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Rotary Club will soon have its first female member

By BY S.I. ROSENBAUM
Published March 9, 2007

"Ladies and gentlemen," the speaker said.

B. Lee Elam looked around at his fellow Rotarians, startled. Ladies? What ladies?

He'd been a member of the Brandon Rotary Club for more than 30 years.

There had never been any female members.

Then, he saw her: Ingrid Rose, a 42-year-old legal office manager - soon to become the first female member of the club - sitting alongside the men as comfortable as you please.

For as long as anyone can remember, the Brandon Rotary has been an all-male club. When the service club started up, back in the 1940s, that was the way things were.

"It was the club of hunters and fishermen," said member Charlie Thurman, who joined in 1987. "And hunters and fishermen, they don't hang out with people other than hunters and fishermen, and not a lot of women do those things."

The wives had their own group, said Elam: the Rotary Annes, a women's auxiliary.

But times changed. All the area's other Rotary chapters have female members now.

Lone holdout

It's only the Brandon Rotary chapter - the area's first, known locally as the Old Man's Club - which resisted.

"We had a meeting once, and this was, I'm thinking, 15 years ago, and a Rotarian said, 'You know, Rotary International says we have to let women in,' " Elam recalled. "I saw the collective hair on seven necks go up."

He recalls one man telling him: "If a woman comes in, I'm gone."

That man is dead now, he said.

Some of the old men are still there, but many have passed away. The club's membership is younger now. Resistance to gender integration has softened.

"Middle-aged men have been around women and competing with women and working with women all their lives," Thurman said.

Not many applicants

Even so, few women wanted to be the first to integrate the group.

One began the process of applying for membership but was in a car accident before she could join, Elam said.

Others simply joined other, younger chapters that already had women members.

"They didn't want to be around all those old men," he said.

But Rose was undaunted.

"I'm honored, really," she said. "Thrilled."

She had been a member of a Rotary chapter in Oregon years ago, she said. It was "my fondest memory" of her time in that state, she added.

"Rotarians are the most wonderful people of all. It attracts the best of the best."

Breaking ground

She moved to Tampa with her new husband a few years ago. As her new life began to settle down, she began to look for a chapter to join.

A friend told her about the Brandon chapter, so she showed up at one of its noon meetings.

Right away, someone clued her in. "We've never had a woman in the club," a member told her.

"I thought to myself, 'I'd be honored to be the first woman to be voted in,' " she said. "It's a wonderful group."

Thurman became her sponsor. Rose will attend a few more meetings under his guidance before she can be officially voted in as a member.

"She had a good, firm handshake," he said, recalling their first meeting. "I thought, 'Just because we don't have any women doesn't mean we can't.' "

So far, he said, members seem pleased that Rose will be joining them - even though it may mean some things have to change.

The club's main fundraiser, its Wild Game Dinner, is still open only to men, according to Thurman.

"Six or eight hundred guys out in the woods, doing male things, it's not some place I want my wife or daughter to be," he said.

But he acknowledged that this might be the last year the dinner doesn't include women.

Elam said he doesn't mind that the days of male-only events are over.

"I won't have a problem," he said. "You could have a green dog in there and I wouldn't care."

S.I. Rosenbaum can be reached at 661-2442 or srosenbaum@sptimes.com

[Last modified March 8, 2007, 07:46:06]