This wonderful, legendary club is made up of professionals from the arts: Literature, music, art, media and drama. The club has been meeting on Tuesdays for lunch since 1905, during the academic year, and has an annual dinner at the Harvard Club at the end of each year. Each week, members hear from a renowned performer and esteemed speaker and enjoy great food and the wonderful company of the mem
bers. Membership must be approved by the board, and potential members must be current members in the professional arts world, or have had a long career in the same. Also, members must be good company, not want to sell anything, and agree to come to many meetings throughout the year to keep the group as lively and wonderful as it has always been. HISTORY: The Dutch Treat Club was formed as a society of illustrators, writers and performers based in New York City. Primarily social in nature, the club has had as members such leading literary figures and humorists as Robert Benchley, Rube Goldberg, Robert M. In 1905, Tuesday was the day of the week when Life Magazine's editors, such as J. Mitchell reviewed the drawings and writings of their regular contributors. Every Tuesday morning Life's anteroom would be thronged with clever illustrators chatting together sociably as they waited their turns to be ushered into the sanctum of "JAM", and writers waiting similarly for interviews with Thomas L. Masson, the literary editor. Since many of these contributors lived in the suburbs, it was natural that, being in town for the day, they should feel like having a good time in each other's company. And so the "gang" got the habit of lunching somewhere together, each paying for his own meal. Life contributors brought friends who had no connection with that magazine. Numbers grew till one Tuesday the bunch organized themselves officially as the Dutch Treat Club, with Masson as President.
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The eleven founders included four writers, four illustrators, two editors and a publisher, among them:[2]
James Montgomery Flagg, illustrator later famous for his Uncle Sam
Rupert Hughes
Julian Street
Ellis Parker Butler
Frank Ward O'Malley
Will Irwin
Wallace Irwin
George Barr Mallon, then city editor of the New York newspaper The Sun. Past Members[edit]
Richard C. Pionk
Eric Sloane
Lowell Thomas
Isaac Asimov
