History
by, of, Bob Simpson

Thanks to Herb and Cookie for their history articles and for covering damn near everything the club has done since its inception. I had to rethink my whole train of thought but, after my first think, I was all thunk out!  After all, being a T-Bird for twenty five or so years has caused me to burn out a significant number of brain cells along the way. With the way this club has partied over the years it’s no wonder that they took a shy, innocent, church-going young man like me and turned him into bleary-eyed, half alcoholic, skirt chaser. I can see many of you guys out there nodding your head and thinking, “I know where you’re coming from, Bob. They did it to me, too.” Well, some of you were the ones that broke me in, thank you very much.

For me it all started as I was standing in a bar called Henry’s on Ford Road near Southfield sometime around 1984 sipping my usual glass of ice water.  I had been divorced for two years and was once again seeking solace in the arms of any strange woman I could entice into some sordid, amorous tryst after pumping a few drinks into her.  Oops, what happened to the innocent thing?  Some guy I knew came squeezing through the crowd and greeted me by saying, “You want to meet a girl”? I replied in the affirmative so he reached behind him and grabbed one of the two girls there and jammed us together face to face. Her name was Margo and her girlfriend was Ginger Stewart.  Margo and I ended up dating for a year or two, and during that time she and Ginger told me about this ski club they belonged to.  They invited me to a club business meeting but I couldn’t see going to some stuffy gathering of club officials sitting around drinking coffee and blabbing about stuff I wasn’t interested in.  I wouldn’t go for some months… Big Mistake!!

At some point in time I acquiesced and allowed my self to be dragged out of my favorite hangout and hauled over to Hawthorne Valley for some dumb meeting. I was stunned as I walked in to find several hundred beautiful people having the time of their life drinking, dancing, and mingling while some poor sap stood up front trying unsuccessfully to be heard over the din of voices and music (The president or something).  Margo and Ginger had never really described a “business meeting” to me which now whizzed me off that I had been missing this debauchery for all these months. This feeling quickly dissipated as the night went on and I pulled $25 out of my pocket and joined then and there. The club became the epicenter of my social life from then till now. Like Cookie and Herb I participated in the Mime Shows, and did all those fun things like boating and, of course the Put-In-Bay trips.

Put-In-Bay, that wonderful place where more brain cells are sacrificed to the party gods than Carter has liver pills. Sometime in April would be the sign-up for this safari into elbow bending oblivion at a business meeting. In those days people actually went to meetings to sign up for trips as the computer age hadn’t yet altered the need to physically leave your house to communicate with others. You had better be there with check in hand that night as the trip sold out in a matter of an hour. Seventy four people would fill the Park Hotel in the center of town and if that was sold out you were on your own as to where to stay. Those with boats would raft off on the docks and take as many Birds as they could cram on board with them, thus doubling our numbers. I slept (passed out) on more fly bridges and open decks than I care to remember. Stumbling from bar to bar with an empty beer pail from the Roundhouse on your head proved to the world what all your friends already knew.You’re wasted Dude. There were people riding mattresses down the stairwells at 4AM, girls showing a little skin, and the occasional barf fest. Things are not quite the same there with the police cracking down, but you can still tie one on if have the desire.

One thing I would like to point out here is that just because I walked into the Club’s arena ready to party didn’t mean that I was instantly accepted. It has been said that the Club is “cliquey”. Well, that is the way of things in any large group until you break the ice and get to know a few people. You can stand around for years and not be a real part of the happenings, or you can divide and conquer.  For me the ice breaker was to sign up for a trip. This way I scaled down from trying to become familiar with hundreds of people at once to hanging with a smaller group for a weekend. In this case it was a train trip to Toronto. Jamming 90 people into a few train cars for hours at a time will get you to meeting folks on a more intimate level real fast. We drank the bar car dry going and coming and divided a train car in half to play Trivial Pursuit with 30 on each side. After that trip I had thirty new friends, a lot of whom where in those cliques I wanted so much to be a part of.

So if you don’t have a history with the Club or are new to the scene, please go on a trip or attend a few socials. We really are a friendly bunch. History is only a memory and we’ll tell you all the stories, but the future is just as, if not more, important. The future is history in the making!!