SI/Los Angeles, CA, Celebrates 100th Anniversary

Congratulations to SI/Los Angeles, CA (Camino Real Region), and all its members as they mark the 100th anniversary of their chartering on July 19, 2022!

SIA headquarters does not have any archival holdings on the chartering of this club, and the Los Angeles club did not find any related to the work of Stuart Morrow in chartering the in their club’s archives. But through the use of public domain newspaper clippings, we can begin to piece together a portion of the Los Angeles club’s charter story.

Stuart Morrow appears to have been in Los Angeles within a month after the chartering of the San Francisco club on March 6. Alma Whitacre, in her “The Last Word” column in the April 7, 1921, edition of The Los Angeles Times noted, “There is a fellow in town busily organizing a Soroptimist club, a sort of female Rotary club.” Almost every newspaper clipping in the chartering period made mention of the Soroptimist club as a women’s parallel of the all male Rotary clubs, and several mentioned the Soroptimist clubs in Oakland and San Francisco.

The first meeting of the club took place on Monday, April 10, 1921, at Paulais Café, in downtown Los Angeles. Thirty-two women immediately signed on to become members—including an attorney, several physicians with different specializations, a dentist, apartment house owner, campaign manager, printer, multigrapher, accountant, income tax specialist, several women in the beauty and cosmetology trades, and intriguingly, an “English critic and teacher.”

Rather than wait until later in the chartering process, group captains, whose job it was to encourage and cajole members to attend the weekly meetings were appointed at the second meeting on April 17. Four, including Cora Fithian (life insurance), were appointed, but by late May that number had doubled to eight captains, as each captain shepherded about 10 members. Cora Fithian would later go on to serve on the club’s first board of directors.

The June 18 Los Angeles Times reported that members at the regular luncheon meeting the previous Tuesday reached almost 100. The last mention of the club in the Los Angeles press apparently took place on July 9, when the Times ran a story about the upcoming chartering ceremony to be held at the Los Angeles Athletic Club. However, the Oakland Tribune ran a lengthy article about the Los Angeles chartering, which Violet Richardson, as the Alameda County/Oakland club president, and Fanny Williams, the San Francisco club president, attended.

Only July 19, 1922, the Los Angeles Soroptimist club chartered with 113 members, with California Governor William Stephens, a Los Angeles resident, Los Angeles Mayor George Cryer, and other “prominent men and women” attending the charter ceremony.

The chartering of the Los Angeles Soroptimist club marked the end of Stuart Morrow’s chartering efforts in California. The presidents of the three California clubs—Oda Faulconer (an attorney) in Los Angeles and Violet Richardson and Fanny Williams in the Bay area to the north, agreed to take on the chartering of additional clubs in California at the time of the charter ceremony in Los Angeles. From that point on, Soroptimist clubs in California were chartered by Soroptimists themselves. Morrow took his chartering efforts to the east coast, where he worked to charter a club in Washington, D.C., beginning in September 1922.

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