What do you think of when you picture a bookworm? A lonely person forever reading books in a small apartment? Well, think again! Book clubs around the world show that readers are just as active and social as anyone else. Especially this book club from Long Beach, California that has met for six decades and counting!
Started By Five Friends
One of the longest-lasting book clubs in the world started off in a pretty ordinary fashion. Louise Wilde first started the club a year after she moved to Long Beach, California, in 1954, with two other friends. By 1955, it had grown to five friends who shared a love of reading, meeting every month to discuss the selected title. All of them had another thing in common: they were all the wives of professors at Cal State University, Long Beach. So the club had plenty of books to choose from! And that’s how the Egg Heads Book Club started!
Many of you are probably wondering how the club earned its name. Well, as Wilde explained, it actually did not come from the term “egghead,” mean slang for someone who’s smart. Instead, it comes from another shared interest of the original members, politics. You see, all the women also supported unsuccessful presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson II in 1952 and 1956. Stevenson’s supporters called themselves “egg heads” and so the group adopted the name.
A Book Club of Dedicated Readers
“I’ve always been a reader, and it just seemed like a good idea to get together and talk about books,” Wilde said. And her love of reading was infectious! Just under a decade after the club started, it had grown to eight members. From there, the rest is history! Today, the Egg Heads Book Club remains active and thriving, meeting every second Saturday of the month. “It’s just a part of my life. … Everybody knows that on that Saturday – I’m not available for anything else,” Wilde explains.
As avid readers, the book club will read anything from the most thought-provoking dramas to the latest in young-adult fiction. As long as it starts a conversation, the Egg Heads Book Club will read it.
Generation After Generation
As of now, Wilde has no plans of leaving or shutting down the book club. “You want to read books, and you want to talk about them. Why would I not stay in [the club]?” she commented. In fact, Wilde says that no one has left by choice in the 65 years of the book club’s existence. Some passed, others moved away, and an unfortunate few left due to break downs in friendships, but almost all have stayed. Meanwhile, for those who have passed, their torch is often taken up by another member of the family. “When the mother died, the daughter just kept on coming,” Wilde said.
“I’m kind of a legacy member,” Laurie Wills, one such daughter, said. “My mother enjoyed the sociability of the group. These were people she had many years of friendship with. I was kind of holding on to my mother…I saw how much joy it had given her.” Willis loves reading just as much as her mother did. In fact, in addition to joining the Egg Heads Book Club, she also works as the Manager of Circulation at the Long Beach Public Library.
When asked what has helped the Egg Heads Book Club alive and relevant for so long, Louise Wilde has a simple answer: “I guess we just had the right kind of people in it.”
Sources: Good Morning America