WITH membership coming only from people who were in the city for its 100 year anniversary in 1934, Portland’s 34 Club seemed fated to run out of numbers.

After a diminished response to her invitation to this year’s annual get together club co-ordinator Evie Douglass told the group that had gathered at the Royal Hotel on November 19 that she had made the difficult decision to call time for the club, if they all agreed.

They would not hear of it though, and offers to help with any of the work needed to keep the club running came quickly in order to keep the club running.

Helen Campbell and with Robyn Argo put their hands up, who were both born after the cut-off date but were invited into the club as the descendent of an original member, a strategy to boost numbers back up again.

“A lot of [the original members] are gone now, so we had to get some younger ones in, they’re kin of the old members,” said Mrs Douglass.

“I’m glad I have this help to keep it going because it really was a good time the other day, but it was too much for me to do on my own now.”

The club was started in 1984 as a reunion for the centenary celebration, which was then continued as an annual event.

“[former mayor] the late Keith Wilson and Linda Cooper were the organisers of club 34… and I think three or four hundred people turned up that first year,” Mrs Douglass said.

“Then we met at Fawthrop Lagoon, mainly for afternoon tea, which was a wonderful time, we had some talent around back then and people would get up and sing even.”

Mr Wilson, before he died asked Mrs Douglass to help with some paper work and other administrative bits and pieces involved, but ended up shouldering running the whole show.

Sitting down with half a dozen of the club’s members, it does not take long to get an idea of what the 34 club is about – the oral history of the town from the people who know it best.

Stories abound of colourful characters and their colourful language, so-and-so’s uncle who parachuted into a pigsty, the “strange people” who lived out of town where there was not so much socialising, or some of the more unsavoury habits of the nightmen.

Many of these might be apocryphal, and not quite proper for the history books, but they are certainly entertaining, and Mrs Douglass said that if someone has had family in the area for a good amount of time, they’ll surely have a story about someone related to them.