The Society’s initial Board of Directors consisted simply of Charles Williams, Peter Zuckerman, and myself. We held our first “official” Board meeting on November 2, 1966. I was authorized to open a bank account, and Zuckerman and I were authorized to draw checks on it.
At a later Board meeting, Williams proposed and the Board agreed to hold an Advisory Council meeting early in 1967. Our idea was to reach out to others interested in the future in the hope of getting guidance and also building relationships in the Washington community and elsewhere. Williams would try to recruit his boss, Henry David, to be the Council’s chairman.
The Advisory Council held its first meeting on February 2, 1967, in a private room at the Cosmos Club, a Washington institution with many famous members. I was delighted to have the meeting there since I was very anxious for our just-born Society to start earning a good reputation among serious people. At the time, most people couldn’t imagine that futurists could be anything other than astrologers or science-fiction fans. (I myself would have had such a view only a few years earlier.)
Henry David, who presided at the Council’s first meeting, now held a new post as executive secretary of the National Academy of Sciences–National Research Council’s division of behavioral sciences. Others at the meeting included Harvey Perloff, an economist with Resources for the Future; James Kunen, president of the Eugene and Agnes Meyer Foundation; Michael Michaelis, manager of the Washington office of Arthur D. Little Inc., a prominent research firm; Arthur Waskow, a historian at the Institute for Policy Studies; and John Dixon, my oldest friend, who was then working for the Xerox Corporation after a long association with comprehensive designer Buckminster Fuller.
The Council members were very sympathetic to our enterprise and offered many helpful ideas, but one thing disturbed me: Henry David seemed too authoritarian and argued that the Society should take a positive stance and propose desirable futures. I was convinced that the Society could play a far more constructive role if it were officially neutral on political, social, and ideological issues. Our proper role, as I saw it, was to be a neutral clearinghouse for forecasts and ideas about the future, as well as a nonpartisan forum where people with conflicting perspectives could freely share their views and learn from each other without having to follow a “party line.” There were plenty of partisan groups promoting this or that specific cause; what was needed, in my view, was an organization that would be above the fray.
The Advisory Council held only one more meeting — a supper gathering at an ordinary restaurant. The main topic was how best to handle two different sorts of members — “professional futurists” and “interested others.” In the end the consensus seemed to be that the Society should provide special services for members willing to pay for them but require no special credentials for membership in the Society. This view was in line with the compromise our Organizing Committee had already worked out: There would be a Supplemental Program for people who wanted to receive scholarly or technical papers dealing with the future.
The Supplemental Program later became largely Charles Williams’s responsibility. He invited scholars to submit papers for possible distribution to the Program’s participants. Many of his invitees complied, and the program proved enormously popular with subscribers.
However, duplicating and distributing the papers was enormously time-consuming due to the backward state of the office technology at the time. Most of the papers — as well as the World Future Society Bulletin — had to be typed, corrected, mimeographed, collated, and stapled. This task fell largely to Williams’s wife, Yvonne, and their son Wesley. Once a paper had been mimeographed, the stacks of copies of each page were placed on a Ping-Pong table in the Williams’s basement, and neighborhood women would walk around the table, individually assembling each copy of each paper. Back in those days (the late 1960s), computers and photocopying machines were still primitive and far too expensive for ordinary folk, and the Internet had not yet appeared. Only the devotion of the Williams family enabled the Program to succeed.