A Players Flashback: 1930

Self-portrait, Robert Lewis Reid (1862-1929)

Every spring, as the Club year drew to a close, the Secretary of The Players rose to perform one of the office's sadder duties: reading into the record the names of member deaths over the preceding twelve months. The report of May 26, 1930 does so with a warmth that feels very much of this house.

Before reaching the year's roll, the Secretary paused to summon the Club's honored dead from the stage, from letters, from the fine arts; and from journalism and diplomacy. By that point he noted, four decades since the Club's founding, there were enough departed Players to populate a club in the afterlife.

The twenty-six names that followed were a cross-section of the Club in its early decades. Among them are Raymond Hitchcock, the beloved musical-comedy star; Jesse Lynch Williams, the first playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Robert Reid, a member of the Impressionist circle known as the Ten American Painters; physician and lyricist Henry Strong Durand; poet and critic George Edward Woodberry; and the Shakespeare scholar Horace Howard Furness, Jr. Most poignant, perhaps, is Edmond T. Quinn, the sculptor whose statue of Edwin Booth has stood watch over Gramercy Park, just across the street from our home, since 1918.

Delivered in the uncertain months after the Crash of 1929, the report carries no hint of gloom about the future. It does what The Players has always done with its losses: it names them, raises a glass to them, and imagines them still gathered somewhere, keeping the lively conversation going.