The Movement Grows

On a cold, rainy March day in 1916, Edwin Quarles entered the restaurant of the Claypool Hotel in Indianapolis to join a handful of his fellow businessmen for their daily noon lunch and a bit of business gossip.

"I thought I was the only optimist in the bunch," Quarles is reported to have said as he wiped the rain from his face with his handkerchief. "As I splashed my way over here I made a bet with myself I’d be the only one to show up. But I guess we’re all just naturally confirmed optimists."

That off-hand comment sparked a thought by Quarles: “Maybe we ought to make a real club out of this bunch. “ Seems to me,” he said, “what this world needs most on a day like this is an optimist club.”

The idea was born and others around the table took up the idea of a club of optimists. Between discussions of the news headlines and the usual business talk the tenuous thread kept running in and out of the conversation. By the end of the meal it had stitched together most of the men there in a dream of a formal organization based on optimism.

In May of that year, 33 Indianapolis business and professional men sat down to appoint officers and draft a constitution. What is significant is that the organization was planned as a dual movement: a local club and a national governing body, The American Optimist Clubs, with headquarters in Indianapolis. It was truly an optimistic endeavor, for at that time the Indianapolis Optimists had never heard of the Optimists in New York or anywhere else for that matter. What they had planned was a professional team of club organizers to extend the scope of the organization beyond the city limits of Indianapolis. Before the summer of 1916 was over, Optimist Clubs had been formed in Washington, D.C., St. Louis, Louisville and Springfield, Illinois. In September a club sprang up in Denver, and one in Milwaukee followed in October.

Optimist headquarters in Indianapolis

In the early summer of 1916, a Kansas City insurance man named Jack Schoen visited St. Louis. While there, a friend invited him to a luncheon meeting of the St. Louis Optimist Club. The experience was a rich one, and upon Schoen’s return to Kansas City he contacted a young friend and suggested that they start an Optimist Club there. A week later seven men met for the first luncheon meeting of the Kansas City Optimist Club.

1917 saw clubs form in Los Angeles (March); St. Joseph, Missouri (October); and Kansas City, Kansas (December). Clubs also started that year in Baltimore, St. Paul and Peoria. A club was also in existence in Chicago, but there is no definitive record of whether it was the same one known to have existed ten years earlier.