A Few Secrets Seep Past Yondotega Club's New Walls

Detroit News, May 24, 1959

One of the great secrets that came out of the Yondotega Club's 1938 suit against the government in tax court was the "Kibitzers Foundation for Needy Friends to Encourage Scientific Card Playing." Which wasn't a secret at all but rather some butter-churning bullshit to amuse rich people while they dine and play with Pedro. The card game, not an underage domestic on a foreign island serving the nouveau riche. That would be Freer and Jerome and gang at Capri circa 1900.

This was a different game and the stakes were high: lose in court and lose your clubhouse but gain the city itself, whatever would be left of it in a decade or two. Which takes us back to bread and circuses as sport and entertainment rule the former town of 2.5 million and likewise the club of 100 on East Jefferson Avenue.

Do I think that they are a secret society meddling with society at large? It would be a great leap to think that they weren't at least tinkering with the concept just not in the club. And why should they in their idle time when they held all or most of the cards? Outside those walls is another story altogether.

The bronze doors of Jerome, the tarpon on the wall evicted from a mansion by a mogul's wife and the lobster Newburg (no relation to your Hines Park carp) all came with the new headquarters down the road from the old. There's nothing to behold except, like a lost handbag of Marion Alger, the intrigue. So precious that even a spouse couldn't peer into it and if they did they would see nothing but the illusion of sanctity within walls built by men in an attempt at deification. The most unholy being the discarding of playing cards after each game. For shame ye exacting heathens!

Comments

P. O. Surveying Detroit Needs

Detroit News , October 8, 1929 This is a long article about the Postal Service but our concern is with Arch Coleman, the first Assistant Postmaster-General, who recalled in his visit back to the town that he grew up in, that he was born in the house which was the first Yondotega Club at 302/518 East Jefferson. An article by the Free Press seemed to suggest that he was born nearby.

Yondotega Club Beginnings Told

Detroit Times , March 12, 1939 I will start this blog at the same point of introduction that I had to the Yondotega Club: this short snippet in the Detroit Times from March 12, 1939 that I dug up while researching the Sign of the Mermaid bookstore which opened in 1925 and was owned by Doris McMillan Pittman (later Hoover), daughter of William McMillan and granddaughter of Senator James McMillan. Not only had she reclaimed the home that she grew up in from obscurity but she revitalized and made it a profitable venture. Unfortunately for Doris, her eleven years of ownership came with widowhood, the accidental shooting death of her teenage son, a second marriage to her store manager Clayton Morse, Jr. that failed and ultimately her own untimely death in 1936. The Yondotega Club would have been afterthought to that very research had it not been for the fact that her father founded the club in that very house and her first husband, grandfather, uncle and business partner - Phelps Newberry...

The Ex-Libris Bookplates of James Frederic Joy and His Son Henry Bourne Joy

These are the ex-libris platesreally things found in volume (IV.) of Turner's History of England from 1830 featuring at least one Yondotega Club member: Henry Bourne Joy, who was the first president of the Lincoln Highway - which built roads from New York to San Francisco - and later became president of the Packard Motor Company. His father James Frederic Joy was a railroad magnate, friend of Abraham Lincoln and congressman from Michigan. To boot, there is a main road in Detroit and the western suburbs named after him (Joy Rd.). Besides the plates, the most interesting thing in the book is the marginalia, which I've yet to determine exactly whose it is. It would be great if it were one of the Joys but nearly a hundred years has passed between the latter's death so the likelihood is probably 50/50. Maybe not so ironically, I found this book at an estate sale just off of Joy Road (8634 Hazleton) in Dearborn Heights five years ago or so.

The Yondotega Club

Search This Blog