Activist and Artist
Paige Powell Paige Powell led the charge to give women the right to be full voting members at MAC in the 1970s and rubbed shoulders with New York City’s best artists in the 1980s. By Tony Roberts • Photo by Craig Mitchelldyer
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Paige Powell has a long and fascinating history with Multnomah Athletic Club. She grew up at the club, playing squash and badminton and taking part in fencing tournaments. But what she’s best remembered for is leading the charge for women to become full voting members in the 1970s. Powell, who was working at the Washington Park Zoo at the time, led a letter-writing campaign and, eventually, a protest outside of the club’s annual meeting. She eventually moved to New York City and took a job at Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine. Powell sold ads and eventually became associate publisher during a 13-year career at the magazine. Her photos and videos from that time period were recently displayed in an exhibit at Portland Art Museum. Since her return to Portland in the mid-1990s, Powell has become an outspoken advocate for animal rights, not to mention a regular at MAC, where you can find her taking fitness classes, using the Sun Deck Pool or dining in the Men’s Bar. At the time I was public affairs director at the zoo. I starting playing squash, and I noticed on the doors downstairs there was some sort of plaque, and it said something like, “Reserved for working men only between 5 and 7 p.m.” This was in the mid-70s, probably like ’76 or ’77. It took us a long time to actually get to the point where we did the protest outside of the annual meeting, and then there was an ad hoc committee. I had women accosting me in the locker room saying I was a problem. I had the president of the Multnomah Athletic Club call me when I was at the zoo and threaten my membership. He said, “I understand you’re causing problems at the club.” I said, “What kind of problems?” He said, “You know what I’m talking about and I will revoke your membership if you continue causing problems.” I swear those were almost verbatim his words. They resonate today still. That was scary for me. I was young and I really loved MAC, it was my social club. At that point, most of my friends were single and we’d all come down to the club. The devastation of that going away from me was really scary, but I wasn’t going to back down. I’d never been in such a power struggle. I felt like I didn’t have any rights.
I think it took about two-and-a-half to three years. We were gathering together before we started addressing the club, because we wanted to do it well. I didn’t know who felt the same way I did, so I started talking to people about it and there was a lot of support … Eventually, Sid Lezak, the former attorney general, with his wife Muriel, said, “We’re going to help out on this, this is really wrong.” … We started meeting, started writing letters, and either they didn’t respond, or they would respond and they would just say, “Well, these are the rules, this is a family club.” ... The other thing, too, is I became a lobbyist for the ACLU and I worked on two bills to revoke liquor license from private clubs that discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, religion, color, sex, all of those things. It’s unfortuante, but the club had to be embarrassed from the outside. We did everything we could to work from the inside of the club to no avail, but when we went outside of the club, it was out of embarassment that they decided to have an ad hoc committee, because they knew it had become too big of an issue. Bill Reed came in, and he was very supportive of it, and he worked with an ad hoc committee to form a questionnaire to go out to members. And something like 63 percent voted in favor of it, but it was mainly men. I got really sick from everything. I got mononucleosis and I was really sick. From the stress. I had my job at the zoo, which I really loved, but sometimes we would have events seven days a week. I felt stress about the Multnomah Club, because they were so threatening. And also to have women be threatening as well. I had seen Interview Magazine in Portland, my friends had a subscription. And I thought it was so beautiful, and there were so many people I’d never seen before. I thought, “If I’m going to move to New York, I have to get exactly what I want.” Otherwise, my family was here, my friends, my parents helped me buy a little place, I had my car. I had all of this stuff, but culturally, I felt like there was more. The other job I wanted was to work on Woody Allen films, and I went there and I said, “OK, I’m going to get one of these jobs.” Continued on page 35 AUGUST 2016
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