One day in 1949, a San Francisco bachelor named Linn Alexander discovered he’d set up an embarrassing double-booking: his date with a pretty girl, Sally Fay (who later became Sally Tobin) happened to coincide with his usual Tuesday lunch with some old friends.
When he explained his dilemma, Fay was unimpressed, and announced her intention of coming with him to the all male gathering. The result became a San Francisco tradition—a club of unattached young men who named themselves the Tuesday Downtown Operators (TDO).
“Observers,” Fay told them. “You boys are observers.”
Early last November, a few of the remaining members of the TDO met in a house in Oakland to share memories and pore over an enormous scrapbook. It chronicles the events, the membership, and the press coverage of the informal organization that, as Time magazine put it in 1973, pursued romance “with single-minded fervor.”
The TDO met every Tuesday at various locations over the years, starting at the St. Julien Restaurant, moving to the Canterbury Hotel after the St. Julien was torn down, to Paoli’s in the Financial District, then later to Bimbo’s, Trader Vic’s, and the Metropolitan Club. The club would survive the straight-laced ’50s, the swinging ’60s, the cynical ’70s, and then finally peter out sometime in the ’80s. In the meantime, there were nods from everyone from SF Chronicle society editor Millie Robbins in 1959 (“Ten Years of Ogling for the Operators”) to Life magazine in 1961 (“16 Bachelors and Date No. 1,176”), to Time magazine in 1973 (“Lunchtime Lotharios”).
“We were a social networking group,” explains Jay Kee, once the TDO’s Dean of Women. “At most, we had about twenty-four members, all single. Marriage disqualified you. Every ten to thirteen weeks, you had to bring a lady to lunch, or two ladies, or three ladies. They could not be ladies you were dating.
“The gentleman who invited her would introduce her, tell everyone where she went to school, where she grew up, that kind of thing. Then, everyone stood up and toasted the ladies. The ladies were always asked afterward if they wanted to sign the book, and if they did, they could put in their phone number [or not]. For the next two years, they would receive invitations to our parties. They would come to a luncheon by themselves, but for the parties, they would come with four or five or six of their girlfriends.”
Former member Al McKee remembers it as a romantic, non-threatening venue where young, single professionals could meet. “I think the greatest compliment that we used to get,” he says, “was that after a luncheon, we’d sometimes get a thank you note from the lady who’d been invited, and a call from her, and she would say, ‘I have another lady I think should be invited to your club.’”
“It worked so well,” says former Dean of Women Malcolm Post. “Of course it started in the days when nice young women didn’t go to bars. So it was a way for nice young men and nice young women to meet in an informal and comfortable way.”
The TDO weathered the sexual revolution and, for a while at least, the rise of feminism. While a 1970 article in the Examiner describes a tongue-in-cheek anti-Women’s Lib, pro mini-skirts rally held by the TDO, members apparently had a knack for disarming even skeptical guests at their luncheons. “I thought these guys were all going to be male chauvinists,” one invitee, Susan Billingsly, told AP reporter Edith M. Lederer in 1970, “…and then, they were so nice, you really couldn’t put them down.”
All good things must come to an end, and the TDO had its last lunch in the 1980s. “We tried to hand the club down to younger men,” says Bob Cummings, “but they wanted to charge ladies for luncheon. We decided this should die with us. The TDO was a way that gentlemen became gentlemen. No lady was ever charged.”
So the scrapbook remains, along with fond memories of parties, and good times. There were rafting trips, a party on the Balclutha, an astrology party at the Ballroom at Fort Mason, and Superstar parties that took over whole restaurants just before rush hour. “If you were hot and single, you were at one of our events,” says Scott Elrod.
And, yes, there were marriages. In her 1959 article, a skeptical Robbins observed, “You could count the number of weddings which have resulted from the lunch meetings on one hand … and still have a couple of fingers left.” As time went on, the record improved. Today, former members say better than three or four percent of the members met their wives at the TDO luncheons—and there’s at least one that can be counted as a near miss.
According to Elrod, the wife of one of the early members reminisced not long ago about how she met her husband, an ex-TDO member who’d recently passed away. As a young man, he’d invited her to the TDO luncheon, and then had second thoughts.
“He decided she was a keeper, so he was not about to bring her to lunch,” says Elrod. “It was delightful that she could share this story with me. She said it was 
the best thing that ever happened to her.”
Pamela Troy has an MFA from the University of North Carolina. She’s a freelance writer who lives on Nob Hill, and works in the Events Department of the Mechanics Institute.
