ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 16, 1997 TAG: 9703170107
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-13 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: DOUGLAS MARTIN THE NEW YORK TIMES
The members of this odd little club remain united in the conviction that there are still places to go and little time to get there.
If it's not one thing, it's another. Ninety years ago, the debate at the Explorers Club raged over which member made it to the North Pole first. Lately, researchers have pretty much proven that neither of the two mentioned, Dr. Frederick Cook and Commander Richard Peary, did.
Well, so what?
``They both got as close as they possibly could,'' declared Alfred McLaren, president of the Explorers Club, a position held by both Cook and Peary.
``The Explorers Club is a sort of a liars' club,'' said P.J. Capelotti, a club member who is also an archaeologist specializing in studying (largely failed) Arctic expeditions.
The club exists as a delicious anomaly in a world where everything has seemingly been explored, then explored again. So what if the globe's white spaces were filled in two generations ago? What does it matter that all the mountains have been climbed? There's plenty of education to be done, and there are plenty of young scientists to encourage. And anyway, the members of this odd little club remain united in the conviction that there are still places to go and little time to get there.
They ride on the wings of a glorious past, as reflected by their digs in a Tudor mansion just off Fifth Avenue on 70th Street. Theirs is a cluttered den with a polar bear and a cheetah (stuffed), musty leather-covered books, yellowed photos of Watusi giants and thousands upon thousands of maps, not a few of which were drawn by members. Explorers maintain personal lockers with a bottle or two of their favorite beverage and flop back in leather chairs to trade stories, most of them true. A prominent portrait portrays a member who amputated his own leg with a pocket knife on an Arctic expedition.
``It gives the feel of exploration as it was done in the 19th and early 20th century,'' said Steve Fossett, who recently rode a balloon 9,672 miles. He carried Explorers Club flag No. 180, which had previously been on expeditions to Panama's jungles, the Himalayas and outer space.
Members must be real explorers. A condition of joining is participation in one serious expedition - no UFO hunts - and also publishing an article about the trip. ``We are quite rigorous about these standards,'' McLaren said.
This is a forum where major events of exploration are chewed over endlessly, and not always kindly. In particular, last year's tragedy on Mount Everest in which bad weather and bad judgment combined to kill eight climbers, some of them members, provoked sharp debate over who should have done what.
``Suddenly, people didn't talk at cocktail parties,'' said Angela Schuster, who edits the club's magazine and herself discovered the long-lost base camp of Henry Hudson in northern Canada.
With the greatest race for new frontiers now in the scientific realm, today's members are likely to be research scientists whose quests are so esoteric only other specialists can comprehend them. Accordingly, the club allows them to bounce ideas off exceptionally intelligent people outside their own narrow specializations. And there are undeniably common interests: Where better to shoot the breeze about the latest in tents and thermal underwear?
``I've never met anyone there who's absolutely dull,'' allowed Johan Reinhard, whose expeditions have led him to discover a nomadic tribe in the Himalayas and the perfectly preserved ``Ice Maiden'' high in the Andes.
The club was founded in 1904 and incorporated an earlier group of polar explorers called the Arctic Club. These first Explorers ranged from physicists to mountain climbers to war correspondents to the curator of birds and mammals at the American Museum of Natural History. ``It was started by a couple of guys who were just glad they made it,'' Schuster said. ``That was the first phase of the club.''
The second phase, she said, was ``Let's have fun.'' This phase has clearly not ended, as reflected by their upcoming annual dinner. Saturday's dinner will feature fire-roasted leg of water buffalo, fire-roasted pig and bull moose chili to honor Anna Roosevelt, the granddaughter of Theodore, who will be present to receive an award and speak on her experiences with cave dwellers in the Amazon. There will also be surprise (living) guests from the animal kingdom.
Past repasts have featured sheeps' eyeballs and roasted seaweed, and the only culinary promise is that no endangered species will be served. Falcons have soared through the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, and once an eagle made a big mistake on Lowell Thomas' tuxedo. In the past, there have been camels and motorcycles, and this year, the club had to promise that under no circumstances would they rappel from the ceiling again.
The club's third phase, Schuster said, is, ``Shouldn't we be doing something useful?''
Clearly, the third phase has begun. The club, which has 3,000 members - of whom 400 live in this area - in recent years has been stressing education. Among other things, it links high school and college students with accomplished scientists for internships and gives financial help to top science students. ``In many ways, education is our real mission,'' McLaren said.
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