Queens of the Club
By Steve Simmons
Has it really been nine months since the last Historian’s Report? It feels like just yesterday when I was writing about the club being saved from an early demise by one Ms. Terry Mason. As you may recall from that article, the club lost its president in early 1956 and the lack of leadership caused it to falter. Ms. Mason single handedly took the reins, and over the Summer months rescued the club from near death by organizing meetings and events. The enthusiasm garnered was sufficient to keep things going until a new council could be elected for 1957.
You could say that Terry was the club’s first female president because she was performing the duties of that office for a time, but since she was never actually elected as such it may be more accurate to say she was the acting president for the remainder of the year. Ron Simon and others joined the effort, and it appears the club was run primarily by committee for those few months.
It wasn’t until 2019, 63 years later, that Sandra Loe became the club’s first official female president. We all felt the history being made as she opened her first meeting, but she wasn’t the first woman to hammer the TCMG gavel. That honor goes to our Vice President from 1995, Bobbie Simon. Rather than paraphrase others, I will leave the explanation of Bobbie’s one-night reign to the late Stan Belland who wrote about it in the 1995 Summer edition of The Classic Chassis.
Preceding Bobbie, but after Terry, was another notable female personality in the club. It was 1980 when we elected our first female Vice President, Jean McKarney. Here we see her introduction in the January 1980 newsletter.
Esther Belland also served as Vice President in 1996, and Kay Einhorn in 2000. Several other women have served on our council as well, in fact too many to list here for fear I would run out of room or worse, miss someone.
Many have supported the club in other ways, like Yvonne Schnaer who as a talented artist drew our very first logo, still used (with some changes) to this day. She also drew many of the beautiful covers for our rallye booklets back in the 50’s and 60’s. There was the TCMG cookbook by Mary-Lou Jackson, and if I may be a tad biased for just a moment, my own better half Linda Simmons whose delicious delectables literally doubled our average meeting attendance during my first run as President. Yes, there was even bruschetta and caviar one time! Her efforts with our Summer Picnic and Annual Holiday Party which have also drawn record numbers.
Current as of this writing also is Joyce Edgar who has served as our Treasurer for an unprecedented 22 years, and it’s this kind of dedication that has kept our club alive and well all these years.
There are surely many more “notable women” from our past that a relative newcomer like myself, having only been in the club a meager 19 years, is unaware of. If some of you TCMG veterans know of others, let me know about them and I will include them in these articles.