Woman’s Club Notes Charitable, Fun Past

Harry S. Truman was president, Southern California was dotted with orange and walnut groves, and brush-clearance in the San Fernando Valley meant letting sheep from local ranches graze the hills.

The year was 1948, and a handful of Woodland Hills women who played bridge together decided to chip in about $50 each to buy a bit of land on Comercio Way for their new women’s club.

This week, the Woodland Hills Woman’s Club celebrates the fruits of that partnership: a half-century of community service, philanthropy and friendship. Many of the club’s recent projects were financed by its founders’ initial investment, which had swelled to almost a quarter-million dollars by the time the club sold its land holdings in 1974.

“Most people think of women’s clubs as a bunch of ladies sitting around drinking tea and wearing big hats,” said Donna Smith, a member of the club since 1954. “We have a lot of fun, but we’re very serious with our projects.”

In the early days, the club sponsored art festivals, plays and fashion shows, visited hospital patients and baby clinics, campaigned for a bond to build a library and lobbied the City Council for parks. One of the club’s first projects, and one it continues to support, was raising money for the Pacific Lodge Boys’ Home in Woodland Hills.

The volunteers had a sense of humor too. Dottie Heitz, a parliamentary law teacher who, at 83, reigns as one of the club’s oldest members, said the group’s Fourth of July parade floats were a hit in the ‘50s.

One year, Heitz posed as Carrie Nation, the hatchet-wielding prohibitionist, atop a float featuring the local bartender (whose wife was a club member) cowering in fear amid the wreckage of a saloon. “We had to glue in place all the chairs and things that were overturned,” Heitz recalled.

In recent years, the club has donated more than $32,000 to scholarship programs at Pierce College, Cal State Northridge and the West Valley Occupational Center.

The club, which has about 100 members, has also contributed volunteer time and money to many groups, including Meals on Wheels, the Red Cross and the West Valley Food Pantry.

“They’re a great bunch of women,” said Frank Linebaugh, director of Pacific Lodge Boys’ Home. The Woman’s Club sponsors outings for the boys and plans to buy furnishings for one of their cottages, he said.

“The kids love them,” Linebaugh said. “We all do.”

The Woodland Hills Woman’s Club meets at the Calabasas Inn at 10 a.m. on the second Thursday of every month. For more information, call Donna Smith at (818) 347-7454.