A pioneering female drummer who banged down barriers for women in music at a time when they were mostly seen as a novelty, she landed on the cover of Billboard magazine in 1940 and even performed at President Harry Truman’s inauguration. And yet, her name is virtually unknown. 

About a year ago, I came across Viola Smith on a music blog list of great female drummers. I knew a handful of names — Moe Tucker of the Velvet Underground and Karen Carpenter of The Carpenters — but Viola’s was one I didn’t recognize. 

A quick internet search told me Viola is considered the first professional female jazz drummer and one of the oldest renown living jazz musicians. In 1939, she was widely dubbed “The Fastest Girl Drummer.” In the following years, she received endorsement deals with Ludwig, WFL Drum Company, and Zildjian. Viola cut her teeth playing with the jazz drummer Billy Gladstone at Radio City Music Hall and went on to drum in Broadway’s original 1966 run of Cabaret. And, I learned, she lived in Costa Mesa, California, just an hour-and-a-half away from my apartment in Los Angeles. 

I asked a few friends who like to brag about their knowledge of music trivia whether they had heard of Viola. None had. I decided I wanted to try and meet her, if only to get her stories on tape. It’s not every day you hear of a 107-year-old, nevermind that she is one of the most significant female jazz drummers in American history. I reached out to a journalist who had spoken to Viola a couple of years back as part of an oral history project called Women of Rock. She informed me Viola was living with a community called The Piecemakers. The Piecemakers, I later learned, was an insular Christian sect comprised primarily of elderly women quilters. The Piecemakers drew headlines in 2005 when several of them were arrested for allegedly attempting to block health inspectors from inspecting their country store. (They’d been preparing soup and other foods without a permit, according to a 2005 Orange County Register article. The article estimated the business brought in about $3 million in revenue a year.) 

I found this all baffling. How did a Midwestern-raised New York City drummer wind up in a conservative Southern California suburb with a gang of law-breaking, Jesus-loving arts and crafters? I had questions for Viola that no Internet search could answer, no matter how much I scoured music industry trade mags and the Piecemakers’ website, which, by the looks of it, has been unchanged since 1997. And so I drove the 50 miles from Los Angeles to Costa Mesa to meet Viola. 

READ MORE: The Mystery of Garrett Saracho, the East L.A. Jazz Artist Who Vanished

Piecemakers Country Store is housed in a large craftsman-style building, which stands in contrast to the 24-Hour Fitness across the street and a third-wave coffee shop around the corner. The inside of Piecemakers looks like my great-aunt’s living room if it exploded. It is covered nearly wall-to-wall with yarn, ribbons, thimbles, and porcelain dolls, dessert plates featuring anthropomorphized cats, and display cases of pies. 

My meeting with Viola has been arranged by a Piecemaker named Deborah, a woman in her seventies who acts as a sort of press person for Viola. (But by the looks of my Internet search, she only gets such requests every couple of years). I asked her how she came about the job. She said she couldn’t really remember. Viola had been living with the Piecemakers since her 99th birthday, Deborah told me. Viola had moved to Costa Mesa from New York City at the invitation of her cousin, Marie Kolasinksi. 

Kolasinksi, who has since passed away, founded The Piecemakers in 1978, after God spoke to her as she was walking by her swimming pool, she once told NBC News. Before long, she had become infamous among Piecemakers and law enforcement alike: She served jail time in 2007, at the age of 85, due to the health inspection incident, after “ wrestling with police officers and unleashing a barrage of profanity so extreme that one officer asked Kolasinski: ‘Do you kiss your kids with that mouth?’” NBC News reported. 

As I wait for Viola to emerge, I try to picture what it will be like to interface with a 107-year-old. My grandmother is 80, and I don’t know whether even she would be able to fathom what a woman nearly three decades older would look or sound like. But then, out walks Viola in a navy blouse, pink scarf, and sharp rectangular glasses. She grins at me and says “Pleasure to meet you.” 

Viola uses a walker, but operates it effortlessly, and I walk quickly to match her pace as she leads us to a back room. We settle in at a table and Viola spreads out photographs. “Would you like any tea?” She asks. “You can share mine if you want some. So, what would you like to know?” 

For the next couple of hours, Viola tells me about her life. Shortly into our conversation, however, something jarring happens. “I was walking the dog who lives with us,” Viola says, explaining how she’d recently broken her hip while walking the dog. “She’s a cocker spaniel named Tanya.” At that moment, a Piecemaker named Jean peeks her head into the room to check on us. “We were just talking about your dog,” I told her. “Tanya the cocker spaniel.” Jean looks confused. “Tanya died years ago. Viola broke her hip walking Lucy. She’s a Yorkshire terrier.” 

I realize Viola’s memory might not be so great. She mostly tells the same stories over and over again. As we continue talking, it becomes clear that these are the memories Viola is clinging to, the ones she is working hardest to preserve in her mind. They are not memories of drumming, nor are they memories of her career achievements — the magazine covers and drum company endorsements. Instead, they are recollections of the three groups of women who have defined Viola’s life. 

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I. THE SCHMITZ SISTERS

Viola grew up in a family of nine children, seven of whom were girls. Her father ran a dance hall, and, to save money, he trained each of his daughters in a specific instrument so he could have an in-house orchestra. The fact that it was an all-female orchestra made it a bit of a novelty, and a savvy business move, Viola thinks. Her eldest sister Irene was the first daughter initiated; she played the trombone. Then came Erma on the vibraphone, and Edwina on the trumpet. Lila on the saxophone came next, followed by Mildred on the violin and Sally on the bass saxophone. Viola was the sixth to join when she was 13 years old in 1925. “It was decided that I would be the drummer,” she says. “And I was just thrilled.” 

On weekends and in the summer months, the Schmitz Sisters, as they were known back then, went on tour. (Their last name was later changed to Smith. When I asked Viola the reason why, her only response was, “Because Smith just sounds better.”) The sisters played weddings and parties, vaudeville circuits and movie theaters. They were always the only all-female band. “We’d tell people, ‘Believe it or not, we’re all sisters,” Viola says. “Nobody ever believed it.” Viola laughs until she starts coughing. She takes a sip of tea. 

I ask if they ever fought. At first Viola shakes her head no. But then she sticks her finger in the air. “There was one time I remember one of my sisters wanted to have the final bites of whipped cream, at the bottom of the bowl. She was working on getting it out with her spoon and another one of my sisters said, “Oh, give me some.” So she put her finger in over the spoon. Pretty soon the two of them were fighting over this bowl of whipped cream.” Viola pauses for a moment, smiling nostalgically. “I’ll tell you,” she says. “I think I’m the luckiest person in the world to have grown up with those sisters.”

There’s a reason you’ve probably never heard of The Schmitz Sisters. As the years passed, one by one, the Schmitz sisters got married. They moved on as wives and mothers. By 1938, Viola and her sister Mildred, the clarinetist, were the only Schmitz sisters still performing. They started a new, all-female orchestra called The Coquettes, with a handful of musicians they had gotten to know over the years. It was The Coquettes that would launch Viola into the national spotlight. 

There’s a black and white short of The Coquettes originally released in 1939. In the clip, Viola is seated on a raised platform, framed by her signature drum set-up: two tom-toms turned on their sides and raised up to her ears. When I asked her about this peculiar configuration, she clarifies that it wasn’t for any particular sonic quality, but simply for spectacle. “I thought of this myself,” Viola says. “No other drummer ever copied me, which always amazed me. Because this is where showmanship comes in, when you’re throwing your arms up by your head, whirling your hand back and forth.” 

But then, in 1941, Mildred got married, and, as Viola says, “the war happened.” Viola had briefly been engaged before the war, but her fiancé was drafted and shipped off almost immediately thereafter. “By the time he came back, we had both cooled off. He moved to Miami. And I was glad to get rid of him because I wasn’t about to go through the motions of being his wife.” 

In 1942, Viola set out for the first time on her own, moving to an apartment on East 58th Street, on the border of Midtown and the Upper East Side, where she’d live for the next 70 years. I was curious whether Viola was lonely during those first few months in Manhattan, whether she missed her sisters. And I wanted to know how she felt, watching them retire from music in favor of fulfilling the gender expectations of the time: getting married, serving men, caring for children. When I bring this up, Viola doesn’t answer my questions. Instead, she responds by telling me about an article she had written for DownBeat Magazine when she first moved to New York. 

The op-ed was titled “Give Girl Musicians a Break!” At the time, orchestras in New York had lost dozens of players to the draft and were desperately seeking musicians to fill in. In her op-ed, Viola argues, “In these times of national emergency, many of the star instrumentalists of the big name bands are being drafted. Instead of replacing them with what may be mediocre talent, why not let some of the great girl musicians of the country take their place?” 

I ask Viola why she had written the piece. “Because,” she says. “I knew all the girl musicians that were available. And if no one was hiring them, they would do something else. The music community would lose them.” But somebody did hire them. His name was Phil Spitalny.

II. THE HOUR OF CHARM

Phil Spitalny was a bandleader, famous on the radio at the time. He’d decided to organize the Phil Spitalny All-Girl Orchestra in 1934 after meeting and becoming mesmerized by violinist Evelyn Kaye Klein. Over the following years, the two set about auditioning hundreds of women from across the country for an all-female orchestra, building what would eventually become known as The Hour of Charm, or more casually Phil Spitalny’s All-Girl Orchestra. Viola joined shortly after the publication of her article in DownBeat. 

“We were the biggest and the best orchestra in the country,” Viola says. The way Viola speaks of her time with The Hour of Charm reminds me of the giddy way I used to tell my parents about sleepaway camp, listing off all the people I had met and all the adventures we had had in one dreamy train of thought. “Oh there was Marian McPartland, she was the best girl pianist in the country,” Viola said. “And there was Rosa Caruso. She was my best friend in the orchestra from way back. Maxine was one of the head singers, a top singer. There was Candace and Etienne, she was very, very famous, and Evelyn, of course, the first violinist.” 

Viola describes playing everywhere from Sid Grauman’s former Paramount Theater (now home to Paramount Pictures) to the backlot at Universal Studios. She leans in close to tell me about inside jokes she, Marian, and Rosa used to tell behind the conductor’s back, and she smiles remembering how her friends would wait for her every time, while she packed up her drum set after a show. 

I ask Viola whether, aside from her female friends, she had other relationships. Did she ever fall in love? I don’t say this out loud, but, back in the 50’s, it was highly unusual for a woman to be single and never marry. Viola thinks for a moment. “There was a lawyer,” she says. “The only problem was that he was married.” He gave Viola a date, a few years out, when he would leave his wife. But on the day that he had sworn to break off his marriage, she says, the lawyer had a heart attack and died. “That must have been very sad,” I say to Viola. But Viola just shrugs. “Well, sad for me. Not sad for him. Easy for him.” 

III. THE PIECEMAKERS

In 2012, Viola boarded a flight to California at the insistence of her nephew, Dennis Bartash. She was 99 and he was worried about her. Her eleven siblings had all passed away. So, too, had many of her lifelong female musician friends: Marian the pianist at 101. Rosa the bass player at 103. 

Viola was left to miss people. And to wonder why she was outliving everyone she knew. “Maybe it’s the drums that have kept me spry, or the wine, or going to the casino,” she says with a laugh. Then her face turns serious. “I heard that when you feel like you’re dying you take two Aspirin. It might revive you,” she tells me. “So for a long time I would have Aspirins at my bedside waiting for me to die. Nothing happened.” 

Bartash had grown up watching his aunt perform on television. He remembers his entire extended family gathering in the living room every time Viola appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in the 1950s. In one particularly memorable performance, the stage was dark and Viola played with iridescent drum sticks. “She’d throw them into the air, catch them, and keep playing,” Bartash says. “She was mesmerizing.”

The plan had originally been for Viola to live with Dennis in Canyon County, California, just north of Los Angeles. But Dennis had recently reconnected with Marie, and when she learned Viola was coming to town, she invited them to visit Piecemakers. Dennis drove Viola down to Costa Mesa, to see the cousin she hadn’t been in touch with for over 60 years. When they arrived, there was a shindig with food and drink, and Viola was embraced by Marie and the other women in the Piecemakers community. She visited their houses — many of them lived together — and someone cooked dinner each night. Marie offered to be Viola’s caretaker. “Come live with us,” Viola remembers her saying. “You can live here for the rest of your life.” 

But just a few months later, Marie died, at the age of 90. Deborah says it was only natural that the community continue caring for Viola. They’d fallen in love with her spirit, her witticisms, and sense of humor. And Viola, for her part, was content to remain there. After Marie’s passing, the Piecemakers’ drama with the law subsided. Viola says she and the other women take walks, watch movies, and go for rides. They get salty caramel ice cream. Viola helps in the store sometimes too, winding ribbon and yarn and watching children come in for art lessons.  And Dennis visits every so often. He and Viola drink red wine and go to the casino. I tell her this all sounds pretty great. 

While the Piecemakers had heard bits and pieces about her career, Deborah says it took time to understand just how famous and accomplished she was. They began to get a taste when, halfway through Viola’s 100th birthday party, the phone rang. It was Joel Grey, the actor, singer, and original Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret, calling to wish Viola a happy birthday. 

Another indication of Viola’s influence came when she turned 102. Viola had been interviewed for TomTom Magazine, a publication devoted to female drummers. A few weeks later, Deborah, Viola, and a fellow Piecemaker went to a Guitar Center, to get a few supplies for the Piecemakers’ band, which plays at the organization’s various events. Viola doesn’t take part. She says that playing the drums would be too much excitement for her. 

At Guitar Center, a young woman was helping them, and after learning she was a drummer, Deborah volunteered that Viola was one too. “You could tell that this woman was just being polite with Viola, asking her where she had played, and not thinking much of it,” Deborah says. “And then on the counter was a copy of Tom Tom Magazine. This woman opened it and as she was flipping through it, I said, ‘Viola, there’s the article on you.’ This girl doubled over when she realized who Vi was. ‘You’re Viola Smith? And you’re in my fucking store? Every woman drummer knows who you are.’” 

In the late afternoon, I say goodbye to Viola. We walk through Piecemakers and Viola turns to me and says, “Can you believe how much there is to look at in this store?” I realize I’ve softened somewhat to Piecemakers. “It’s really something,” I say. 

There’s still a lot I don’t know about Viola Smith. In keeping her stories focused on The Schmitz Sisters, The Hour of Charm, and The Piecemakers, she’s kept me from some of her emotions, from the conflict in her life, and from the hardships of being a woman in a man’s industry. 

I will never know the “true” story of Viola Smith. Instead, I have the one she wants to tell about herself, the one that she refuses to let slip away, and that is a story about groups of women. Sometimes women marry off, they leave an industry, they pass away, but there’s always another group of women who will welcome you, who will love you. Even when you’re 107 years old. 

The post The Beat of Her Own Drum appeared first on theLAnd.

On a nondescript corner in Lincoln Heights, sandwiched between World Nail and Spa and Escobar’s Travel Agency, is an unmarked door. Behind it lies a century old men’s club. Wood paneled, carpet lined and teeming with taxidermied polar bears, treasure chests, spears, shrunken heads, deep sea diving gear and an 85,000-year-old mastodon head, this is the home for the world’s foremost explorers, thrill seekers and planet roamers. This is the Los Angeles Adventurers’ Club.

Founded in 1922 by a group of men including Teddy Roosevelt, the club has seen over 1,000 members. Famous names include James Cameron, Buzz Aldrin and Cecil B. DeMille. Alongside lesser known adventurers, they have earned memberships doing some of the most extraordinary, insane and frankly bizarre missions imaginable. There’s the competitive tandem surfer who hitchhiked a flight to Kathmandu with the then Prime Minister of Nepal. Then there’s the man who sailed across the Atlantic with his dog, but crashed the boat and paid his way home by playing clarinet on street corners. Members are scientists, physicists, anthropologists, doctors, engineers and artists. Membership is invitation only. Meetings are every Thursday in the organization’s longtime clubhouse, rented from freemasons. Business attire is required. Only men are allowed.

This is a major point of contention for the Adventurers’ Club. Though it has persisted for nearly a century, it has arrived at a juncture, with tensions mounting between members who insist on tradition and others who want to rewrite the rule book. There are those who feel the biggest risk to the club is male ego, and others who would shred their membership cards were women to be invited. Up to several times a month, however, the club offers “Ladies Nights,” which are intended to accommodate wives and friends of members. Though I am neither a wife nor a friend of a club member, I’d caught wind of the club through word of mouth, and in the spirit of adventure, I decide to attend a “Ladies Self Defense Night.”

On a Thursday in September, I am greeted at the door by an 80-year-old pilot who tells me he survived a mid-air collision. “Dr. Bernie Redman, 1063,” he says. At the club, it is tradition for members to introduce themselves with their name, followed by their member number.

The Adventurers’ Club has no social media presence. It doesn’t advertise, and it doesn’t do outreach. There is a rudimentary website designed by skindiver Stewart Deats, #1168. And the interior of the clubhouse itself feels notably untapped by anyone seeking to modernize or commercialize it. The space resembles an old museum or a preserved historic site. There are wooden chairs, tungsten bulbs in brass fixtures and glass cases containing yellowed letters, frayed books and chipped ceramics dating back hundreds of years.

The Adventurers themselves, most of whom are above the age of 60, contribute to the feeling of having entered a time capsule. As Redman walks me through the club’s halls, men with bushy mustaches—many with gold rings, some in cowboy boots—socialize with women with coiffed hair and long dresses. It feels like courtship 101 from the early 20th Century, with men recounting harrowing and heroic tales to female listeners. It is grossly old fashioned, but to the men’s credit, their stories are an unusual sort of fascinating. They are the kind of stories that warrant telling.

Redman shows me the vestibule lined with members’ photos and personalized buttons. It leads to a long room with taxidermied animals—Pythons, a 9-foot swordfish, black rhinos, rams, and lions—hanging from every inch of the walls. “We’ve got some bears too,” Redman says. “But, these are from years ago. Today we shoot animals with cameras.”

He points to a list hanging on the wall, penned by John Goddard, #507, an explorer and anthropologist dubbed “the real Indiana Jones.” Among the checked-off items: “Climb Mt Vesuvius,” “Ride Horse in Rose Parade,” “play Clair de Lune on the piano,” become proficient in the use of a plane, motorcycle, tractor, surfboard, rifle, pistol, canoe, microscope, football, basketball, bow and arrow, lariat and boomerang,” Unchecked items include: “Appear in a Tarzan movie,” and “Own a horse, chimpanzee, cheetah, ocelot and coyote.”

As I shake hands with adventurer after adventurer, I feel there’s an excitement that I’m a visitor, and that it’s my first time in the club. “You find a warmth, and a closeness here,” says Joe Valecic, #1107, who says he developed one of the first underwater color video systems used for wildlife TV programs. “If somebody’s going on an expedition and needs an underwater camera, well they can call me and get it for free. Likewise, if I need climbing aids or climbing boots, oh, just call Larry. He’ll get you whatever you want.”

As the story goes, when the adventurers gathered for their first meeting in 1922, four toasts were offered: “To Adventure, the Shadow of Every Red-Blooded Man,” “To the Game,” “To Every Lost Trail, Lost Cause and Lost Comrade,” and lastly, “To Gentlemen Adventurers.”

As Redman and I continue through the clubhouse, I realize it’s not the weapons, expedition flags or hunting trophies that make the club feel masculine—it’s the collection of pin-up-style photos of naked women carefully tucked away behind the pull-down “The Ladies Night” banner that remind me women have no footprint here.  

The exclusion of women is the most glaring difference between the Adventurers’ Club and other organizations for adventurers around the world. The biggest and most reputable is the Explorers’ Club, headquartered in a townhouse off Central Park in New York City. It became coed in 1981. The Adventurers’ Club has voted twice, once in 1995 and again in 2014, to allow women entry into the club. Both times, the outcome was “no.”

But it’s not as though the club is opposed to breaking from tradition. The trove of rhino heads, polar bears and other stuffed animals, for example, are now regarded as uncouth and hunting is no longer an acceptable form of adventure. What’s more, plenty of the strict membership rules have fallen by the wayside. It used to be that you had to attend club meetings for a year before you were invited to join. Dinners were mandatory; they were viewed as essential to maintain the bond of community, and also as treasured occasions to get to know and to learn from fellow adventurers. The process for membership has since been shortened to as little as a few months. Dinners are now optional.

If the rules on membership have been loosened over the years, why hasn’t the ban on women?

Redman rings the brass dinner bell. “Cover your ears, please!” he yells.  

As we line up with paper plates for meatloaf, made by a chef whose family has been cooking for the adventurers for more than 30 years, I ask why the club has always voted to remain single-sex. The most common answer is a shrug that seems to imply, well, it’s tradition.

“The club was founded when gentlemen’s clubs were common,” says Valecic, the videographer who built his own 52-foot boat, dubbed the research vessel quest. (It was docked for years, he says, next to John Wayne’s in Newport Beach.) “This was back in the early 20th Century, when members liked the time to discuss things other than probably what their wives would want to discuss at dinner,” Valecic says. “It’s a place for guys to have camaraderie and get together.”

As we eat, the men ask me about myself, about my line of work and my own adventures. I had assumed that because I am a woman and therefore have no potential as a club member, the adventurers wouldn’t be interested in what I had to say. But they listen; they ask questions. I’m pleasantly surprised.

When I express my own conflicted feelings about a club that excludes women—who are still egregiously underrepresented in many professions—Wayne White, #1194 assures me that the point of a men’s club is not to send the message that women are unequal, but to offer men a place to be with other men. “I personally think men are in a bit of a crisis right now. There’s enough things going on in society and with certain groups trying to break down spaces for men,” he says. The way he sees it, the club is facing societal pressure to “do the right thing” and admit women. The harder task in today’s climate, he argues, would be to fight for the rare opportunity to maintain a men’s only space.

There are a handful of things I would like to say in response to this, but Kevin Lee, a scuba diver who has searched for sea slugs on all seven continents, chimes in. “We can let our hair down on men’s only nights and use different language than we would when ladies are present,” Lee says. “The dynamic would change. The meetings would feel different.”

I speak with Casey Shepard, a woman who’s traveled the world by van and bike. She spoke about her travels during a meeting several years ago and still visits the club from time to time. “When I mentioned I was married,” she tells me, “One man said, ‘If I were her husband, I wouldn’t trust my wife being gone that long.’”

According to anthropologist and fine-arts teacher Pierre Odier, 988, comments about women’s appearances are not infrequent at the Adventurers’ Club. And he resents that Ladies’ Nights (which have since been listed on the club’s website as “Open Nights”) often turn into date nights, platforms for men to brag and seduce or simply show off the women they’ve invited.

Bob Oberto, a pilot, aerospace engineer and NASA-trained research scuba diver, says he finds the club’s ban on women embarrassing. “It was a handful of female friends who introduced me to the club, and they are not allowed to be members,” he says. I rationalize it and think, ‘Well, the club is so old. It’s almost kind of kitschy that you’d have a bunch of old guys hanging onto an old men’s club from the Empire, British Empire days. But in reality, women are quite bothered by it.”

Andrea Donnellan, a geophysicist and principal research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, discovered the club in the early 2000’s and was a regular attendee and speaker at  Ladies Nights for years. While she said never felt disrespected during those events, she held out hope that the club would someday become co-ed, as many members had promised her early on. But when the adventurers voted down the option to admit women in 2014, Donnellan felt profoundly let down. One night following the vote, she accidentally showed up to a men’s only meeting. She was turned away at the door and never came back.

Shepard admits she feels torn about returning to the club. “It is a hidden gem, an amazing, epic place,” she says. “But at the same time, I am an adventurer. I go to the organization to learn and to talk about adventure. And the club members make it about gender. I think they have to decide: Is it a men’s club, or is it an adventurers’ club?”

After dessert, Redman rings the bell again, announcing the end of dinner and the start of the meeting. We stack our plates and file into the great hall.

The first order of business is to rise for a moment of silence for those who have disappeared and remain missing on adventure. This happens from time to time. There are the men who went missing while whale-watching in Baja, and the 61-year-old insurance salesman who set out on a 10,000-mile sailing expedition in 2003 and never came home. We also take time to acknowledge those who have euphemistically “gone on the great adventure.”

“These days, unfortunately, there are deaths,” says Vince Weatherby, #1060. “Our club is nearly 100 years old. And many of the founding members are passing away.”

The club is ushering in a new generation of adventures, but few of them have any intention of rewriting the rules.

Alec Shumate is in his early 30s and makes his living as a storyboard artist. But here at the Adventurers’ Club, he identifies as an “expedition artist” and says he’s planning a trip to sketch wildlife in the Amazon. He was recently voted to serve on the board of the Adventurers’ Club, a place he says is empowering, in part, because of its all-male membership. “There is something special, at least for me personally, about that kind of camaraderie and the mentorship that I can find in an all-male institution,” Shumate says. “When I come into the club, I feel one step closer to being the kind of person that I want to be one day.”

In the great hall, a woman named Linda Abrams, who looks to be in her 70s, shares plans for her next adventure. “I’m flying my 415-C to the Mojave desert to for the Ercoupe Convention in a few weeks,” Abrams says, revealing herself to be not a wife or a friend of the club, but a adventurer in her own right.

A male adventurer stands. “I lost my wallet going through security,” he says. The crowd chuckles.

Abrams smiles politely. I fight an eye roll.

During the women’s self defense training, a frail, slightly hunched man who is revealed to be 96 years old takes the stage. His name is Sid Hallburn, #998. Halburn served in the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA, during World War II. He was a Grand Mixed Martial Arts Master and a professional tap dancer who trained with Gene Kelly, Shirley Temple and Judy Garland. I find these facts delightful, and Hallburn himself even more so. “I’ve seen a lot in my life,” he insists, “But I’m nothing special.”

Hallburn begins his tutorial by listing the three “Categories of People Who Are Going to Hurt You.” The first is teenagers. “They don’t want to rape you,” Hallburn said. “They just want your money.” The next type is “Mr. Know it All.” He’s really slick and really smooth,” Halburn says. “He’s a family member or a friend. And he wants to rape or molest you. But he’s not interested in killing you.” And the final group: “The guy who wants to rape you and take you to the desert somewhere and dump your body.”

Hallburn then brings up an assistant named Fred Culkowski, a 60-something longtime Filipino weapons expert. Culkowski distributes copies of a list, handwritten by Halburn. “Things To Help You If Needed,” it reads. Those include things like “Saw,” “Hammer,” “Hot Coffee” “Chair and other furniture,” “Knife (Butcher), keep one in purse.”

At the bottom is a note: “Our Video is only $14.95 we pay the shipping its not another martial arts video–we also have a secret weapon that can stop anyone in seconds.”

Hallburn then demonstrates how to use each of the objects named on the list. “Come at me,” he says to Culkowski. The adventurers and I watch as Hallburn fends off his assistant with a hammer; a Campbell’s soup can; then an ice pick. “Eyes, stomach, side of the head, between the legs and side of the head again. That’ll stop him.”

Not unlike everything else I have experienced at the club, there is something amazing and completely baffling about this demonstration. I look around the room at the men nodding, taking in this lesson from a 96-year-old about warding off rapists with butchers’ knives. Initially, I am amused by Hallburn and his quirky biography. But then I am unsettled. I feel growing discomfort watching a program that men have curated on my behalf, which they have deemed helpful for my safety. I can appreciate that the club was founded in another era, and that views on gender used to be different. But looking around the Adventurers’ Club, I see men using the club’s history as an excuse to live in the past, embracing outdated ideas about gender and power.

Hallburn pulls out a pistol and gestures towards the audience. “You probably don’t want to kill him, so shoot him in the leg,” he says. “That’ll stop him.”

During the Q&A, a woman raises her hand and asks about the “not another martial arts video” advertised at the bottom of the handout for $14.95. Hallburn says he has no idea what she’s talking about.

Following a round of applause for the conclusion of the meeting, I approach Abrams, curious to learn more about her. She tells me about her upcoming solo flight to a spaceport in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and about the Renaissance reenactment club she devotes herself to when she’s not climbing aboard her vintage two-seater plane. I ask if she wishes the club allowed women.

“Not at all,” she says. “I like it as is.” She must read the surprise on my face, because her tone becomes stern. “Now, the word counterculture used to mean something different, but I’m going to be literal in the way I’m using it here … I am counter to the present cultural trend that tries to homogenize men and women,” she says. “I enjoy men being men, and I have no problem at all with a club that specifies that it’s for men.”

After the meeting, many of the adventurers shake my hand and tell me to please come back, but I’m not so sure I can endure another male lecture.   

“We have another Ladies Night next week,” Weatherby says. “It’s a man who documented Russian teen royalty kidnapped in the Amazon!”

I have to admit, begrudgingly, that I am intrigued.

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