Junior League of Boca Raton past presidents and other members
gather around a sand castle on the beach.
Photos courtesy of the Junior League of Boca Raton
Junior League Today: Photos
By Ron Hayes
In 1971, a group of 26 young women declared themselves The Junior Service League of Boca Raton and decided the 46-year-old city had been around long enough to deserve a historical society.
Today, that historical society is only the first in countless community projects the organization has nurtured, and the 700 women of the Junior League of Boca Raton are celebrating their own four decades of history.
Jeanne Baur was a charter member and the league’s third president.
“We were all Junior League members from all over the country,” she recalled recently, “and when we moved down here we saw a need. We were a growing town in 1971. IBM was here and we saw the need for all kinds of volunteer projects.”
Next came the challenge of restoring the 1912 Singing Pines house, now the Boca Raton Children’s Museum.
In those early days, the Junior Service League supported puppet shows and consignment shops, the Morikami Museum and Planned Parenthood, the Children’s Home Society — and on and on.
“Our biggest problem was finding 100 women under 35,” Baur says with a laugh. “We had so many restrictions in those days.”
In 1984 the group was formally accepted to membership in the national body, and the Junior Service League became the Junior League of Boca Raton. The name had changed, but the commitment to service remains.
In 1984, the Boca Raton Junior League
dropped ‘Service’ from its name, but not
from its core mission. Above: a 1975 clipping
of club news from The Boca Raton News.
Mayor Susan Whelchel had just moved to Boca Raton from Central Florida in the late 1970s. The mother of four children and a former schoolteacher who couldn’t find a job, she looked for an organization where she could meet new friends and make a contribution to the community. She found the Junior Service League.
“I think without question it was one of the better things I was able to do,” she says today. “It was fulfilling from almost every angle, with opportunities to do things exciting and helpful in the community and at same time to make new friends and have families that got together.”
Katharine Dickenson (left) and Jeanne Baur prepare for an event in the 1980s or ’90s.
When Whelchel sought to start a community garden, the city partnered with the Junior League, and on Oct. 11, “Pave The Way” debuted, a 1½-acre community garden on Northwest Fourth Street. To date, 48 plots have been sold, with each gardener agreeing to donate 10 percent of the growth to the city’s Helping Hands food pantry.
“I believe in partnerships,” Whelchel says. “What I always like best about the league is that, even many years ago, it’s been a strong believer in partnering with other organizations, and therefore having twice the effort to make something good happen.”
In that spirit, its Newman-Craske Grant Library provides help to other nonprofit service organizations in search of grants.
In 2001, the league’s cookbook, Savoring The Moment: Entertaining Without Reservations became the first nonprofit publication to win the prestigious James Beard Award. Since then, it has sold 46,000 copies.
“I’m a member because it’s so organized,” says Kristin Calder, a past president and chair of the league’s 40th anniversary task force. “You become aware of the outreach to our community, and you have a powerful group of women with wonderful resources.”
The Boca league supports In The Pines, helping provide low-income housing for migrant workers.
On Nov. 9, a trailer truck delivered 200,000 diapers to the league’s headquarters, the Vesgo Community Resource Center on Northwest 13th Street, a donation from Huggies to South Florida’s first “diaper bank,” founded by the Junior League.
But despite four decades of service, the Junior League still battles a comically simplistic stereotype. Junior Leaguers, so goes the rap, are pampered young white women who wear white gloves while they “do lunch.”
And The Help hasn’t helped.
In the hit movie version of that blockbuster novel, Bryce Dallas Howard plays Hilly Holbrook, president of the Jackson, Miss., Junior League in 1963, and the most unctuous racist in American literature since Simon Legree.
Andrea and Ed Kornblue and Joan and Ken Robertson
attend a 1985 Junior League Sock Hop.
Images courtesy of the Junior League of Boca Raton
But stay to the end, and you’ll find a credit thanking Jackson’s Junior League for its help in filming The Help.
Today, the Junior League of Boca Raton’s mission statement notes that the group “reaches out to women of all races, religions and national origins who demonstrate an interest in and commitment to voluntarism.”
Today, members must be at least 23, but remain active as long as they like.
“The biggest misconception is that we’re exclusive, only for younger women and ladies of leisure,” says Nancy Dockerty, the current president. “But I’m a member because it’s immensely rewarding to see what Junior League has accomplished.”
Forty years ago, the League’s publication, The Bridge, was an amateur effort, mimeographed and stapled. Today, The Bridge is a glossy, professionally produced quarterly that devotes most of its space to volunteer efforts.
When The Boca Raton News reported on the league in 1975, the president was referred to as “Mrs. Dan Burns.”
Today, many of the league’s members are working or professional women, including charter member Jeanne Baur, who still sells real estate in town. Dockerty is a director in a commercial mortgage company, and Calder is the public relations director for the Bethesda Hospital Foundation.
Rather than shy away from the stereotypes, Junior Leaguers are exploiting them with clever slogan.
“We’ve traded our white gloves for work gloves,” one ad proclaims. And “Let’s Do Lunch ... And Make a Difference” touts the League’s work feeding needy children.
Today’s Junior League isn’t even uniquely American anymore.
Founded in 1901 by social activist Mary Harriman, the Association of Junior Leagues International boasts 155,000 members in 292 Junior Leagues in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom.
And the Junior League of Boca Raton serves an area from Lake Worth south to Deerfield Beach, including the island communities. President Dockerty lives in Delray Beach and former president Calder in Boynton Beach.
Baur looks back on it all with pride — and amazement.
“The projects are bigger and more expensive,” she says, “and the money we raised through different fundraisers — it’s mindboggling. It’s just been a very meaningful part of my life, knowing that you’re helping people and the accomplishment of seeing this grow into what it’s become. We early girls are just amazed at what has happened to the Junior League of Boca Raton.
“We are amazed.”
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