Nostalgia for a Night Familiar and Elegant

On the night after Christmas, men in tuxedos and women in silks and fur will step from the chill of the Chicago winter into the Grand Ballroom of the Hyatt Regency on a glittery stretch of North Michigan Avenue.

In the buttery light of chandeliers, they will dine on steak and salmon and toast with champagne. Men and women past their 65th birthdays will dance as effortlessly as guests half their age.

And working the room, the men of the Chicago Assembly, their lapels adorned with purple satin badges, will squeeze an arm here and kiss a cheek there as they greet friends. Many are old enough to remember when they held this dance in the 1950s at the South Side’s Parkway Ballroom, when guests brought their own food and liquor in baskets.

Never mind the statistics about black men in jail, black families in peril and black unemployment. For decades, the Chicago Assembly--a black men’s club--has celebrated a world where marriages last half a century and children finish college, a world of black lawyers, doctors, teachers, executives, police officers and firefighters.

The Assembly was the least snobby of the exclusive black clubs that grew out of the segregated Chicago of the early 20th century. The club accepts as many as 300 members--and cares less about a prospect’s career than his character. “We’re not that elitist,” says Julius Davenport, 60, the new president of the Assembly, and the owner of an insurance agency. “We hardly ask a man what he does for a living today.” Davenport has two brothers, a nephew, and an uncle by marriage in the Assembly. At the Christmas Dinner Dance, his family and guests spread across five tables.

Throughout the evening, my father, James Hall, a former president of the Assembly, would play the delighted host, offering wry comments, laughing at every story. Now 78, he’d known many of these people for decades. “We were Boy Scouts together,” Charles Davis, 79, a longtime member and the owner of a public relations firm, once told me. “I was his patrol leader.”

The Chicago Assembly was chartered in 1932. The world has since changed dramatically for black men. “We don’t all live on the South Side any more,” says Davenport, referring to traditional black neighborhoods. Davenport lives in an integrated south suburb.

The club also has changed some.

In a nod to political correctness, they’ve toned down their annual smoker--no more strippers. “Guys can’t afford to be caught up in a raunchy kind of thing like that today,” sighs one 71-year old member. This past year, they had a band and a magician.

But at its core, the club has not changed. The word “gentleman” is still taken as seriously as the dress code. Formal attire is mandatory at the Christmas gala, no matter the prevailing fashion trend. “People have wanted to come in dashikis and African garb,” says Bernard Spillman, an officer of the Assembly. “Only if you’re a diplomat.”

Even two decades ago, when the dance first moved to the Hyatt, a parade of formally dressed black men and women drew stares. “When 1,000 people came through in tuxedos, people would stop and watch, because they’d never seen so many of ‘us’ dressed up and not killing each other,” says Neal Harris, a former president of the Assembly and a veteran organizer of the dance.

Black men and women can now join any professional or social groups, but the Assembly offers an old-fashioned fellowship. The men who make up the core membership are in their 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s--and they know the group is aging. Assembly officials have begun the process of rejuvenating the club--particularly the 25-member governing board.

“We all realized when we had vacancies that we need to put younger men on the board,” says Lloyd Wheeler, 94, a retired insurance executive.

Chicago Police Officer Paul Davenport, 32, joined two years ago and is among the club’s youngest members. Davenport, the nephew of the current Assembly president, grew up with family members going off to Assembly events. For him, the aging membership is not an issue. “I usually hang out with an older crowd--my dad’s age.”

Veteran members fret over the caliber of some of the younger candidates. An inarticulate man raises eyebrows.

“I know it sounds snobbish,” says Spillman, 66, an educational consultant, “but if you can’t hang a sentence together, you don’t belong in this group.”

The rules of the club are few but strict. The club is for socializing, not soliciting. Officers do not want members bombarding each other with business offers. The governing board does not release a full roster of names.

“We’re not a secret organization but a reserved one,” says Davis, a member of the governing board.

The raison d’etre of the club remains its four annual social events--the dance, a brunch, the men’s night and a summer picnic.

Spillman recalls, “That’s what we heard when we came in--’You are all in other organizations that do good works, and you are all hard workers on your jobs. So here’s a chance for you to belong to an organization and meet people of similar interests and backgrounds.’”

In my parents’ young adulthood in the 1940s, social clubs were as common as health clubs are now. My mother and her college friends went to balls hosted by the Assembly. The invitation to my first Assembly Christmas dance was my introduction to an adult world that was at once familiar and exotic. I was 20.

For my father, as for the other members, the dance was a rite of winter. We were rarely out of town at Christmas so my parents could attend. When my father was recuperating from surgery in 1985, he insisted that my mother and I attend without him. We made a stop at his hospital room to show off our finery, then drove to the dance.

I loved going. The dance was a rare conjunction of formal dress, reunion with family and friends, and dancing. The backdrop was a ballroom swagged wall to wall in Christmas decorations.

My parents bought a table and invited close friends. There were the Turnquests--Colette and Byron, an oil company executive. There were the Waltons--Lorraine and Charles, a jazz musician and college music professor, who would talk to me about music and books he was writing. A few weeks after the event, a package would arrive by mail at my Los Angeles home bearing some of his latest works.

In the 1980s, we were sometimes joined by a Chicago Police Department chaplain and his wife. Lean and possessed of a face nearly unlined, even in his 60s, P.G. Morgan was sweet and unpretentious.

One year, as the orchestra swung through a series of rhythm and blues tunes, he returned to the table, worn out from dancing with several women. “Whew!” he declared, as he plopped into his seat. I jumped to my feet, looked at him and asked loudly, “Wanna dance?” The table burst into laughter. He smiled, gallantly stood, and escorted me to the dance floor.

My father wasn’t much for dancing. His gift was for conversation. As the dance ended, some guests moved to a party in a suite of the hotel.

Long after my mother had grown weary, my father and I were happily ensconced in different corners of the suite, nibbling hors d’oeuvres, chatting with other night owls. From the glass-walled suite, you could see chunks of ice floating in the Chicago River and the Wrigley Building bathed in white spotlight.

The last Christmas Dance we attended was in 1996. My father had just resigned the presidency of the Assembly because he was found to be in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. At the dance that year, he went off to socialize and lost his way. He was gone about 20 minutes. I found him searching for us. I knew at that moment our years at the dance had ended.

Since then, my parents have divided their Christmases between Chicago and Los Angeles. Now the new memories of the dance belong to people like Paul Davenport, who goes with his wife and sits at one of the tables of friends and family.

Neal Harris says they have a new orchestra now. Members had tired of hearing the same old songs.

But my sweetest memory is hearing the closing song, “Little Darling,” as guests swayed on the dance floor one last time.