Executive Board
- President: Bob Gerecke
- VP Education: Ivan Light
- VP Organization: Gar Byrum
- Secretary: Carolee Monroe
- Treasurer: Merrill Ring
- Past President: Parkes Riley
- Fund-Raising: TBD
- Ways and Means: Betty Cramer
- Political Liaison: Gar Byrum
- Issues: Werner Warmbrunn
- Peace & Justice Liaison: Lois Thompson
- Publicity & Letters to Editors: Ted Radamaker
- Speaker's Bureau: David Levering
- Voter Lists: TBD
- Newsletter: Ron Wolff
- Special Projects: TBD
- Parliamentarian & Legal Advisor: TBD
- Website Editor: Bob May
For an expanded list with telephone numbers and email addresses, Click Here.
Helen Myers, who died on September 14, 2005, at the age of 91, was a Democratic activist for many decades and an invaluable member of our club. She was a hostess for many board meetings, providing comfortable chairs, abundant refreshments, and a coffee table piled with up-to-date books on politics and the arts. She was also a backroom strategist and a frequent proposer of resolutions, usually trying to push the club to the left on matters like the estate tax cuts she loathed.
To the club she brought her aesthetic sense, her thorough knowledge of politics, her liveliness, and her sardonic and playful humor. She also brought her experience of years of working on campaigns. Thoughts of certain things could instantly delight her: Paris, the Southwestern desert, but maybe Adlai Stevenson even more. To people in a younger generation, she could seem a product of a distant era when the Democratic Party was not playing a bitter, defensive game against dangerous mediocrities but was full of grand, outsized personalities who were able to change the world for the better.
Only in 1986 did Helen move to Claremont and became active in our club. But she was part of the Claremont political scene as early as 1948, when she worked with Steve Zetterberg in his Congressional campaign against then first-termer Richard Nixon. Steve, still one of our club members, was not able to defeat him, but he and Helen had picked their target well.
Five years after that, Helen’s party activism reached a peak when she helped found the California Democratic Council, the parent organization for Democratic clubs all over California. At the CDC founding convention in November 1953, Alan Cranston, later a U.S. Senator, was elected President, with responsibility for Northern California. Helen was elected Vice President, with responsibility for Southern California. There was thunderous applause.
She had been born in Chicago in 1914, the daughter of recent immigrants from Sweden. Her father was a carpenter and union member, later a contractor, who was steeped in Swedish social democracy and became a committed Democrat. Her mother had been an au pair girl from age fourteen in an attorney’s household. After an early childhood in small towns in Michigan, Helen moved to Lakewood, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland.
She graduated from high school in 1933, but in the midst of the Depression, she did not immediately go to college. Instead she helped form the “32 Club,” for a group of graduates interested in the arts. Her friend since seventh grade, Mary Grace Slattery, was another member. Both of them later attended the University of Michigan, where Slattery met Arthur Miller, the future playwright, later becoming his first wife. In Ann Arbor, Helen was a member of the Zeta Tau Alpha sorority.
Ware Myers, also of Lakewood, joined the 32 Club in March 1933. His romance with Helen began in April, and they married in 1937. After that she transferred to the University of Chicago, graduating in 1939 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Her degree was in Social Service Administration, and she worked for a few months with the Chicago Relief Administration on Chicago’s South Side.
Then she got an illness, pericarditis, an infectious disease of the sac around the heart, which was serious and debilitating in the era before antibiotics. To recuperate, she spent winters in the dry climate of Tucson, and then spent the World War II years there while Ware was an officer in the Navy. After the war, Helen and Ware settled in Los Angeles County. Their son, Paul, was born in 1946, and he is now carrying on the family’s Democratic tradition by writing a book on Franklin D. Roosevelt. Ware has been and continues to be active in our club.
Helen’s political involvement began in 1948, after a friend told her about an open place on the Los Angeles County Democratic Central Committee. She joined the committee and got to know Steve Zetterberg. In 1950 she became chair of the Organization Committee, working tirelessly in the era of Helen Gahagan Douglas’s campaign for the U.S. Senate and James Roosevelt’s campaign for Governor. By 1952, the year of the Stevenson campaign for president, there were 125 Democratic clubs in Los Angeles County, and Helen spent many hours meeting with groups and showing them how to organize a club.
The CDC emerged in 1953 as part of a battle against California’s old system of cross filing in primaries, which allowed a Republican incumbent to compete for the Democratic as well as the Republican nomination. The CDC spent its time trying to publicize the names of the leading Democrats in political campaigns, and its successes helped bring an end to cross filing.
During the 1950s, Helen was engaged in diverse organizational activities from Los Feliz to Montclair. Her party work was as an unpaid volunteer, scrupulously honest. During the two Pat Brown administrations, she had a job in Pasadena with the California Disaster Office.
Her many friends included not only Slattery and Miller, but Mackie Jarrell, who was married to Randall Jarrell, the poet and critic. In Pasadena, Linus Pauling got her taking vitamin C. Her activities extended to the Scripps Fine Arts Foundation, of which she was variously President, co-President, and Chairman of the Board. She took about twenty trips to Europe, from Britain to the Soviet Union, making visits to her relatives in Sweden and developing her fondness for France.
She could work with rich and poor, lofty and lowly, brilliant and ordinary. She made hundreds of phone calls and ran many fundraising events. She had training in administration and had natural skills, including energy, effervescence, persuasiveness, and shrewdness as a judge of character. From her teens to her nineties, she was an organizer and catalyst.
Parkes Riley
Fred Stoerker
1917-2003
Fred Stoerker, long the esteemed editor of our club's newsletter, the Voorhis Voice, died in Claremont August 19, 2003. Born in Kansas, he was an ordained minister with a degree from Boston University, and he later got a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Missouri. From 1956 to 1988, he lived in New York, where he first headed the Office of Ecumenical Voluntary Service of the National Student Christian Federation and then taught political science at Kingsborough Community College. Deeply religious as well as firmly committed to our party and its principles, he served on both the Board of Deacons and the Board of Trustees at the Riverside Church. Acquainted with many national political figures, he brought knowledge, shrewd judgment, and energy to our club and our area's Democratic party. Club members will find it hard to get through an even-numbered fall without his recommendations about how to vote on propositions.
(909)-626-8100
P.O. Box 1201, Claremont, CA, 91711