chapter 19 Twilight Club

Page 229 →In 1973, the Right Reverend Walter H. Gray wrote, “Our meetings between daylight and dark linger in memory as the play of sunshine and shadow on a distant meadow still bright and fragrant in the retrospect.” This reflection describes the fulfillment of being a member of the Twilight Club. The club is a congenial group of individuals who gather monthly to dine and share good fellowship, scholarly papers, and scintillating conversation. Reverend Gray, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut and former club member, wrote an historical account of the club, which was established in 1886 by the Reverend Dr. Graham Taylor, pastor of the Fourth Congregational Church in Hartford, Connecticut.¹

Ellsworth Grant, a former convener of the club and historian, updated the club’s history in 1998. He recorded observations about the club and the times that surrounded its establishment.² After the Civil War, Hartford emerged as a thriving center of manufacturing and insurance. The city’s prosperity afforded the elite the time and money to engage in leisurely pursuits, like clubbing. In the late nineteenth century, three prominent literary groups were organized: Monday Evening Club, Saturday Morning Club, and Twilight Club. In 1869, the Monday Evening Club was founded by Horace Bushnell; Calvin Stowe, husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe; and J. Hammond Trumbull, head of the Connecticut Historical Society. Mark Twain became a member in 1871. He used the club to test many ideas during his seventeen-year period as a prolific novelist in Hartford. Page 230 →Two of his blockbuster novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), were written while he was in Hartford and a member of the Monday Evening Club. The Twilight Club was formed two years after Huckleberry Finn was written.

Ellsworth Grant was married to Marion Hepburn, the sister of famous actress Katherine Hepburn. Ellsworth would often provide tidbits of conversations he had with Miss Hepburn while at her home in Fenwick, Connecticut. A descendant of Hartford founder Thomas Hooker, Ellsworth was former mayor of West Hartford, Connecticut.

I was invited to join the Twilight Club by Robert “Bob” Lazear in 1994. Bob was acting headmaster at Renbrook School when we met. He had been headmaster at Kingwood Oxford School for many years until his retirement. Kingwood Oxford revered him for his wisdom in guiding the school through many successful years of growth. After a Renbrook event, Bob approached me, and we engaged in a free-ranging conversation. With unexpected frankness and surprise, he exclaimed, “Jim, I like the way you look me in the eyes when we talk.” He asked whether I had heard of the Twilight Club, to which I replied that I hadn’t. He gave me a brief history of the club and invited me to join. Colin McEnroe, a club member and journalist, in a feature article for The Hartford Courant Sunday Magazine titled “Won’t You Join Us?,” facetiously, but accurately, noted that these “highbrow, elitist, self-massaging . . . literary clubs seem to prefer—when possible—new members who have never even heard of the club until the moment they’re asked.”³

Bob had been an incessant promoter of Black education as a dean at Hampton Institute, a historically Black college in Hampton, Virginia. Bob felt that, after one hundred plus years as a white organization, it was time the Twilight Club integrate African Americans into the club. A few years earlier, the Right Reverend Clarence Nicholas Coleridge, the first African American bishop to head the Connecticut Episcopal Diocese, was considered and rejected for membership.

Page 231 →The club was slow in expanding its membership to include women. The first woman was admitted in 1988, six years before I was selected. At first, the suggestion of admitting a woman caused considerable angst among some members. The catalyst that pushed an affirmative vote was the refusal by Patrick McCaughey, the new director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, to accept an invitation of membership because of the club’s century-old tradition of admitting only white men. Alice DeLana was the top vote getter in the next balloting for membership. Alice, the widow of former club member William DeLana, a prominent lawyer at the law firm of Day, Berry & Howard, had a very successful career as an English literature and history of art teacher at Miss Porter’s School, a private preparatory school for girls located in Farmington, Connecticut. The current gender composition of the club is more balanced.

In 2006, the congeniality of club members faced a threat far more serious than the debate over gender admission. The controversy came close to ending the club’s existence. A paper was presented by a member that another member perceived as an attack on his reputation. The presenter’s key point was that in situations involving the award of competitive contracts for civic projects, there was a growing trend among the leaders of Hartford’s establishment to choose professionals from outside of Hartford, notably New York and Boston. In most cases, Hartford professionals in law, medicine, architecture, and other consulting professions were the equal of outsiders. To underscore the sensitivity of the issue, the observation was made at a time when Hartford was losing its luster as a leading commercial center with established banks and insurance companies being acquired by outside entities. The aggrieved member was the director of a leading museum and had a large influence in selecting the contractor to improve the museum building. He was offended and resigned from the club, which triggered another resignation by a member supporting his viewpoint. The member who delivered the paper also resigned, which triggered another member resignation Page 232 →in support. Two other members sympathetic to the presenter were seriously considering resigning. To stem the flow of further resignations, the club’s convener, Daniel “Put” Brown, masterfully persuaded those leaning toward resignation to reconsider. A year later, the presenter, who apologized for an error of judgment that caused hurt to club members, and the supporting member accepted invitations to rejoin the club. The aggrieved member and another chose not to rejoin the club. After the episode blew over, Philip Reynolds, a senior club member, exclaimed: “It looked like Gotterdammerung for the Twilight Club.”

The signature feature of the Twilight Club has always been its professionally diverse membership. When I joined the club in 1994, the membership included leading educators, physicians, lawyers, businessmen, writers, historians, and media professionals in the Hartford area. The club included the presidents of Trinity College, University of Hartford, and Hartford College for Women; the Chief Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court; the CEO of Connecticut Bank & Trust Company; the president of the Connecticut Historical Society, the dean of the University of Connecticut Medical School, the dean of the University of Connecticut School of Law; the CEO of Hartford Hospital; the chief psychiatrist at the Institute for Living; and the head of the Wadsworth Atheneum. Past club members included luminaries, such as William Hooker Gillette (the great thespian), Bishop Walter H. Gray (head of Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut), Dr. Francis J. Braceland (renowned chief psychiatrist at the Institute of Living), and Ellen Peters (Chief Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court).

The club meets monthly from October to May at the former stately Colonial Revival mansion of Theodore Lyman and presently the home of the all-women Town & County Club in Hartford. The Lyman House is located a half block from the Mark Twain House and Harriet Beecher Stowe House in the historic Nook Farm area of the Asylum Hill neighborhood.

Page 233 →Meetings begin with cocktails and conversation in the Lyman library adorned with a carved oak panel around the fireplace, followed by dinner in a dining room, and a return to the library for the reading of a paper. Some papers are so thoroughly research and footnoted that, on occasion, a member or two might get caught nodding (not surprising, since they are delivered after a substantial dinner and libations). In his article, Colin McEnroe noted the humorous incantation of Patrick McCaughey: “At no time during any paper is every member of the Twilight Club awake.”⁴

On occasion, meetings have been convened at special venues, including Hasty Pudding at Harvard University; Dauntless Club (historic sailing club founded in 1905) in Essex, Connecticut; and the Yale Center for British Art at Yale University. The membership numbers twenty, and each member is required to present a paper about every two years. The club has no formal rules and is managed by a convener, who has absolute authority over club administration.

When I joined the club, I had no idea what topics I would choose to write about. Then one day it hit me. I had always thought about writing a memoir. I felt that I had something to say from the many experiences I had accumulated. The topic of my first paper was African American education in the South after the Civil War and my family’s contribution to Black education. Over a period of thirty years, I delivered twelve papers, which constitute the primary source for this autobiography.

During my Twilight tenure, I have observed that many members have written papers that were deeply personal autobiographies, including Chief Justice Ellen Peters, who wrote about her family’s flight from Germany to escape the Nazi concentration camps; Humphrey Tonkin on his upbringing in Cornwall, England; Gene Gaddis, who discovered that his great-great grandfather was an enslaver; Jared Edwards, who chronicled his genealogy over four centuries; Kathleen McGrory, who described her life as a Roman Catholic nun, and Phil Reynolds on aging. Other papers that exhibit the Page 234 →varied interest of the members include Humphrey’s contributions to the development of the Esperanto language, Elizabeth Normen’s exploration of the evolving definition of feminism, Mally Cox-Chapman’s introduction to the phantasmagorical world of emoji, Louise Blalock’s explanation and demonstration of cooking two yeasted breads passed down from her German grandmother, and my historical exploration of the political division within America.

During my nineteenth year as a member, I was selected convener. I was not elected to that role by the membership but instead chosen by the then current convener. That is the tradition at the club. One of the important responsibilities of the convener is to closely observe members to be able to select a successor based upon leadership ability and the respect of other members. Over the years, the succession process has worked well. There has never been a challenge to a convener appointment.

I was appointed convener by Put Brown, a very distinguished and erudite lawyer, who was educated at Williams College and Yale Law School. He practiced law at Shipman and Goodwin, a leading law firm in Hartford, where he once led the firm as managing partner. After retirement from the firm, he was elected probate judge in Granby, Connecticut. Put is a person with varied interest. He once was an avid sailor who was a member of the crew on the successful America’s Cup twelve-meter yacht “Constellation” that defended the cup against the British yacht “Sovereign” in 1964. Put selected me to be convener because he said I was the “obvious choice.” He also thought it was good to acknowledge the first African American member at the helm.

Through my position as convener, I have brought other African Americans and people of color into the club, including Joanne Berger-Sweeney, the first Black and woman president of Trinity College, and Meera Viswanathan, head of The Ethel Walker School and former professor at Brown University. This has been a defining Page 235 →feature of my life—paving the way for Black people and others to enter institutions from which they have been historically excluded.

At the end of the 2023–24 season after eleven years at the helm, I appointed Mally Cox-Chapman to succeed me. Just as I was the first African American convener, it was important to me that a woman follow me. While there had been a woman co-convener, Alice DeLana, who shared the position with Charles Todd, then headmaster of the Watkinson School, a private secondary school, for two years (1996–98), there had never been a solo woman presiding over the organization. Mally is a graduate of Yale University; she is a writer and heads her own charitable consulting company.

During Put’s tenure as convener, he started the practice of summarizing the papers delivered. The summary wasn’t necessarily a verbatim synopsis but instead provided commentary on the topic presented. I followed that practice after I became convener. During my 11-year tenure as convener, I provided commentary on 65 papers. The titles of a sampling of papers show the diversity of interests of members: Kathleen McGrory, “In Our Midst: Joža Karas and the Music of Terezin” (2013); Gene Gaddis, “We are all related: Stories from the Life of Josiah Henson” (2014); Steve Metcalf: “The Lenny Legacy: Leonard Bernstein at 100” (2018); and Put Brown, “The Sea or Me” (2020).⁵

Regrettably, the Twilight Club has not undertaken the preservation and archival of the many scholarly papers that have been delivered over the years. Various members have preserved their papers, as I have. Phil Reynolds has published his collection of papers.⁶ Phil satisfied his paper requirement by writing, over a period of thirty-five years, a series of memoirs on topics ranging from his military service, politics, charitable boards, music, clubs, and business.

During the spring of 2019, in-person meetings were suspended for safety reasons because of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the membership did not want the intellectual fervor of the club to go Page 236 →dormant, and members agreed to continue interactions through Zoom. For two years, the club functioned on a modified format— a brief member presentation on a topic followed by general membership discussion.

At the December 2020 Zoom meeting, I led a spirited discussion about the removal of monuments and the renaming of buildings, programs, and other objects named after historical figures whose advocacy or support of activities would today be considered abhorrent. The following questions were considered: Must an institution or state authority have clear values and beliefs to guide the acceptability of structures, spaces, symbols, and names before they are shelved? Rather than erasing or editing the past, is the proper solution a point and counterpoint narrative to ensure all points of view are represented? Where an honored name had failings, should his or her positive contributions be considered? Should it matter whether an individual’s abhorrent activities and beliefs were viewed differently during an earlier time? We considered those questions in examining monuments commemorating the Civil War, Christopher Columbus, and Thomas Jefferson.

Fortunately, in 2022 the membership resumed in-person meetings since vaccines and other public health precautions were introduced to the public. Happily, the club is now back on sound footing and is looking forward to celebrating its 141st year of existence.

The Twilight Club has been instrumental in integrating me into the cultural life of Hartford. Although the club is professionally diverse, its members play a key role in powering the cultural life of the city. In addition, club members have a connection to the families that were instrumental in guiding the progress of Hartford in the arts, academia, and business. Many member papers have been written and delivered that document the history of the city. A few of those papers have been archived by historical societies, like Jared Edwards’s paper on Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt and her life at Armsmear, the Colt mansion, after Samuel Colt’s death.⁷