Besides negotiating with restaurants, Falknor’s role on Capitol Hill meant that he could recruit outstanding speakers, such as Walter Mondale, a young senator from Minnesota who later became vice president of the United States and the Democratic candidate for the U.S. presidency in 1980. (He lost to Ronald Reagan.)
Downtown Washington proved to be an extraordinarily good place to recruit experts of almost every kind, and most did not require a speaker’s fee, which, of course, we were in no position to pay. Besides Mondale, early speakers at our Washington meetings included Harvey Perloff, author of The Future of the United States Government; Jessie Bernard, author of The Future of Marriage; Mary S. Calderone, America’s best-known sexologist; and Frank Davidson, first president of the newly created Institute for the Future, now located in Menlo Park, California.
Most notable of our early speakers was Glenn T. Seaborg, then chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. I attribute our success in getting Seaborg largely to his speechwriter, Stan Schneider, who was an enthusiastic member of the Society.
Seaborg had won a Nobel Prize for discovering plutonium and other chemical elements, and he would later become the only chemist in history to have an element named for him during his lifetime (seaborgium, element 106). His steadfast support of the World Future Society through the rest of his life was of extraordinary value to us.
The high quality of speakers attracted a growing number of people to the Society’s luncheon meetings. Many of them not only joined the Society, but also proved to be enthusiastic volunteers for Society projects. One of the most valuable of these was Frank S. Hopkins, a former diplomat who was then a State Department officer in charge of long-range planning.
Hopkins was willing to take on almost any task for the Society, from the most exalted to the most menial, and this aspect of his character endeared him to me. As a former U.S. diplomat, he had the savoir-faire to deal suavely with top-ranking leaders, as well as the humility and generosity to perform humble but necessary tasks for the Society.
When Falknor could no longer arrange meetings for us, Hopkins took over, so generally all I would have to do was to help recruit speakers. This proved to be remarkably easy, since interesting speakers were generally eager to address Society members.
Still, the luncheon meetings added to my responsibilities as president, and soon there were Society members outside Washington who wanted to establish chapters so they, too, could meet. I was simultaneously delighted and alarmed by this. The members’ enthusiasm was exhilarating, but I wondered if we could cope with a network of chapters. My workload as president and editor was mounting higher and higher, and I had been warned by Fred Durant, who had been president of the International Astronautical Federation, not to get involved with chapters due to the many problems they create.
In the end, however, I could not resist the eagerness of our members. Earl Joseph, a computer scientist with the Sperry-Rand Corporation, organized the remarkably successful chapter in Minneapolis–St. Paul and also established an impressive journal, Futurics. Almost simultaneously, Robert Prehoda, author of Designing the Future: The Role of Technological Forecasting, organized a chapter in Los Angeles. Soon afterwards, other chapters appeared across America.
In 1970, Tibor Hottovy in Stockholm organized the first overseas chapter, and our members in London held their first meeting early in 1971, with physicist Dennis Gabor as their speaker. Gabor, who won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of holography, had recently published a book, Inventing the Future, in which he argued that the great human challenge is to create or “invent” a better future rather than to predict it, which is largely impossible.
The London chapter, under the highly competent and dedicated leadership of David Berry, proved remarkably stable over the years. But the Stockholm chapter — despite the dedication of its founder, Tibor Hottovy — ran into difficulties because a number of the early participants in the meetings rebelled against belonging to an organization based in the United States. Despite the Society’s neutrality, global perspective, and effort to treat all members alike, our organization was actually held responsible for the Vietnam War.
Yes, Fred Durant was right in warning me about the difficulties that chapters bring. Still, they became — and I hope will remain—a vital part of the Society’s life.