Mabel Bass died in 1984 within a few months of her 95th birthday. By then, she had outlived her husband, my grandfather, by over forty years. Mabel never remarried. She continued to occupy the central place she no doubt always had in raising, advising, influencing (and eventually financially supporting to some extent) her large family. In fact, I have sometimes even wondered, half seriously, whether we ought to formally recognize that we are really Basses rather than Robisons. In keeping with standard practice of those days, she was nevertheless always known in public life, right up to the end, as “Mrs. W. S. Robison.” Educated, well-traveled, scholarly and entrepreneurial, Mabel had a bachelor’s degree in journalism and was one of the first women to be awarded a Juris Doctor, in 1914, by the University of Washington law school.
Our lives — Mabel’s and mine — overlapped by about 30 years. She was the only one of my four grandparents still living by the time I was two. Throughout my childhood and until the age of 18 I saw her frequently. Our immediate family of five even traveled together with her in a camper for a full year through Europe when I was around ten years old. Although during most of my twenties I was away at college, in Europe, or working on the East Coast or California, I felt I knew Mabel as an adult well into her advanced but active old age.
Still, the elderly always appear ancient and inscrutable to the young. The world that formed them is almost unimaginably alien to the one we inhabit with them at the very end of their lives. When Mabel arrived with her parents in Seattle as an 18-year-old, there were more horses than cars on the city’s streets. Long-distance travel was almost exclusively by train or steamship. The waterfront still bristled with commercial sailing ships among the steamers.
Even her late-in-life business activities, at the time I knew her, seemed obsolescent. For many years Mabel owned the Clark Hotel on First Hill in Seattle where, according to a long-since-abandoned formula once common in port cities on the West Coast, it was strictly “men only” upstairs in the overnight and residential rooms. Women — except for housekeepers, of course — were allowed only in the dining room, lobby, and other public spaces. Mabel herself lived on the ground floor of the hotel in a suite crammed with books near the office whose large plate-glass window allowed her and the staff to monitor comings and goings.
While I knew that she had also been involved throughout her life in various women’s clubs and organizations, often as a charter member or in leadership positions, this fact seemed just another quaint echo of a society long superseded by our rapidly evolving times. (As far as I know, none of the girls in my generation, for example, grew up to join women’s clubs.)
I was therefore surprised at how interested I was when I learned by chance a few weeks ago that one of these women’s clubs that Mabel had helped found — the Durant Study Club — had donated its papers to Special Collections at the University of Washington. I myself have created (or joined) many different sorts of private, voluntary clubs, associations and ventures over the years. Some have been successful, some not. I suddenly wondered if there wasn’t something new I could learn not only about my grandmother, but about this mysterious phenomenon of forming and sustaining a community.
So, last week, on the last day of a short visit to Seattle, I made an appointment in the reading room of the Allen Library on the UW campus. After confirming to their satisfaction that I had left behind all pens, pencils, notebooks, bags, etc., the archivists assigned me a table and doled out in succession the three boxes of documents I had requested telling the story of the Durant Study Club.
I was struck first by how well organized, visionary and ambitious Mabel and her co-founders were. These were experienced club women, and they knew how to run a meeting and how to set up an organization. Although they didn’t yet have a name, they succinctly minuted their first meeting on October 4, 1946, in a format that stayed consistent through hundreds of subsequent sessions over the decades. Roll was taken. (There were fourteen founders at that first meeting). Dues were discussed; by-laws proposed. They adopted a “collect,” a kind of opening prayer which they recited in unison at the start of every meeting to set the tone and remind themselves of their values. They began issuing, right from season one, a small format “year book” recording their programs, evolving statutes and membership, and were at pains to assure that libraries and other friendly organizations received copies. There had obviously been considerable informal discussion going on before that initial meeting, and they envisioned the long run right at the outset.
The founders were middle-aged women (Mabel was 57) who knew each other from other club memberships, but who were now obviously eager for substantive intellectual engagement. The country had just come out of the cataclysm of World War II, and many of the Durant Study Club members must have had sons (as Mabel did) who had served and fought. Aware that Western civilization had narrowly avoided disaster, they were hungry for discussion about culture, history, art and philosophy. They took their inspiration from (and named the Club for) a hugely successful, intellectual power-couple of the time, Will and Ariel Durant, whose best-selling series The Story of Civilization won them a Pulitzer Prize and eventually a Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Durants, with whom Mabel corresponded in the name of the Club, seemed to be genuinely touched that they had such serious fans.
Although the Durants’ works served as a kind of study-guide, this was no passive reading circle nor did it have the variable and mercurial agenda of a book club. Members of the Durant Study Club were expected to research and make presentations on topics determined by their Program Chairman (a position, like the president, treasurer, secretary, and all the others, which rotated year-by-year among the membership). Presentations were formal, to be delivered orally and after careful preparation. The whole membership was expected to engage in intelligent discussion. One of their year book’s “Suggestions for Durant Speakers” (who were always Club members, not invited guests) included that “each member should read the assigned topics carefully and be able to participate in discussion with pertinent facts gathered from other sources such as personal reading and daily observation.” Another suggestion noted dryly that “for the improvement of each member and the Club, it is to your advantage to use notes sparingly.”
Given that the Club met twice a month, September through May, with a formal program at every session, this is an astonishing agenda and rhythm. Mabel herself spoke in the first couple of years alone on the essays of Michel de Montaigne; John Law and the history of money; English art in the 18th century; Tristram Shandy; and many other topics. Membership continued to grow. By the time Mabel was president, in the 1970 – 71 season (the 25th anniversary of the Club), there were 36 members.
This, though, may have been the high-water mark for the Club. Many developments in society converged around this time to diminish the attractiveness of such initiatives. Watergate and the Vietnam War accelerated a suspicion of formal organizations of all sorts. Steady progress in women’s rights in society at large reduced the unique importance of long-standing women’s colleges, movements, and clubs. Public intellectuals retreated from the sort of popular history once energetically advocated by the Durants, Mortimer Adler, H. G. Wells, Henrik Van Loon, and others in the early- and mid-twentieth century. There was also an increasing and overdue appreciation of vernacular culture and a corresponding and lamentable disparagement of high culture as elitist — a trend which has not yet hit bottom. Meanwhile individualism, growing personal wealth, increasing sophistication of entertainment options, and even the explosion of tourism and travel all lessened the attractiveness of serious, self-managed — and time-consuming — programs of intellectual activity such as the Durant Study Club.
By the spring of 1986, it was clear it was clear that the end had come. The minutes of the final meeting on May 8, penned in long-hand script in precisely the same format as usual, begins matter-of-factly that “In the absence of Vera Haydrick, Ruth Cullen called the meeting to order.” (No more “Mrs. Chas. Cullen” by this point.) It is a bittersweet moment. Ruth Cullen had been the first president in the 1946-47 season. Now, by chance, she is presiding over the dissolution of the Club 40 years later. The minutes proceed in a perfunctory manner, approving the last minutes, authorizing reimbursement of an expense, and then, simply: “A motion was made, seconded, and carried that we disband the Durant Study Club.” The eleven members present nevertheless agree to continue meeting informally once a month, beginning in September, “so as not to lose touch with one another after so many years.”
Mabel had written a few years earlier the only heartfelt valedictory for this intense, personal and idealistic enterprise I found in the archives. Two years before she died, and then living temporarily with her third son and his family in California, she wrote in a firm, legible hand the following as the Club wrapped up its 35th season (something they obviously celebrated as an anniversary):
San Diego, Apr 22 – ’82
Dear Gretchen and all my dear Durant friends,
I sincerely miss being with you on this anniversary.
We have spent many happy times together reading and discussing world events, watching the progress of mankind, and learning that man does not make history, but men and women rise to the responsibility of leadership.
We discovered that no nation has ever been conquered from without until it first disintegrated from within.
This makes us ever conscious of our national and world problems and our responsibility to love one another in these troubled times and to work for a better world of peace and good will.
This is the cement that draws us closer together in sincere and loving companionship.
God bless and keep you in the years to come.
My deep and abiding love to each and all of you.
Sincerely,
Mabel L. Robison
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