Our longest-serving club members, Fred and Rachel Adams, receiving their awards for more than 60 years as embers of our club! Fred served as our Club Treasurer for many years and Rachel kept our then-younger members, like Don Dear (left) and President Dan Medina (right) in line when they first joined the club. Fred noted, in his speech, that he became active in politics in 1938! Dolores and Ray Harbold, who are also 60-year veterans of our club, couldn't make it to our celebration. Unfortunately, another 60-year club member, Frank Barton, died a few weeks before the event. Frank's father was one of the founders of our club, as was the late State Senator Ralph Dills.

Our Club has a long history, as evidenced by the memorabilia that was on display at our 75th Anniversary. We worked on all four campaigns for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then for Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Hubert H. Humphrey (though most of our members supported Eugene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy in the Primary election that year), George McGovern (many members supported other candidates in the 1972 Primary), Jimmy Carter (but we endorsed Teddy Kennedy in the Primary for Carter's second election in 1980), Walter Mondale (in the Primary many of our members supported Gary Hart. who polls said would have beaten Reagan, but the AFL-CIO supported Mondale), Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore Jr. and John Kerry. The latter two won each of their elections, by the way, but the elections were stolen (read the books by Greg Palast and by Steven Freeman & Joel Bleifuss noted below). And we worked on an untold number of campaigns in California, most notably the "Sweep the State in '58" campaign that installed many statewide Democratic officeholders for the first time in a lifetime, including Governor Pat Brown! That campaign was led by the California Democratic Council, co-founded by Alan Cranston, who we later supported in his U.S. Senate campaigns. We also supported Sinclair Lewis in his 1934 EPIC (End Poverty In California) campaign for Governor which was defeated by the very first massive propaganda campaign, launched by a coalition of right-wing newspapers and Hollywood movie studios. Our club probably started as an EPIC Democratic Club, some club members remember seeing photos of an EPIC banner we strung high across a main boulevard in Gardena.

For most Presidential elections we ran a Democratic Headquarters, including one in 1972 for the George McGovern campaign, which we co-hosted with the South Bay Students for McGovern. Harmon Belcher used his famous "Belcher Boards," which he had perfected in Don Dear's City Council campaigns, to run our huge precincting operation. Hopefully someone will find photos of the Belcher Boards in use, with gold stars for each completed precinct and also for donations to help run the headquarters. Between the students from El Camino College and local High Schools, members from the Gardena Valley and other Democratic Clubs and other South Bay anti-war activists (anti-Viet Nam War in those days), we reached every household in our very large area and won the primary by a landslide. When the official Democratic Party took control after the National Convention, they opened a new Headquarters a little further down Crenshaw and confiscated the $500 we had collected in donations, and largely ignored us until the last weeks of the campaign. We still ran the headquarters and did our precincting, and we beat Nixon locally in the General Election, but unfortunately Nixon swept the rest of the country. In those days the police -- in some South Bay cities and in much of the country -- harassed people with anti-war or pro-McGovern bumper stickers. No longer -- things have improved immensely in the intervening years!

Go to our Gallery page to see photos from previous GVDC events!

We are trying to build up a history of our club! We don't want to forget those who've helped build up our club over the decades. Every little bit helps us! If you've got any photos you'd like to put up on our website, please bring them to one of our club meetings (we can copy them there) or send them to us at GVDC, c/o 15433 S. Catalina Ave, Gardena 90274, or email us copies! If you would like to add an anecdote or comment, please write us, come to a club meeting or email us!