ENCORE GOOD WORKS
Forging Friendships
Newcomers Club has connected women for 80 years BY MAGGIE DREW
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hat began 80 years ago as a club to welcome new residents to Kalamazoo has become an enduring organization focused on forging friendships among women. The Kalamazoo Area Newcomers Club, which celebrates its 80th anniversary this month, was founded in 1940 by Ann Ewing Smith, a resident of Kalamazoo and a former Welcome Wagon hostess. Smith created her own advertising service, A.E.S. Hostess Service, and would meet with new residents to tell them all about what Kalamazoo had to offer. According to club member Nancy Greer, as Smith met with new families, she discovered a much larger need among the women she met: the need to make new friends in their new community. Smith’s hostess service would thus become the catalyst for what is now the Newcomers Club. Since it was common in the 1940s and beyond that husbands would work full time while wives stayed home with the kids, many of these women felt they had little opportunity to meet and connect with other women. Smith partnered with the Kalamazoo YWCA to form the Newcomer Club of the Young Women’s Christian Association, and the group became very popular, growing to more than 400 members by the 1970s. After meeting at the YWCA for more than 30 years, it split off from the YWCA in 1974 and became the Kalamazoo Area Newcomers Club, an independent group that’s not affiliated with any larger organization. In recent years the number of active members in the organization has averaged between 120 and 140, says Greer.
Members of the Kalamazoo Area Newcomers Club include, from left, Suzette Ross, president; Nancy Greer, publicity chairwoman; and Marge Davies.
A lot has changed since the group’s inception — more women work now, for one — but what hasn’t changed is the need for women to connect with one another, say organizers. “Initially it was for new people in the area,” says Marge Davies, a Newcomers Club member for more than 15 years. “Now it really is geared toward people experiencing a lifestyle change. Whether they have just retired, they lost a spouse, they are new to the area, it’s for them.”
Typifying the current makeup of the club is Greer, who has lived in the area her whole life but was seeking new friendships after retirement. “Recently retired, I was seeking out a way to do activities with women who shared similar interests with me,” Greer says. “I find you still look for structure and purpose in your free time once you retire. I have quickly met many other women through the garden group, happy hours, luncheons, and other events. The diverse group of women I have
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