to become nonresident members. Nothing was said, however, about residential status for women.
In November, before the repairs were completed, the correspondents said goodbye to the Dai-Ichi and moved into their new quarters. According to Hessell Tiltman, the Club had approximately 170 members at that time. By popular acclaim, the correspondents picked as the address of their new home "No. 1 Shimbun Alley." (No. 1 because what else could it be but "No. 1?" And Shimbun, because shimbun is the Japanese word for newspaper. Although the Club has moved three times since then, to this day, a letter addressed to "No. 1 Shimbun Alley" will reach the Club without fail.)
The opening was a noisy, boisterous affair establishing for the Club a reputation that few others could match. This "informal" party was followed a few weeks later by a formal opening, featuring a dinner and dance. Close to six hundred guests attended. The anniversary parties of the Tokyo Correspondents Club became Tokyo's Event of the Year, an occasion for celebration not only by its members in Tokyo but also by members, former members, and friends in outposts all over the world.
A sidebar on this party is the tale of the disappearing piano. The Club had borrowed a piano for the occasion from NHK, but, mistaking the date, had promised to return the piano two days earlier. When movers came to pick up the piano, Club officers swore they had no piano. When the movers began a search of the premises, the members moved the piano into an elevator, and kept moving it up and down until the movers finally gave up and went home in disgust. NHK got its piano back the next day.
In the tradition of Freedom of the Press, members have always felt free to express their own opinions about the Club. What did they say? Kelley and Cornelius Ryan said it succinctly in their Star-Spangled Mikado: "The club became famous for three things: . . . the food. . . the bar. . . and overcrowding." Tiltman wrote in 1965: "The Club is still infused with a unity and esprit de corps, dating back to Shimbun Alley days, that transcends all barriers of nationality and race. . . ." It has evolved "into one of the world's largest and most representative press clubs."
Correspondent and former Club Manager Richard Hughes, beloved in press club bars throughout Asia as "Your Grace" and admired for his irreverent and eloquent speech, called it "The Liveliest Club in the World." (Hughes always had a group of correspondents gathered around him as if he were holding court. One of his habits was to address a listener as "Your Grace." They turned it around and applied it to him and forever afterward he was known as "Your Grace" wherever newsmen gathered in Asia.) He described it as combining "some of the features of a makeshift bordello, inefficient gaming-house and a black market center, with the basic goodwill and bitter feuds of any press hostelry anywhere." Hughes, who was fired during a Club economy drive while he was on leave in Australia (to a bitter outcry from his supporters), described its membership as consisting of "war-weary correspondents, the world's best reporters and combat photographers, liberal, conservative and radical commentators, and some of the world's most plausible rogues and magisterial scoundrels."
"Those were the days," agrees AP's Jim Becker. Jim lost half of a mustache to pranksters while sleeping off a hangover on a sofa in the lounge. Becker, after wartime military service, joined the AP in New York in 1946, and was a center of fun and good fellowship in the Club during his days of service in Korea and Tokyo. He recalls a time when one member got locked in a telephone booth while befuddled and could think of no other way to extricate himself than to telephone his office eight thousand miles away. His office phoned "Jimmy" Horikawa, who walked thirty-five feet, pulled the stuck door open, and let their man out.
"Ah, there were drinking men in those days," Jim says with a nostalgic sigh in an article that the No. 1 Shimbun issued on the FCCJ's twentieth anniversary. "They drank in the lobbies, in the bar and in their rooms. Yes, there were rooms in the Old Press Club . . . and fellows kept things in them, like Korean War uniforms, bottles and girls."
In a more sober mood, Rutherford Poats, United Press, who was Club president from September of 1954 to June of 1955, recalls, "The Press Club was the center of social life in Tokyo for much of the Western community during its first decade, especially for Western diplomats and some professionals (lawyers, consultants, etc.) who did not feel at home among the American Club's foreign traders' set). The Club's anniversary party and New Year's Eve party were the most coveted social invitations of the year among nonpress Westerners."
Ray Falk, chief of the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) bureau in Tokyo and one of the oldest active members, said, "Newcomer correspondents could listen and learn from the veterans." He adds, "Though the members could be boisterous, they respected age and experience."
Hal Drake, who started out as a cub reporter and became executive editor of the Pacific Stars and Stripes, retired in 1996 to a home in Australia. He echoed Ray's views. "I bird-dogged club pros like Gene Kramer and Robert Trumbull, carefully listening as they framed those trapdoor questions for chiefs of state, learning, learning," he wrote in a farewell article to the No. 1 Shimbun on the Club's fiftieth anniversary. This was a view repeated time and again by other Club members.
When the Club first opened, the idea had been one member to a room, but there were more members than rooms. The only sensible solution was to provide more than one bed to a room. Soon, this didn't seem as much of a problem as first envisaged. Double occupancy turned in emergencies into triple and sometimes quadruple occupancy.
When the Ginza began to come to life, and nightspots like Mimatsu, Marigold, and later Ginbasha sprang up, they became natural oases for journalists seeking R&R from their busy duties. From these nightspots to taking guests, including the Japanese hostesses, to after-hours snacks at the Club was but a short step. And, after that? Members were never at a loss for ideas.
Complaints led to a Club rule: No women on the second floor and above. Then they modified this to read: No women upstairs after 12 midnight. Soon, this was modified to: "between the hours of 4 and 6." This led in turn to an era when the Club was treated to the sight of a stream of resident members and their companions in various states of dress sleepily wending their way downstairs and lolling around the lounge until the all-clear was sounded, when they would find their way up again. On some of these occasions, Al Cullison recalls waking up the bar boys who slept behind the counter with a "Wake-Up Song" ("Open up the bar, boys, open up the bar"), when the assorted members and their guests resumed their libations.
However, lest readers think all members were "the rogues and scoundrels" painted by the honorable Mr. Hughes, AI Kaff of the United Press, Club president in the 1967-68 years, points out the Club did have upstanding members of the caliber of Father Patrick O'Connor, an Irish priest who wrote for Catholic publications and was a popular member of the Press Club during its early No. 1 Shimbun Alley days.
"Father O'Connor sometimes objected to the profanity and sex stories that he heard in the Club's lounge and its adjoining bar," recalls Al. "So, in an effort to rehabilitate his colleagues, the good father presented the Club with a Bible, and for several years the Good Book was prominently displayed next to rows of bottles on the back bar. To more than one member, Patrick, as we called him, suggested a Bible reading. No one was offended by this evangelism in the Press Club bar, and Patrick always remained a member of the gang, well liked and admired. But few of his colleagues asked the bartender to hand them the Bible."
Ah, yes. Another deterrent to excessive enthusiasm and mayhem on the part of members was the Club's own Larry Tighe. A correspondent for ABC, this personable young man with the friendly smile also was a welterweight boxer of some renown in Golden Gloves history. Club presidents made it a point to station Larry at their side when facing a particularly obstreperous member or guest. As far as the records show, no one ever challenged the "Bouncer."