Two years later James Severance was killed inVietnam. He'd missed the previous year's dinner, his reserve unit having been recalled to active duty, and members had joked that an Asian war was a pretty lame excuse for breaking such a solemn commitment. The following May, when they read his name along with Phil Kalish's, you could almost hear last year's jokes echoing hollowly against the paneled walls.

In March of '69, less than two months before the annual dinner, Homer Champney died in his sleep. "If there comes a day when you don't see me by nine in the morning," he'd instructed the staff at his residential hotel, "ring my suite, and if I don't pick up then come check on me." The desk clerk made the call and had a bellman take over the desk while he went up to Champney's rooms himself. When he found what he'd feared, he called the old man's nephew.

That nephew in turn made the calls his uncle had instructed him to make. On the list were the twenty-eight surviving members of the club of thirty-one. Champney was leaving nothing to chance. He wanted to make sure everyone knew he was gone.

The funeral was atCampbell 's, and it was the first club funeral Lewis Hildebrand had attended. The overall turnout was small. Champney had outlived his contemporaries, and his nephew- a great-nephew, actually, some fifty years Champney's junior- was his only surviving relative in theNew York area. Besides Hildebrand, the contingent of mourners included half a dozen other members of the thirty-one.

Afterward, he joined several of them for a drink. Bill Ludgate, a printing salesman, said, "Well, this is the first of these I've been to, and it's going to be the last. In a couple of weeks we'll be all together at Cunningham's, and Homer'll have his name read with the others, and I guess we'll talk about him. And that's enough. I don't think we should go to members' funerals. I don't think it's our place."