‘America’s Funniest Ladies’ topic for Club Au Courant

Hostesses for Club Au Courant meeting from left to right; Kay McKinley, Marcella Harkrider, Norma Norris Members of Club Au Courant met Wednesday at Country Place Village.

President Opal Stewart welcomed the group and led them in repeating the Club Collect. Refreshments were served by hostesses Kay McKinley, Marcella Harkrider and Norma Norris. The lovely table held an array of fruits, a breakfast casserole, a choice of cinnamon rolls, blueberry bread, pumpkin bread and coffee, orange juice and water.

Minutes were read by Secretary Dorothy Camp and Kay McKinley made the treasurer’s report. Donations were made to the Helping Hands project. The chairman of each committee was asked for a report. At this time, Koleta Kinney was welcomed as a new member to the club. Changes in the yearbook and meetings were announced for the coming year.

The program theme for the year is “America’s Funniest Ladies” and the first of these programs was given by Dianne Wilson and titled “Barbara Johnson.”

The speaker shared quotations from several books written by Barbara Johnson that confirmed she was a very humorous speaker and writer. Titles of a few of dozens of books she wrote include “Where Does a Mother Go to Resign”, “Splashes of Joy in the Cesspools of Life” and “So Stick a Geranium in Your Hat and Be Happy.”

Johnson has often been called “the Christian Erma Bombeck.” Her husband, Bill, was an engineer and was thoughtful and sensitive to others while she was emotional, bubbling over with a good sense of humor and talkative. Bill was severely injured after a car accident and it took years to deal with serious brain damage, loss of sight in one eye and damage to the other. He did recover enough to go back to work and died in 2004.

Johnson also had to deal with the death of two sons. A foundation to expand her “Spatula Ministries” was established by her third son, who was estranged from the family for a time after she discovered he was homosexual. It has a Joy Room bookstore where her books, calendars, etc., are sold. She died in 2007 from a brain tumor.

The speaker mentioned one more quotation from Johnson and her sense of humor: “If you haven’t liked my presentation today, I am sorry but you can’t complain, because yesterday was the deadline for all complaints.”

Attending were Dimples Burns, Dorothy Camp, Bettye Collins, Marion Dovel, Jan Elliott, Marcella Harkrider, Kay McKinley, Micah Mitchell, Norma Norris, Clemmie Richards, Jean Robertson, Pat Sers, Justine Stanley, Opal Stewart, Ellen Watson, Dianne Wilson, Margie Morton and Koleta Kinney.