Women use 'The Club' to protect 60 years of BFF status
Paris Hilton needs a reality TV show to find her a new Best Friend Forever.
A better role model for female friendship is airing on the big screen in "Sex and the City," where fictional characters Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte hash out all of life's foibles and bliss over Cosmos.
But for a real-life tale of endearing and enduring friendship, you should have been there Wednesday for lunch at Alta Villa Banquets in Addison.
"Our friendships have lasted 60 years," says Doris Magnus of Norridge.
In June of 1948, eight high school girls made a pilgrimage to the markets on Maxwell Street to buy the matching, royal blue, satin baseball jackets that signaled their status as a Club and best friends forever. Those chintzy Club jackets from their days at Carl Schurz High School in Chicago ripped and faded, but the Club friendships endured.
"I don't know how we could be any better friends. It's amazing," says Pat Baumann of Arlington Heights, who joined the Club after she married a man who went to school with the others. "As one of the girls said years and years ago, this Club was like going to a psychologist. This was like our couch."
Every other Wednesday, the girls got together to talk about high school, boyfriends and graduation; then marriages and husbands; then kids, aging parents and deaths; then jobs, their own illnesses, tragedies, celebrations, more marriages and grandkids; then more marriages, great-grandkids, more deaths and a lifetime of joys, fears, sadness, hope and friendship.
"After 60 years together, we all deserve diamonds," reads the message on the sparkly picture frames Lois Weinberg of Schaumburg made for all six surviving Club members at Wednesday's lunch. Since the Club's big 50th anniversary in 1998, Darlene Haman of Des Plaines and Janet Holmblad of Buffalo Grove have died.
Now Weinberg, Baumann, Magnus, Dorothy Dorman of St. Charles, Vivian Krieg of Prospect Heights and Lorraine Mazur of Park Ridge have trimmed their twice-a-month nights out on the town to just one lunch a month.
"We don't need all those calories," Dorman notes. "We don't even have cocktails or hors d'oeuvres anymore."
The original 50-cents-a week dues topped out more than a decade ago at $7 a month. Lavish New Year's Eve parties and summer extravaganzas in someone's yard earned them the nickname "The Noisy Club" from their young kids back in the day. Members took trips together (even went to pre-Castro Cuba), and later brought along their families on summer vacations.
Now, the outings are less frequent and much more subdued.
"But we don't feel we are any different or look any different," Weinberg says with a sparkle in her eyes.
The talk hasn't changed. These women know everything about each other, correcting their stories, finishing their sentences. They are still those teenage girls at heart.
"We've all been married 101 years and we still use maiden names," Weinberg explains after she slips in a name her friend hasn't used in more than half a century.
This is what friendship is all about. And it's not as easy as these women make it look.
"You just have to say you are going to do it, and then do it; otherwise, it's 'come see me sometime,' or 'let's get together sometime,' and you don't do it," Magnus says.
As the old friends chat away another meeting of the Club, another glue in these friendships comes to mind.
"Laughing," Magnus says, "is always good."