In the mid-1970s, shortly after Toastmasters International opened its membership to women, there were two options available to Billings women who wanted to sharpen their speaking skills by joining the group.
They could join one of the male-dominated local chapters or sign on with the one all-female chapter, known as the Toastmistresses.
By 1978, several of the women in the Toastmistresses Club decided it was time to try something new. As Carrie Sackman explained it, the Toastmistresses Club, as the only one of its kind in Billings, offered limited opportunities to interact with other Toastmasters, and if the women wanted to compete with Toastmasters clubs in speech meets, they had to travel to other cities in Montana.
That's why they branched off in 1978 and formed their own Magic City Toastmasters Club No. 1759, with a woman president and a membership of nearly all women. Sackman became the club's first president, and it was formally chartered early in 1979.
Last week, five members of that club, which disbanded about 10 years ago, met for lunch to talk about those distant-seeming days when it was considered somewhat bold for women to start their own chapter of Toastmasters.
The group originally met at the Northern Hotel but later moved to George Henry's Restaurant, where they used to gather in an upstairs room. For last week's reunion, they met again at George Henry's, but on the ground floor.
"Some of us can't climb stairs anymore," said Rose Marie Rockwell, an original member and one of the organizers of the meeting.
The membership of club No. 1759 was always meant to be open to men and women, especially since you had to have 20 members to form a new chapter. As it turned out, when the club was chartered in 1979 it had 18 women and two men.
Also at the luncheon were two people who attended the club's charter meeting but were not members of the chapter - Lois Thacker, the group's mentor, and Bob Rightmire, then the area governor for Toastmasters, who spoke at the charter meeting.
Thacker said she joined Toastmasters as soon as women were allowed to do so, and she wanted nothing to do with the Toastmistresses. She had been a debater in high school and thought she could handle herself in any situation, she said, but when she joined the state Department of Transportation, she was the only female engineer on the staff. She suddenly found herself tongue-tied and joined Toastmasters to gain confidence.
She's still a member 36 years later, and she's still encouraging people to join.
In fact, she said, one reason she liked the idea of a reunion was that it might be a vehicle for getting new people to enroll in Toastmasters. Membership seems to be down in professional groups of all kinds, she said, and she suspects the weak economy has something to do with it.
She wants people to know that Toastmasters has helped thousands of people find work and then advance in their careers.
Sackman said she joined Toastmasters to advance her career in business and to improve her public-speaking skills, which she used often at meetings of Christian women's clubs around the state. But what really kept her interested, she said, was the opportunity to get up at weekly meetings and share her enthusiasm for whatever book she happened to be reading at the time.
Thacker said that's a big part of Toastmasters - you learn to communicate and to speak in public, but you also hear speeches on topics you might never have encountered otherwise.
She said someone recently said to her, "You're still hanging around Toastmasters? I said, 'Every time I go to a meeting, I learn something new.' "
A Billings newspaper tells the story of the first Toastmasters club run by women. Via Twitter user @Toastmasters.