A few days after William Safire died on Sept. 27 of last year, a paid tribute to him appeared in The New York Times.
It was from his fellow members of the Wednesday 10, a networking group that Safire organized in 1957, an informal organization that continues to meet.
Last week in The Wall Street Journal, reporter Katherine Rosman offered a fascinating full account of the Wednesday 10, its history, its membership and its endurance.
William Safire
Safire was with a New York City advertising agency when he launched the group. Later, he would be a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon and, after that, a columnist for the Times.
The other men who became part of the Wednesday 10 were also at the start of their careers, careers that, for most of them, would prove to be extraordinary.
There were future editors and media executives in the group, and there were men who would become leaders in medical science and other fields.
The “10″ in the name Wednesday 10 was not a reference to the maximum number of men in the group.
Rather it was the minimum number of attendees the organizers hoped to get at any one of their monthly Wednesday meetings.
Over time, at least 32 men were part of the group. Only one member dropped out. “It was getting to a very self-admiring group, and it lost appeal for me,” Bill Adler, a literary agent, told the Journal.
Including Safire, eight members of the group have died, among them Stewart Richardson, a publisher and editor whose authors included John Updike, Mikhail Gorbachev and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy.
The club had a rule that only two members could come from any one profession. This made it a kind of full service shop with someone for just about any need.
Members in search of spiritual adviser could turn to Father Paul Chan, a Roman Catholic priest.
There was financial advice to be had from Robert Menschel, who became a high-ranking executive at Goldman Sachs, and Stanley Bartels who was at other finance houses.
And, as Rosman notes, anyone who needed a literary agent could, like Safire, turn to Morton J. Janklow.
Menschal, Edward Bleier, a former television executive, and restaurant owner George Lang were club members and Janklow clients.
From the start, the club was all-male.
“In 1957, it didn’t occur to us to include women,” Menschel told the Journal. “If we formed it today, it wouldn’t occur to us not to include women.”
Other members noted that wives came to some of the meetings and that some of the guest speakers were women, their numbers including Gloria Steinem, the former editor and publisher of Ms. magazine.
“It may not please them to know that I don’t remember,” Steinem told the Journal. “But I would urge them to change the name to the Wednesday Men’s 10.”
In their tribute to Safire, the club’s remaining members said they would continue to meet: “The best thing we can do in his memory is to seek to keep our group going until, over time, we all join Bill in his new venue where we are sure the table will be laid and he will be waiting for us with his wry smile.”
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