This information was taken from an Article Published in the Baltimore Sun, January 1998
City’s social clubs fading Tradition: Even as they vanish, Baltimore’s pleasure and social clubs are celebrated for what they have meant to working-class neighborhoods.
By Joe Nawrozki
Baltimore Sun, Jan 02, 1998 at 12:00 am
On the cusp of the 1950s social revolution stood Margaret Davidson. And the picture before her was quite unsettling.
Her teenage son and his Highlandtown friends were applying grease to their hair, listening to rock ‘n’ roll music, fighting in the streets, and getting chased by the cops.
“One day I was ironing, and the boys were sitting on the front steps,” recalls Mrs. Davidson, 86. “The police told them they had to move or get arrested. It was our house! I had to do something.”
Thus, the Paradise Pleasure Club was born — in the Davidson basement on McElderry Street.
An enduring Baltimore-area tradition, pleasure, and social clubs have provided tranquil islands for residents of working-class communities for more than a half-century. In rowhouses and storefronts, members have shaped a unique social culture — together.
Whether at the Loudmouth Pleasure Club in Rosedale, the Dizzy Pleasure Club in Dundalk, or dozens of others around the area, members still engage in the same pursuits that their predecessors did when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. They play cards, have a cold beer, quietly assist needy neighborhood families and discuss issues of the day.
“Every Tuesday night, we have homemade bean soup, pigs’ feet and fried chicken,” says George Wilson, a retired steel worker and first president of the Apollo Social and Democratic Club in East Baltimore. “It’s a good night for your wife to be mad at you.”
But now, these bastions of the bull roast are vanishing as members age and recruitment slows.
Loyola College sociology Professor Antonia K. Keane calls the pleasure club one of the last vestiges of urban socialization, a neighborhood symbol that is dying.
“We’ve become more individualistic as a society,” she says. “The people in these clubs cherished the values of the common good. We’re seeing people today less concerned with the other person.”
Keane, a native Baltimorean, takes a bus to the North Baltimore college every day and sees “these ladies wearing windbreakers, ‘Lansdowne’ on the back. Well, these clubs are the next part of a community, what lies beyond the bus stop.”
Informality cherished
Many clubs began informally, and members are happy to remain that way.
“We started in a backyard in the 1920s, and just have fun in our private club with a little bar,” says Beverly Gottlieb, vice president of the Baltimore Pigeon Fancier’s Club in Curtis Bay.
While not enjoying the prominence of their more influential cousins — veterans, church, fraternal and political organizations — private pleasure clubs had little bureaucracy. “I’ve never seen anybody tossed out of a social club,” says Edgemere’s Doris Plumhoff, who has attended pleasure club parties for four decades.
In the infancy of most clubs, the formula was simple: organize by having enough members for two-handed pinochle and order club jackets. Most jackets were made of corduroy or satiny material, in colors chosen by members.
The jacket carried the organization’s name on the back and the member’s name above the breast pocket. In some neighborhoods, the wrong colors could invite a severe beating.
“Not too many guys had cars in my group; parents were scraping every penny together to send their kids to Calvert Hall or Mount St. Joseph’s,” recalls Mike Davidson, Margaret’s son. “But we could afford jackets. They were like our gang colors, a symbol of being linked together.”
Today, the clubs bear no resemblance to gangs.
“We’ve calmed down a bit in our 42 years,” says Dick Downes, past president of the Omega Club — named after the brand of watches given people retiring from the Lever Bros. plant. “We used to shoot pool and drink beer; now we take bus trips.”
Clubs like the Paradise still have reunions, one in the 1960s a rather memorable and disorderly gathering at which a member “planted” artificial grass on the new oak floor of a banquet hall rented for a “Roman orgy party.”
“The evening actually started out wonderfully — we had wine coming from the fountains, we brought our own pillows — but it got ugly,” recalls Bob Jones, a retired salesman and Paradise member. “The artificial grass stuck to the floor but, fortunately, we settled it [out of court] before it got any more expensive.”
Long-ago origins
Some larger organizations — the Hawks P.C. of Essex, Balco P.C. of North Point, and Rossville P.C. — have thrived for a half-century.
Some, like the Dizzy on Holabird Avenue, fiercely guard their privacy. “We started in 1935, and that’s all I’ll tell you,” President Frank Guido says.
The same policy is in force at the Loudmouth.
But James “Buddy” Mattheu, a lifelong member of the Hawks, which has 240 members, is more forthcoming.
“I’ll tell you everything,” Mattheu says at a meeting hall table with pals Martin “Dutch” Wernsdorfer, Norman Lang and Bernie Herzberg, the club president.
City’s social clubs fading Tradition: Even as they vanish, Baltimore’s pleasure and social clubs are celebrated for what they have meant to working-class neighborhoods.
“I’ll even tell you the story about state Comptroller Louis Goldstein,” Mattheu says, his friends suddenly cringing. “We had one of our anniversary affairs in the 1960s and hundreds of people came, Louie included, and we had a great time.
“I got to talking with the state comptroller and told him I fought through the Pacific as a Marine. Well, that got Louie all charged up, and he went outside and climbed that utility pole in front of our hall. Louie was a Marine, too.”
The Hawks gather in a comfortable Essex hall from which thousands of Christmas baskets have flowed to needy families across five decades; the club also presents four annual scholarships to local high school graduates. In the rear, along the Back River, they hold parties where sides of beef are grilled on large industrial drums cut in half.
Like many clubs, the Hawks had humble beginnings — in a saloon.
“They wouldn’t let us in an established Democratic club in Essex so we started the Hawks in 1944,” says Wernsdorfer, 80, a retired brewery worker. “We took a vote on the bar stools of a joint on Eastern Boulevard. Nothing fancy, but we’ve lasted.”
But, because private social clubs don’t carry the interest they once did, recruiting new members has been difficult. Some clubs, including the Brown Buddies in Turners Station or Dundalk’s Kimball Mountain P.C., have gone.
Recruits come from outside
“New members, when we get them, are not from the community like we were but are from families of members out in the counties,” says Apollo’s president, William Neal, who grew up on the city’s east side.
“Hanging out” has changed drastically across the generations.
“We’re looking at the fragmentation of families and communities over the last half of the century,” says Joel Lapin, a sociologist at Catonsville Community College. “They’ve gone from Catonsville to Howard County to Frederick; life is mobile and the money is there.
“Today, young people want instant pleasure; they wpaintballball games or the Mall of America. Most don’t have the attention span to enjoy a game of cards.”
One former charter member of an O’Donnell Heights club, now closed, agrees.
“Today’s young people are not interested in social clubs,” says Manuel Alvarez, who helped start the now-defunct Blue Star Pleasure Club in an abandoned hardware store at Clinton and Elliott streets. The third floor of the building was reserved for party-goers who needed to sleep off an evening of excessive celebrating.
“In 1952, it was something we could afford and we kept the club going with profits from beer and parties,” adds Alvarez, a retired tugboat engineer. “Today, the kids go to the trendy bars and spend money like there’s no tomorrow. And most of them don’t stay in groups over a long period of time like we did.”
Young “clubbers” are one reason that folks such as George Renwick, member of Apollo’s Social Democratic Club at 1021 N. Luzerne Ave. in East Baltimore, gather in their chosen setting: a well-kept brick rowhouse owned by the club.
The building sits between two alleys, a bright green awning over the front door. The first and second floors have bars with small tables where members enjoy card games or conversation.
Bars less inviting today
“It’s gotten so you can’t feel comfortable in bars anymore,” says Renwick, a former Dunbar High basketball star who works for a local attorney.
“We have a door person check you out.”
“Everybody takes off their hat when they walk in. The sloppy look is not accepted in our place. And there is no violence.”
Like other clubs, the Apollo has supported the community it calls home. One of the first donations, in 1962, was a wheelchair to a neighborhood youngster. Since then, members have held Christmas parties for kids at the old Apollo Theatre, and distribute holiday baskets for the needy.
Apollo’s members support their operating budget and charitable causes through four annual affairs — and profits from the bar and juke box.
Some clubs, however, have no desire to be civic-minded.
“We don’t hold bingos, dances or raffles,” says Ace Boller, a retired Baltimore County firefighter and a member of the Little Beaver S.C. on South Lehigh Street. “We started in a bar in 1953, and we do now what we did then — play cards and drink beer.”
That wasn’t enough for Mrs. Davidson, who thinks that the Paradise was a creation for its time.
“I know some of the boys managed to sneak some booze past me and my husband,” she says. “But they danced, played cards, and they stayed overnight with their parents’ permission. They just had my r,ules and they pretty much listened to them.
“We trusted them, so every one of them had a key to our house.”
‘An era that’s gone’
Bob Tarr, an original Paradise member who runs a printing business in Baltimore, says the days of the pleasure clubs are all but a footnote to Baltimore history.
“That’s an era that’s gone,” Tarr says. “Time marches on and there is nothing as constant as change. We were poor back then but we didn’t know it because we had the closeness of our friends, right in that basement on McElderry Street.”
What about the CPC Building?
As far as we can tell it was originally the Grindon School House. It is Baltimore’s only remaining One Room schoolhouse structure still standing.
It was jointly built by Mill Workers and Farmer in 1852 for children in Lauraville
The building has changed ownership many times and has served as a church, a meeting place for a political club, and the Clifton Pleasure Club