The Growth of Chapters

The Society’s chapters grew in number along with the increase in our membership. By 1974, we had 20 chapters plus 36 local committees and coordinators. All told, we had representatives in 56 cities around the world.

Frank S. Hopkins, a U.S. diplomat and State Department planner who had arranged luncheons for our members in the Washington, D.C., area, took a special interest in our growing network of chapters and volunteered to become the Society’s Coordinator of Chapter Services.

I gave Hopkins that responsibility with enormous gratitude and relief. The chapters had proved quite troublesome for me, mainly because they always needed far more help than I could possibly provide.

Hopkins’s wife was slowly dying of a crippling disease, and he had to carry her in his arms to meetings of our Washington chapter. As her condition worsened, he retired early from his State Department post so that he could be constantly at hand to care for her. Being at home so much gave him time to write long letters to our chapter leaders, advising them on how to organize a chapter, get speakers, etc. Though his method was primitive, it proved extraordinarily effective in helping our chapters.

Aside from my wife, Sally, Frank proved the Society’s most dedicated, reliable, and productive volunteer during the early 1970s, and when Charles Williams could no longer serve as the Society’s vice president, Hopkins assumed those duties as well.

After Hopkins’s wife died, he had even more time to advise our chapter leaders, and when they came to Washington, he would take them to the Cosmos Club for lunch and answer all their questions about the Society and Washington. As a former diplomat, he took a special interest in the Society’s overseas members and even lodged some of them in his home.

The coordinator of the Society’s London chapter, David Berry, became like a son to Frank, and he remembered David in his will. When Frank died, David flew across the Atlantic, and he and I went together to Frank’s funeral.

By this time, David Berry and I had also become good friends. I had long been impressed with his dedicated support of the London chapter and delighted with its success. One triumph was having as its first speaker Dennis Gabor, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who developed holography. I had taken a special interest in Gabor since his 1964 book Inventing the Future and had sent him copies of the prototype issue of THE FUTURIST in 1966 to distribute. (He wrote back that he distributed three copies to friends he thought might be interested.) Thanks to Berry and the London chapter, we had established personal contact with Gabor.

Another accomplishment of David Berry and the London chapter was entertaining Soviet futurist Igor Bestuzhev-Lada when he came to England. We had published Bestuzhev-Lada’s writings in THE FUTURIST, but we had never had face-to-face contact with him. I was delighted that our London chapter could do this for us.

I might add that, years later, when circumstances allowed me to make a stopover visit to London, Berry arranged for me to give a talk for our British members at the Polytechnic of Central London. While in London, Berry and I looked into the possibility of holding a conference at the University of London. I decided the Society wasn’t quite ready for such an undertaking, but I hope that someday it will be.