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The BC Club celebrates its 10th anniversary

The club’s Harbour Room on a Thursday last summer. Photograph: Lee Pellegrini
On a Wednesday evening in a window-walled room on the 36th floor of 100 Federal Street in Boston’s financial district, about 50 people dressed in casual business attire—fairly evenly divided among men and women, young and old—chatted, sipped drinks (mostly wine), nibbled on crudités and scallops wrapped in bacon, took a chance on raffle tickets for Red Sox seats, and contemplated the view: to the west, the Longfellow Bridge and what one member swore was the Heights at Boston College; to the east, the Bank of America Pavilion, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and the ships and sailboats navigating among the Harbor Islands.
It was open house night at the Boston College Club, a time for prospective members to test the ambience and the company for suitability. The club had been celebrating its 10th anniversary year, but the mood that evening was understated. A young BC graduate who works at a nearby marketing firm and travels for business mused that he’d probably join so he could take advantage of cooperative membership arrangements with clubs across the country, while a middle-aged woman, a financial consultant who is among the 30 percent of the club’s 2,460 members with no BC affiliation, noted to a visitor, “I often schedule meetings here.” “My clients feel really special when I bring them up here,” said a young female financial advisor to another woman. “Most of the staff know my name.” “We’re very creative in our approach,” said one man, passing business cards to another man and a woman. “We like to listen to our clients and adapt to their needs.”
Although open houses continue to be held bimonthly, membership has not been a problem for the club since it was founded amid great skepticism that it could succeed. Other iterations—including one in the 1960s in the back room of a Tremont Street seafood restaurant whose only telephone was in a booth in a front room—had ended badly; and while BC graduates had certainly ascended in the worlds of finance, business, and law that mingle in downtown Boston, there remained questions about whether they would join a nascent Boston College club or maintain the allegiances they’d established with other private organizations and universities.
Jack Joyce ’61, managing director at Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown and one of a handful of alumni who organized the club in the mid-1990s, recalled visiting law firms and financial institutions in the neighborhood and asking fellow graduates “to round up people they knew in their companies who might be interested in membership.” With a thousand graduates prepared to sign on, Joyce and his colleagues received financial backing in 1997 from the University’s then-new president, William P. Leahy, SJ, and the club opened in February 1998. A for-profit corporation and part of the 170-member ClubCorp network, the BC Club donates half its annual net to a scholarship fund at Boston College, last year contributing $535,000.
For the men and women sipping cocktails and trading business cards at the open house, the fact that Boston College’s name adorns a lofty precinct high above the city’s landmarks seemed to be of no particular moment. After all, Boston College has been a top-40 national university for more than a decade, has Rhodes Scholars, an endowment of $1.5 billion, and enrolls students from 90 countries. For Jack Joyce, however, and his fellow instigators of those earlier failed efforts to make a place for Boston College at the center of a city from whose blue collar neighborhoods most had commuted by trolley to the Heights with brown bag lunches—for them, the momentousness is ever present.
Recently, at a lunch table in the club’s Charles River Grill Room, Joyce told a visitor that among the things he most enjoyed about the place that day were seeing the president of Tufts University dining at a nearby table and earlier learning that a group of Harvard Medical School alumni had scheduled a reunion at the BC Club. “We have a lot of pride in the school and in the success of this club,” said Joyce.
Terry Byrne writes about theater for the Boston Globe.
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