Posted on 04/02/2005 5:06:20 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Above a drugstore on a busy street on the edge of Downtown Los Angeles is a former Masonic temple. Inside are stuffed polar bears mid-roar, Amazon spears and expedition flags from all over the world. It's not your usual room, but then again, the men who gather here every Thursday evening are not your usual inhabitants. Not even close.
Welcome to the Los Angeles Adventurers' Club, a bastion of testosterone old and young, a place where the men are men, the jokes are usually ribald, and the tales, for the most part, are true.
At a recent meeting, men ranging in age from 30s to 90s made their way up the stairs for the 6 p.m. social hour. Three World War II vets held court on a bench, a few members grabbed drinks from the self-service bar, and the jokes began to fly. There were also inquiries about the photographer and the skirt, i.e. the reporter: Non-members must be invited and the fairer gender is only allowed during sporadic Ladies Nights and the annual formal called the Night of High Adventure.
The club was founded in 1921, and its list of notables is long: John Goddard, the first man to explore the length of the Nile; film directors Cecil B. DeMille and John Anson Ford; Jimmy Doolittle, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner who lead the first bombing raid on Japan in WWII; supersonic test pilot Bib Gilliland; Ed Boden, who endured the longest solo circumnavigation of the world in an engine-less boat (13 years, five months); and Ralph White, who has made more than 30 dives to the wreckage of the Titanic.
The stories, informally told, begin during the social hour. They can be tragic, but also impossibly funny. Recently World War II veteran Frank Haigler, one of the group's most adroit raconteurs, gave the newcomers a quick rendition of one of his standards - the true tale of a gunfight in an Okinawa cave, where he shot at an enemy soldier, the bullet ricocheted off the soldier's helmet and came back to hit Haigler in his, well, nether regions.
"Frank's just a great storyteller," member Bob Silver says later. "The one about the bullet that came back and got him in the gonads? And Marines aren't meant to shoot themselves! It's like listening to Bob Hope. When he stands up, we know we'll get something. I hope when I'm an old fart my stories are that good."
Silver, by the way, is 75. And when he later calls the skirt on the phone, he identifies himself as "High Ho Silver." Welcome, again, to the Adventurers' Club.
OTGA
The Adventurers' Club is a place where who you are and what you own matters far less than what you've done. In other words, accomplishment, and to a lesser degree, storytelling savvy, are the currency here.
Despite some attendees' flair for the theatrical, they speak of late members with a straight-laced directness. Member, actor and humorist Will Rogers attended a club meeting the night before he and aviator Wiley Post disappeared on an air trip to Alaska. Experienced Redondo Beach seaman Frank Guernsey set sail for South Africa in October 2003, and disappeared en route. Gordon Cooper, described as reserved and modest despite being the last of the Mercury 7 astronauts, the first American to spend a day in space and to perform a manned pilot-controlled re-entry and splashdown, died recently.
Every club member gets a number; founder Jack Roulac was number one, and there have been 1,110 since. When someone dies, fellow members say he is OTGA - On The Great Adventure.
There are currently 122 members, and a core of about 30 shows up every week. Dozens more attend when they're in town, and not off on adventures. Club rules hold that through the social hour and dinner that follows, business cannot be done, deals cannot be struck, and neither religion nor politics can be discussed.
"It's for comparing notes and sharing, which you couldn't do anywhere else because people would think you were crazy," says author and photographer Pierre Odier, who maintains the club's archives and member library.
The preferred adventures, according to club bylaws, carry a theme of "off the beaten track." Members pay the highest compliments by issuing phrases that in other situations are cliche. There is no loftier praise than "this guy's the real thing" or "he lives the life." Conversely, the Adventurers can be cutting, expressing displeasure by quipping "he's a phony" or "that's a credit card adventure."
But a so-called "plastic" adventure isn't always a statement on the participant's valor: There aren't as many unexplored territories as there once were, and modern modes of travel don't exactly necessitate bravery. "If you have $50,000, you can fly to every single place that it took some of us months to trek to," Odier explains.
New School-Old School
There are two camps when it comes to bragging rights. "We have a new group that's more into Humvees, big material things. There's a place for it, I guess, but that's not the objective," Odier says. "The objective is also not to go out and jeopardize your life. We're not hotshots. There are mellow guys, but then you talk to them and it's like, 'Wow, you did what?' They don't want to talk about it, they don't brag like some of the other guys. So it is shifting, but that's culture."
Some younger members have a tough time meeting every week. "They're concerned with making a living, doing their own thing," Odier says. "The older guys have a different sense of camaraderie. We want to come around every week. In that sense, we're old fashioned."
The club's acting president is Vince Weatherby, a 42-year-old freelance videographer and eight-year member. Like several in the club, he came to his first meeting via Haigler. They bonded over their mutual interest in vintage sports cars. Of course, Haigler's interest in machinery does not stop at cars - his backyard is said to have once included several tanks.
Though membership dues are only a couple hundred dollars a year, joining is no easy feat. Prospective members must attend meetings as guests for about a year, have two sponsors, endure a background check and earn board approval. "We definitely turn people down," Weatherby says. "Some people have not been truthful on applications."
Weatherby says the club doesn't actively pursue members, doesn't promote itself and doesn't do much public outreach. "I'm sure if we did, that place would be packed every week."
Tough Crowds
The social hour is followed by dinner, and then members move to the meeting room, where they're surrounded by prized possessions like a fossilized mastodon head, a white rhino and a polar bear whose fur has grown sooty because smoking used to be allowed. The gatherings generally last until about 10 p.m.
At the recent meeting, Weatherby took the podium at the front of the room. A bell rang eight times, according to tradition, and Weatherby initiated a moment of silence for all the "absent or departed members, and brother adventurers, wherever they may be."
Weatherby then asked if anyone had adventures in the last week. Members took the microphone to describe recent trips and experiences. One showed his striking slides of Death Valley. Another read a letter from a South African acquaintance interested in starting a similar club in Cape Town. The writer requested the L.A. club's bylaws as a template.
"Can't we send them our board of directors too?" one member called out.
Weatherby asked if anyone was departing on an adventure, and again, a few men took the mic to outline expeditions in the works. If there are slides, slides are shown; if a member wants to tell a joke, Weatherby determines whether he should be allowed.
Each week includes a pre-planned presentation, during which members or invited guests deliver multi-media tales of recent or long past adventures. Speakers include author Brett Carlson, who discussed Cowboy Now, a book about his harrowing crossing of the Northern Patagonia Ice Field, in which nine men waited out blizzards in manmade ice caves. The speakers are never paid, and Weatherby says it's not difficult to schedule guests, because everybody knows somebody with a story.
"There isn't anything you can think of that hasn't been done by that club, from climbing Everest to deep sea diving to working with the atomic bomb explosion," said Ted Williams, 82, who survived the Bataan Death March and spent 42 months as a POW in Philippine and Japanese prison camps. "I've done a lot of exploration, been to every state in the union, many countries, went back to the Philippines 21 times. And I'm one of the more sedate members."
It can be a tough crowd, though, and not every program is met with approval. Silver is known to yell "Where's the adventure?" if he is displeased with a presentation.
"I can be abrasive," Silver admitted. "Some guys will tell a story that's got no meat to it. They're reliving it and for them, it's like therapy, talking about their lost luggage or whatever. I say, 'Get to the part where you cried or you bled.'"
High Times With the Raja of Swat
The members of the Adventurers' Club are known for their stories. Here are some of their best.
Ken Freund, on motorcycle journeys: "For my 50th birthday, I rode across the Sahara to Timbuktu - 2,000 miles. There were camel caravans that travel from the Taoudenni salt mines, and smugglers along the Algerian border. You just steer clear; don't ask questions or look at them too much. You have to carry an AK-47 all the time, because bandits will hold you up and leave you to die out in the desert. Our Tuareg guide, who followed us in the support vehicle, carried one. He was found shot to death in a camp after our trip.
"I also rode through Borneo, 1,200 miles through the jungle. We met Dayak tribesmen, who along with some of the guys in Papua New Guinea, are among the last headhunters. Supposedly it's outlawed, but we got invited into their huts and some of the old guys had skulls on their shelves."
Bob "High Ho" Silver, on the 1960 Pakistan leg of his trek around the world: "I was in Swat Kohistan, attempting to cross a mountain pass into the princely state of Dir. I'm following trails of hoofed animals, and the weather's good. But then it starts to snow, and I can't see the valley or the trail. I only have provisions for three days. I spend a couple hours making some snowshoes by attaching saplings to my boondockers [Marine slang for field boots], the first attempt I've ever had at making boots. By this point, the snow has gotten so bad, I can no longer see. After some debate, I turned back.
"By nightfall, I was back to the last hamlet. The mountain people who lived there invited me into their hut and I got hot water and slept. The next day I set out down the trail, and started hiking in the company of a tall, handsome Pakistani and a little fellow. The tall Pakistani was carrying a rifle and it turned out he was the captain of the king's bodyguard, or the raja of Swat. By noontime, we stopped to eat, I asked him if he was a good enough shot to kill this little tiny bird on the other side of the stream. Turns out he was."
Frank Haigler, on war and fate: "In Okinawa after the war, I decided I didn't want to make a career of the Marine Corps. I resigned and went to medical school at the University of Illinois. When I graduated in 1950, the Korean War just started, and there was a shortage of doctors in the Navy. My God, if I didn't end up as a doctor in the Korean War.
"After that, I went to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and took a four-year course in obstetrics and gynecology. One day I had a new patient named Mrs. Lucy Borelli, and in the course of filling out the forms, I asked about her children. She informed me they were all living except her oldest boy, who was killed in the war. I said, 'Corporal Sam Borelli, died May 17, 1945?'
"She said, 'How do you know that?'
"I said, 'He was one of my boys. I send you a Christmas card every year.'
"I went to visit her that evening, and told her what I knew and gave her some pictures of the platoon taken in Guadalcanal before we sailed to Okinawa. I hope I helped her close the door on some of that stuff."
For more information on the Adventurers' Club of Los Angeles call (323) 223-3948 or visit adventurersclub.org.
Contact Kristin Friedrich at kristin@downtownnews.com.
Bump - and a salute to all the REAL adventurers of the past. Helicopter rides to K2 and million dollar gadget junkies need not apply.
"Credit card adventurers"--LOL, good one! I know a few of those.
Excellent club, it is right out of a Hemingway novel. I know a few of these guys, they are the real thing!
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