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The 25 years of Hansoms party. . .

It’s been a week since the 25th anniversary meeting of Peoria’s one and only Sherlock Holmes society, the Hansoms of John Clayton. The decorations are almost put away and we’re starting to look ahead to Sherlockian events ahead. But before moving on, there must be a moment of reflection on the party just past, mustn’t there?

As I mentioned a couple of columns ago, that myriad of More Important Things we collectively refer to as "real life" often get in the way of our Sherlocking, and such was the case this fall for the Hansoms of John Clayton. Our annual 2704 banquet, held every September, had been cancelled for the second time in twenty-five years. Our membership, which has never been huge, has been taking hits from a number of "real life" factors, and while we tend to see a lot of our local folk over the course of a year, any given meeting can be pretty sparsely attended. Our twenty-fifth anniversary meeting was looking like a pretty quiet little November get-together, with a few of us spending a not-too-eventful evening discussing "Five Orange Pips."

And then, during a September visit to Indianapolis, I wound up talking to Meredith Granger of the Illustrious Clients.

Meredith has been on a personal mission to attend a meeting of every scion society he can get to, and doing quite well at it. He has even been known to drag a defunct society back into existence for just long enough to make a meeting, so ardent is he in his quest. He had tried to drop in on a Hansom meeting once before, but his inquiries had fallen into a gaping leadership chasm as the Hansoms’s management was in a transitional phase. (That’s the fancy way of saying "I forgot to write him back.") But Meredith is a forgiving soul, and was willing to try once more to attend a Hansom meeting.

We discussed moving the Hansoms’ November meeting from the usual Friday to Saturday, to aid the out-of-town visitor, and once the ball got rolling, I though we might as well make it a gala twenty-fifth anniversary celebration as well. If we were going to have company in Peoria, we might as well show off our good side. I ballyhooed the event a little bit in the Hansom newsletter, which I sent out to Sherlockians all over states adjoining Illinois (taken from The Holmes & Watson Report address list), and Meredith worked on getting some of his fellow Illustrious Clients to come along. And, all in all, we didn’t do too badly.

We had about twenty people show up for our little event, and as we were holding in at my house, that was about as many as we probably needed for comfort. Five of those were Hansoms, eight were Illustrious Clients, two were Criterion Bar members from Chicagoland, three were Norwegian Explorers from Minneapolis, and two were Parallel Cases/Occupants of the Empty House from St. Louis. Over a third of those present were Baker Street Irregulars, and the fact that I finally got to see the Rascally Lascar and the Wiggins in the same room was a delight unto itself, as the former has never made it to the Irregulars’ January meeting.

So, what did we do at this gathering? Well, with the collection of grand Sherlockians that had chosen to come to Peoria to help us celebrate our anniversary, we didn’t have to do very much at all. At many a point during the party, when the program needed to start or restart, I’d look around at the great conversations going on and think "it might be more fun just to leave these folks on there own."

But a program there was, and here is how it laid out. During the opening open house/happy hour, we mostly just "meeted and greeted," with a visit to my little Sherlockian library and the first ever attempt at the Sherlock Peoria Walking Tour, outlined on this page in an earlier column. As it was snowing/raining, we didn’t actually walk on the walking tour, however, and discovered that the whole tour can be taken while standing in front of our living room picture window. Geographically, Peoria’s Sherlockian history does not wander too far.

When the meeting proper started, we had introductions and greetings from afar, performed "The Clayton Ritual," and I proceeded to bore the crowd for forty-five minutes with an eccentric and vague recounting of the history of the Hansoms of John Clayton thus far. Those in attendance were patient with me, and at the end of that time, we toasted Holmes, Watson, "the lady" (a slight misquote from the Hansoms’ first meeting), Mrs. Hudson, and Moriarty.

Then we ate. Although I had done much planning and procurement had been done for our dinner, the actual plan was put into effect by my mother and sister, who graciously acted as caterers (and have been since repaid with flours and fine dining), with some salad assistance from Hansom Leslie Thom and dessert help from Explorer Julie McKuras. The main course was Italian beef sandwiches, a nod to Holmes’s rude meal of beef and bread during a certain investigation.

When the program started up once more, Michael Elliott, the Sherlock Holmes of Thought, gave us a delightful sample of his thought-reading talents. His performance was the perfect segue from light dinner talk to deep Sherlockian thought, and next I called for the Sherlockian writers in the group to come with me into the sun room where I sealed them off from the main group. The main group of Sherlockians were then given a quiz on "Five Orange Pips" by my wife, Kathy, and I lead the sequestered writers on an exercise of round-robin Sherlockian scholarship. (After a brief crisis involving a closed fireplace flue, the quiz proceeded, and happily, no one has since accused me of trying to kill off the non-writers at the party.)In the side-room, I presented each of the writers with a quote from FIVE, and set them to writing upon some topic springing from that quote. After five minutes, they all had to pass their work to the person on their right (or left, I kept mixing that up), who continued the essay. The results were a number of essays with a certain schizophrenic train-of-thought, some of which sounded excellent while containing little actual solid content, yet all were somehow enlightening and providing some point of interest.

We awarded 25th anniversary Hansom medals and door-prizes to the winners of the quiz, Meredith Granger and Don Curtis, and then the writers proceeded to deliver their hastily-written papers on FIVE (mixed among them so no one could identify any guilty parties). Each writer was then presented with a medal and a door prize, Pat Ward, Steve Doyle, Elliott Black, Julie McKuras, Karen Murdock, Gordon Speck, and myself.

Next came "The Battle of the Sherlocks," as I explained that the Hansoms’ namesake, John Clayton, had never truly understood just who Sherlock Holmes was. A Paget drawing from the Strand illustrates this problem, showing the top-hatted Holmes on the street with Watson, while Clayton ferries the black-bearded false "Sherlock Holmes" in his cab. (Read up on it in The Hound of the Baskervilles, if you doubt Clayton’s confusion.) To solve this confusion, we pitted a team of top-hatted Sherlockians against a team of black-bearded Sherlockians in a trivia challenge. Each team posed questions on a story drawn at random to the other, and, as much as I hate to say it, the black-bearded Sherlocks prevailed. (But I guess that fits a true John Clayton moment.)

After this, the latest issue of The Holmes & Watson Report was presented to the guests, who were encouraged to find typos. While a "find the typos" contest seemed like a fun excuse to hand out the newest issue of the Report before it was mailed (and it just went into the mail on November 25th), it was a little hard to get the proofreaders to stop, once they got into it. (And the average H&WR, I’m happy to say, is not all that typo-filled. These were keen-eyed observers.)

Lastly, but not leastly, we had two papers from the early days of the Hansoms on Watson’s drunkenness. Elliott Black read a paper written by Hansom Tom Simpson, accusing Dr. Watson of being a hopeless inebriate. Bob Burr then stepped up to read his own defense of Dr. Watson written so long ago. The climax of the debate was a one-act adaptation of a short story called "The Internship," written by Tom Simpson, which portrayed a drunken Watson attempting to remove a mole from Mary Kelly. (And if the name "Mary Kelly" rings a bell, you probably know the dark realms where this play headed.) Dr. Watson was ably portrayed by a soda-guzzling Meredith Granger, and Mary Kelly was equally well played by Julie McKuras (who, it must be said, in real life is a virtuous soul who in no way resembles an East End prostitute). An end-of-the-play appearance by Sherlock Holmes was badly done by me, who cannot hold an English accent for more than one line.

Vincent Starrett’s "221B" was read by Bob Burr and the meeting adjourned.

The next morning, the out-of-towners and Kathy and I all met at Perkins for breakfast. The mark of any great Sherlockian event is always a good morning-after breakfast, and I have to say that our breakfast that Sunday made it seem like the previous night’s event had, indeed been fine. But basically, with a cast of Sherlockians as delightful and energetic as the ones we entertained in Peoria last week, it was very hard to go wrong.

Thanks to all who did us the honor of coming to Peoria on November 16th, and to all of you who wished you could have, but couldn’t quite. It’s such folk that put the "Sherlock" in Sherlock Peoria, even if you’re just stopping for a visit, and I hope to see you all again soon.

Your humble correspondent,
Brad Keefauver