On a Wednesday in January shortly before noon, the parking lot at the Beverly Woods, a restaurant at 11532 S. Western, is filling with cars. Amid the compacts and SUVs, 14 or 15 four-door sedans arrive. Most are roomy and low-slung American models: Buicks, Cadillacs, and Fords, hallmark vehicles of an older generation. Some of the men emerging from these boats are as spry as they were 30 years ago; others grip canes and slowly shuffle to the entrance. They’re members of Men of Leisure, a club with no dues, no agenda, and no special purpose other than to get these men out of the house once a week for lunch.
With new members coming in and old ones dying off, the composition of the club has changed. In the 1960s, there were around 40 members; now there are 20, Spencer says. “If you’re lucky, you start out as the youngest member and you get to be the oldest,” says Art Hartley, 87. Hartley, a retired steel salesman, has belonged to the group for 23 years, but he’s not the oldest. The club has members in their 90s, though they come to meetings less frequently. It maintains a member list that includes birthdays, which are recognized, in song, as close as possible to the correct date.
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It’s customary to start meetings with a joke. For the last ten years Eaton has been the man to do this. Sometimes he passes out hard candy, but mostly he reads from a leather-bound copy of More Over Sexteen, a book of jokes published in 1953.
While club members may not pay close attention to the jokes, they do seem to keep close tabs on each other. At the November meeting an attendance poll revealed that only 14 men were present, and Clif Hullinger asked if anybody knew the whereabouts of the eight who were absent. Three may simply not have felt like coming, but the group provided specific answers concerning the remaining five. One man was visiting his sister, a nun who is in bad health. Another was in Florida, and another had gone to his cottage in Michigan. Another was on his way to Mexico for a vacation. The last man in question has bad hearing and may not have heard the message on his answering machine. A member of the group suggests, “Maybe we should write him a note.”
“Last week’s program [the police safety talk] was very interesting,” Pete Rakiewicz told the men seated at his table at a meeting not long ago. “My sister lives on Belmont. A guy broke the rear door in. She had to give all the money she had. Two hundred bucks! Now who’s a hostage now?”
