Clubs seal inclusivity with pact

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This article was published 12/03/2009 (6371 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IN an attempt to turn a page on Winnipeg’s racist past, a downtown club that used to refuse entry to Jews has entered a membership-sharing agreement with a golf and tennis club founded by Jews as a response to exclusionary practices.

On March 1, Broadway’s Manitoba Club and the Glendale Golf and Country Club in St. Charles began offering their members access to each other’s facilities at a discounted rate, but without the entrance fees normally charged to new members.

On one level, the move is an attempt to generate more revenue for each club, whose members pay between $2,100 and $3,450 a year for the privilege of using facilities such as the Manitoba Club’s meeting rooms or Glendale’s 18-hole golf course.

But the reciprocal agreement is more poignant because the 135-year-old Manitoba Club refused to allow Jews to become members until the 1970s, and the Glendale Golf and Country Club was founded in 1946 by Jewish businessmen who could not get into the Manitoba Club and other social institutions.

Although it’s been decades since either club employed exclusionary practices, both are eager to illustrate the fact they’re open to members of all ethnic groups.

"I still hear people say bad things about the Manitoba Club, things that aren’t true — that people from certain ethnic groups aren’t allowed in," said Alex Robinson, a senior City of Winnipeg official who serves as the Manitoba Club’s president. "What we’re really trying to do is show people we’ve changed."

The Glendale Golf and Country Club, meanwhile, is still trying to combat the perception it’s only open to Jews, president Chris Douglas said.

"It’s amazing in this day and age. My hockey buddies can’t believe I’m president of Glendale, since I’m not Jewish," said Douglas, a financial adviser. "It’s funny, because even my dad couldn’t believe it when I became president."

Glendale Golf and Country Club has about 500 members, about 80 per cent of whom are Jewish, Douglas said. The Manitoba Club has almost 1,000 members, including several high-profile members of the city’s Jewish community.

Members of each club are now able to obtain an associate membership in the other club for a 30 per cent discount. But they don’t have to pay entrance fees, which can run into the thousands of dollars.

Both clubs have the capacity to absorb more members, but revenue was not the primary motivation behind the agreement, Douglas insisted.

"This is a fabulous way to turn a page on history," he said, referring to what Robinson called "the bad old days" in Winnipeg — the latter half of the 20th century, when "old money" was code for an Anglo-Saxon establishment often at odds with the city’s partly Jewish nouveau riche.

 

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca