them there are none.
John Weld and former Times sports editor Paul Zimmerman are the only two founders still active in the group, but if the cast has changed, the irreverence hasn’t. The club has an impressive list of honorary officers, including Aaron Burr and Calvin Coolidge. Keavy wrote about the club a few years ago: “Its only similarity to other luncheon clubs is that it meets on the same day every month--sometimes. It has no rules, no officers and does not support a charity. It has no ladies’ nights or invocations.”
Among the current membership of 76 are such luminaries as Sid James (the first publisher of Sports Illustrated), former Times editor Nick Williams, nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist Karl Hubenthal, author Lee Cooley and Marshall Houts, former FBI agent, judge, forensic pathology professor and prolific writer who has recently published a fascinating book on the trial of Jesus by the Sanhedrin. There are also four former All-American and NFL players (Mel Hein, Paul Cleary, Bill Fisk and Ray George) with nebulous connections to the media. But, as Keavy once pointed out, “they communicate orally.”
One pseudo-rule that hasn’t been violated is the men-only tradition. There are no women non-members, and in all of its 228 meetings, only three women have addressed the group, two in the last year. (One was The Times’ Narda Zacchino.) There have also been two meetings in the last two years in which women guests were welcomed. This suggests a softening of attitude that Hub Keavy and the other founding fathers would probably deplore. When dues of 50 cents a month were inaugurated, one of them growled: “I suppose they’ll have name badges next.”
The group meets in El Toro this noon to hear Clare Thain, the publisher of the highly successful new business magazine, Entrepreneur. I plan to be there. But then again, I may not.
