Some of the Big Boys Need to Learn It’s Time to Grow Up

A quaint little comedy was playing out in Garden Grove the other day. It was a series, really, parts one, two, and three and there may be more after that.

Some influential Rotarians, big boys every one, were in a huff because a woman wanted to join their all-male club.

My 4-year-old daughter has a Berenstain Bears book with a similar theme called “Girls Not Allowed.” In the end, the boy bears see that they’ve been shortsighted fools. Girls can be a lot of fun.

Back at the Rotary, the big boys tried to kick the woman out, huffing and puffing all the way, after the club’s board of directors had voted her in.

But, alas, only half of the voting membership, instead of the required two-thirds, stood up to support The Great Male Way.

“I’m not going to quit the club because of her, but I’m not happy,” said W.E. (Walt) Donovan, a club member for 37 years. “I go to a meeting to have the camaraderie of male companions. I’m sure if I went to join the Assistance League, they wouldn’t welcome me.”

Walt, by the way, is the mayor of Garden Grove.

As for the Assistance League, they told me over there that Walt should give them a chance. Fact is, they do welcome his kind. Two men are on the organization’s advisory board in Garden Grove. The League’s bylaws say that discrimination is taboo.

And the courts have ruled on this time and again. The U.S. Supreme Court said that service clubs, such as the Rotary and Jaycees, may not keep women and minorities out. A separate decision said that cities can force large private clubs to abide by those same rules.

There are holdouts, of course--aside from the fun guys in Garden Grove.

The all-male Bohemian Club, chartered in San Francisco, keeps winning its days in court. President Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Henry the K, and scads of CEO and corporation presidents are members there.

The Bohos are known for their summer camp-outs, where members like to relieve themselves in the wild. This is obviously high-powered male bonding, and besides, everybody knows that ladies are such prudes!

But back to the Rotary and Garden Grove. (Oh, if we must .)

Rotary International, credited with all kinds of good works, has some 1.1 million members worldwide.

Women, though still a distinct minority, are members too. Joanne Yusi, who owns an escrow company, became the first Orange County woman Rotarian when she joined the club in Laguna Niguel in 1987.

At any rate, The Woman of the Garden Grove Rotary, a 50-year-old bank vice president, is now in too. Her name is Woo-Chang Lee England.

Woo-Chang, in Korean, means benefit to humanity. That’s why Woo-Chang’s father chose that name for his firstborn child.

Woo-Chang Lee England says that I should just call her Woo.

“I’m disappointed by all this and actually, I feel sorry for them,” she says of the men who tried to keep her out. “I think, ‘How silly can they be?’ In this day and age.”

Woo is not one to make much of a fuss, at least not by doing anything like clenching a fist and shouting in someone’s face. She smiles a lot, and she works very hard. That is how she makes her points, well.

Woo has been in banking for 22 years, working her way from teller on up through the ranks. She says she’s felt discrimination, but nothing as in-your-face as this business in Garden Grove.

Of course, Woo acknowledges that had the big boys said that they didn’t want her because she was Asian , maybe they wouldn’t be talking about it as openly as they do.

But to say that you just don’t want women , that’s apparently OK. (Aw shucks, sweetheart, everyone knows that boys will be boys.)

“When I started in banking, I saw very few females,” Woo says. “I had to work very, very hard. . . . I didn’t want to hear, ‘We used that Korean woman and she was lazy.’ It was a matter of my self-respect.”

Woo’s life story sounds something like a movie script. She was born in Seoul, the eldest of seven kids. She lost her mother, and feared her dead, during the Korean War. Later, she studied hard to make her parents--both university professors--proud. She’s always helped out those less fortunate than she; that is the way she was raised.

Woo is married for the second time. She emigrated with her first husband to Northern California in 1964. During a year’s stay in Italy en route, her first daughter, Aida, was born. She is named after the Italian opera that Woo so loved.

Woo and her family, including 9-year-old Minna, adopted from South Korea in 1985, live in Altadena now. That’s where Woo was a Rotarian before. That club really didn’t want to let her go, so she is an “honorary member” today.

With her new job at First State Bank in Garden Grove, however, Woo couldn’t make the afternoon meetings up there. She figured joining a club close to her job would be easy enough.

She had no idea.

“Honestly, I never thought they weren’t going to accept me,” Woo says. “Because, you know, they are not like ordinary people. They are Rotarians . They should be broad-minded, have vision.”

Woo-Chang Lee England was inducted into the Garden Grove Rotary at a luncheon meeting last week . Her sponsor, Harry Broglia, executive director of the Garden Grove Chamber of Commerce, gave her the official Rotary pin in front of the club.

The brief ceremony went pretty smoothly, except that a clump of five or six Rotarians stood up together and walked out--just like, say, an offended delegation does at the U.N.

Harry Broglia tells me that he thinks more of the fellas would have walked out were it not for the visitors that day--high school scholarship winners, many of them girls, with their proud parents in tow.

So a mass exodus would have looked kind of bad or like, you know, real mature .

Yo, guys! Grow up. You’re big boys now.