In 1992, we were living in Mundelein, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago. We lived in a community called Tullamore, named after a county town in Ireland. We lived there for eleven years and our children, Adrienne and Gregory, received excellent schooling there from grades 2 and 1, respectfully, finishing high school and then off to universities in Canada. When Gregory went off in his freshman year, we pulled up stakes and moved to Maryland.
The northern suburbs was a book lovers mecca, many used and fine, rare bookstores, frequented very often by yours truly. One of them was called The Cogitator Bookshop, a cool name I must say. The owner was getting on in years and he finally closed his shop and moved everything to his house. In October 1992, I received a call from him saying that if I would like to come to his house, I could purchase books at 50% off. It was actually a sad occasion because his wife had Alzheimer’s and they needed the money. This is where I learnt that many bookdealers’ retirement nest eggs were high quality books squirreled away while they ran their shops.
I bought as many books as I could afford at the time, and many are treasures in our private library. I had to leave some great material behind, but what can you do.
One of the purchases was an odd little book that caught my eye.
The Secret Papers of the Dutch Treat Club, New York, 1950.
The foreword – Confidential and Restricted: The Dutch Treat Club is 50 years old today. This is the inside story of what really happened during its first half century, assembled and privately printed for Members and their guests on the occasion of the annual Dinner and Show at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in the City of New York, May 5, 1950.
Later, when I read the book, I was quite captivated by the book and by the organization. There was a list of Members in the back of the book, and it was a who’s who of the literary, publishing and marketing scene in New York.
This crowd got together for lunch every Tuesday, and I’m sure not too much work got done in the afternoon. At every lunch they had a guest speaker or performer and what a listing of A names. I figured this crowd was a powerful bunch. Some of the names appearing at the lunches: Burl Ives, Herbert Hoover, General Omar Bradley, Kay Ballard, Mary Martin, Danny Thomas, Arthur Rubinstein, Lowell Thomas, Wally Cox, Samuel Goldwyn, Carol Channing, and Nanette Fabray.
But I must confess that I was very much taken with the illustrations in the book. Risqué! And clever, as you can see in the photos below. The President’s White Paper was an outhouse and facing that page a piece of toilet paper was inserted.
The Dutch Treat Club founded at the beginning of the Twentieth Century is still going strong. From their website, here is a history and overview of the Club from a New York Times article in 2008. It states the founding was in 1905 and not 1900, as noted above, but the early days were in a daze!
The Dutch Treat Club was founded in 1905 by Thomas Lansing Masson, an editor of Life (then a humor magazine), and Robert Sterling Yard, a reporter with the New York Sun, and two other men of letters who rode into Manhattan together each day on the Lackawanna Railroad. They enjoyed their conversation with each other so much one of them suggested, "Let's continue this at lunch sometimes." They wanted a New York City club for creative people -- writers, illustrators and later, musical artists and actors -- a club not to be dominated by publishers or editors, who were more driven by profit motive. The original 11 members consisted of four writers, four illustrators, two editors and a publisher who was certified as benign. The lunch was "dutch" -- everybody paid his own bill.
From this beginning grew an institution with over 350 members, including some of the most creative minds in America. In the past, the Club produced elaborate musical and dramatic entertainments at an annual banquet. Charles Dana Gibson, David Belasco, Ring Lardner and Otis Skinner were among those involved in early Dutch Treat theatrical productions. DTCers Rodgers and Hammerstein provided many of the original songs for the occasions. The ’20s featured the first performance of Robert Benchley’s famous "Treasurer’s Report" and the first known play by Robert Sherwood. Member George M. Cohan’s last appearance was at the Club in 1942, a week before he died. The great Broadway producer George Abbott had been a member for 52 years when he died at the age of 107.
Since 1920 the club has produced a yearbook whose contributors have included James Montgomery Flagg, Lowell Thomas, Otto Soglow ("The Little King" comic strip), John Chapman, Rea Irvin (Eustace Tulley covers for The New Yorker), Deems Taylor and Isaac Asimov and Ralph Graves (the last managing editor of Life).
Illustrious Members from the past:
Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, Walter Cronkite, Jose Ferrer, Bel Kaufman, Lowell Thomas, Ray Bolger, Robert Merrill, David Brown, Isaac Asimov, Jimmy Cagney, George M. Cohan, Howard Chandler Christie, George Abbott, Frank Loesser, George S. Kaufman, Jerome Kern, Edward R. Murrow, Ogden Nash, Norman Rockwell, Artur Rubinstein, Gene Tunney, and Presidents Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harry S. Truman and Gerald R. Ford
Starting in 1920, The Members had a big annual dinner, at which there were staged performances, and the presentation of the annual yearbook. What I have come to realize is that the illustrators took this opportunity to create risqué cartoons that they would not do during their day jobs. And each year, there was a different editor and team and, of course, they tried to outdo their predecessors. These untamed year books went from 1920 to 1959 at which time they succumbed to the morals of the day. By the early 2000s I had acquired every one of the yearbooks. Today it would be much more difficult and expensive to do. I must note that it was extremely hard to find a copy of the 1951 yearbook. The editor deliberately inserted a ripped page and skipped a signature of pages in the book. I surmise that a great number of owners and dealers have discarded the 1951 book as faulty. I have put a note in this book to this effect.
Here are some year book covers, some signed copies and one risqué fold out illustration from 1934.
