Club Activist Has No Time for Tea

In earlier days, Ruth Schermitzler thought of herself as a mover and a shaker and an activist, all the while serving as a dedicated and active woman’s club member.

“I’m for changes,” said the 68-year-old La Habra resident, vice president of the La Habra Woman’s Club who openly and actively urges club members throughout the country to get involved.

She wants them to become involved in such community issues as day care, elderly care, crime, literacy, the environment, health insurance and adolescent pregnancy.

Next year she will seek election as recording secretary of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs to give more clout to her far-ranging ideas to encourage more club members to support projects and needy community people.

“Woman’s clubs have always lived under the stigma of doing nothing more than drinking tea and playing bridge,” said Schermitzler, who became an active club member when her husband, Lyle Schermitzler, joined the Air Force and made it a career.

The energetic grandmother is ready to knock on doors again, one of the practices she likes to remember from her earlier activism while president of the La Habra Junior Woman’s Club.

It began as a way to find friends while her husband was stationed overseas.

“I took to it like a duck to water,” noted the Oklahoma College for Women (now the Oklahoma College of Liberal Arts) graduate who grew up on a farm in Oklahoma. “I never did anything like that before in my life.”

Schermitzler graduated from high school at age 15 as a valedictorian and considered herself an all-around good person.

“My teachers saw something in me that I didn’t see,” she recalled. “I didn’t have time to do any extracurricular activity then. I studied hard, but maybe I should have found a way to be involved.”

In those early woman’s club days, Schermitzler wasn’t fully aware of her purpose.

“We were so new and so young at that time we weren’t thinking about changes,” she said. She developed a sense of purpose in the club, an attribute she hopes to re-create in today’s club members.

One of those purposes is to get members to rise through the ranks and take on leadership roles, she said, adding that women should not be afraid to say, “Yes, I’d like to be president of the club.”

In many cases, she says, members say they didn’t run because they weren’t asked.

“Service is the rent we pay for the privileges we enjoy,” she is wont to tell her members. “Think about knocking on doors and become movers and shakers. Sometimes things don’t work, but sometimes you have to be willing to fall to be successful.”

Although women’s clubs everywhere seem to be having membership problems, Schermitzler believes one solution is to get more clubs strongly involved in community needs.