The Little House

As you enter Pacific Grove, California the signs read, “Welcome to America’s Last Home Town.”  Of course it isn’t, but the phrase sells its nostalgic tourist economy; a lovely coastline, colorful old houses, retirement homes and antique stores. 

Founded by Methodists in 1875 as a summer campground for religious inspiration and learning, the original Chautauqua Hall still hosts lectures, square dancing and quilt shows.  The many lovely old gingerbread style houses, built quickly for summer pilgrims, without insulation or continuous foundation, now sell, with their precious historic plaques, for more than a million dollars. 

But in a California of strip malls and freeways I like this kind of coastal Brigadoon.  Mercifully the people are warm and real; it’s not a Disneyland.  I live 15 miles south, down the coast in a redwood canyon, but you can find me in PG (as we call it) every year at their cute events like “Good Old Days” with pie contests and tug o’ war and races between local fire departments.  Or watching the school kids dressed up like butterflies in the annual parade that celebrates the monarchs that winter here.  Pacific Grove also bills itself as Butterfly Town USA.

You can also find me in PG every week at another sweet old building in a small park near the center of town.  Across from the old-fashioned gazebo bandstand which hosts summer concerts, there is a small one-room building known as the Little House.  The plaque reads “Built by the PG Rotary Club in 1951”, the year of my birth.  Lots of community groups use it – Boy Scouts, singing groups, various clubs.  I am there most weeks as a member of a 12-step group that has met there for years.

Rotary Clubs are part of the very American phenomenon of voluntary service clubs that bring folks together for shared fellowship and good works. De Tocqueville noticed in 1835 that Americans were crazy about voluntary associations, and the passion has not waned.  Every town has all kinds of clubs.  Rotary, started by a Chicago businessman in 1905, now has 35,000 clubs worldwide, over a million members. They have lunch, raise money for local schools and do good works.   I am particularly impressed with their project Polio Plus that has given oral polio vaccines to 2 billion children worldwide.

Rotary had a notoriously hard time opening up its membership to women.  De Tocqueville also noticed the American tension between liberty and equality; does our freedom include the freedom to discriminate?  Rotary men said a voluntary organization should be voluntary, able to decide who is in and out.  But a California chapter admitted a few women in 1976, and when sued, argued that Rotary was a business and hence subject to a 1959 California law prohibiting discrimination by businesses based on age, sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, marital status, or (later) sexual orientation.  (Actually it was the central Rotary headquarters that objected to women members, and sued the local chapter, saying women members would made Rotary “like a motel, having to accept anyone.”) The US Supreme Court agreed with the women in 1987.  (Why is it that in so many organizations a local group has to work so hard to get the central headquarters to remember its real mission, viz church, government...?)

In 2011 the local Rotary chapter closed the Little House for almost a year while they added a continuous foundation, made the bathroom accessible, fixed up the kitchen.  Slowly, with their volunteer labor.  All those 12 Step and Boy Scout and other community groups had to meet elsewhere. My group met at the local youth center, but even with the ping-pong tables and comfy sofas, attendance fell off; our funky old Little House was part of why we went every week. We’d drive by the little park and the construction and long for the day of our return from exile.  Finally the day came and we returned.  Some folks grumbled at the changes (we 12-steppers can be a little stuck in our ways.)  But it was nice to have a reliable toilet and not blow the power with our coffee maker.  There were more windows and insulation.  The plaque now read, “Built by Pacific Grove Rotary 1951.  Restored 2011.”

Curious about those old Rotarians, I did some research.  Their local website notes historical accomplishments: “1951: Built a clubhouse as a meeting place for the older ladies of Pacific Grove.”  This notoriously male centered service club, who also proudly note their first woman member in 1986 (!) and first woman president in 1995, had, like the original PG settlers, quickly thrown up a building so “older ladies” could have community and self-improvement.  Whose idea was it?

I imagined one of the wives of those old Rotarians saying, “You guys go off to your meetings every week.  What about us?”  Or, “I’m tired of hosting the sewing circle in this little, cold, gingerbread house.  I wish there was a place we could all get together.”  Or maybe (we are talking 1951 here, not 1890) it was one of the tens of thousands of military servicewomen who came back from World War II and said, “Enough with the cute town, I’ve seen the world and want a place to discuss politics and economics with my sisters.”  Perhaps it was the local chapter of Republican women who wanted to fight the 1950’s communist scourge and Adlai Stevenson.  And just because the men wrote the history and brag about the building, maybe women even did some work with saw and nail.  I love sitting there imagining those feisty “older ladies” and their clubhouse.  I wonder if they let men in?

California official history can be sort of shallow, and white and male.  Mission padres, Gold Rush, the railroad.   But a good historical mural along our coast Recreation Trail (commissioned by the Rotary?) depicts other PG citizens besides the upright Methodists: the native folks who live here for ten thousand years, and the Chinese fishing men and women who escaped a famine in China in the 1850s and settled here, suffered the suspicious burning down of their village and boats, and came back.  Maybe we should add a picture of those “older ladies” meeting in the 50’s at the Little House.  And us today.

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter