The Scowrers: How It All Began
Written by Marsha Pollak for the Vermissa Herald August 2017 with minor updates August 2025.
San Francisco’s scion society of the Baker Street Irregulars is known as “The Scowrers and Molly Maguires.” The “Scowrers” were a secret society of terrorists in The Valley of Fear based on the exploits of an actual group known as the Molly Maguires. Watson avoided using the true name, perhaps because he had distorted some of the facts.
The Scowrers meet irregularly, approximately three to four times a year, for dinner or lunch, discussion, the reading of papers and frequent toasts. The membership has included such diverse occupations as journalist, bank vice-president, travel planner, broker, photographer, writer, and numerous doctors, lawyers, librarians, teachers, office workers and domestic scientists. Since the pandemic we have been meeting via Zoom, with an occasional in-person gathering.
Founded by friends William Anthony Parker White, an author and critic, better known by his pen-name, Anthony Boucher, and Joseph Henry Jackson, book editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, the first meeting was held on March 31, 1944, at Fred Solari’s Italian restaurant, 19 Maiden Lane, near Union Square. In addition to Boucher and Jackson, Robert B. Frier, who was then a Yeoman First Class in the Navy, and John Rechab Baxter attended.
How did we get our name?
In the invitation to this first meeting, mailed to a number of men, Boucher wrote:
“We are tempted to call ourselves the Scowrers: we have scoured the Bay Region for candidates.” Probably there never was a thought of another name as Tony admired the Valley of Fear and could identify with it.
Where were the Mollies?
A draft of the invitation, found in the Boucher papers at the San Francisco Public Library, contains a postscript which is marked to go into the body of the announcement, and it states: “Any friends whom you deem suitable are invited with you. The gender on the noun friends need hardly be specified; only the shades of Irene Adler and Mrs. Hudson will represent their sex at this gathering.”
Just like the BSI and other earlier scions, the Scowrers were following the tradition of a male-only group, and indeed, there were no Mollies at the first gathering.
However, when the meeting honoring the only San Franciscan in the Canon, Hatty Doran, was written up in Joe Jackson’s “Bookman’s Notebook” in the Chronicle, and readers were asked to communicate a desire to join, all letters and requests came from women!
Maybe this made Boucher re-think his position, or maybe it was because his friend and literary protege Lenore Glen Offord wanted to join. Or perhaps as Marilyn MacGregor, our then Bodymaster, once said, he changed his mind because he found most all-male occasions boring and enjoyed having dinner with his wife, Phyllis White.
In a letter written to Life magazine on May 2, 1944, he stated: “We are also, I believe, the only Irregular branch to have a female auxiliary, known inevitably as the Molly Maguires, and including among others the novelist Lenore Glen Offord…” Offord would later become the first female to be invested in the BSI, as The Old Russian Woman, in 1958.
The second meeting, again at Solari’s, was on January 5, 1945, included women and saw Offord and Bodymaster Boucher give papers. Esther Longfellow read a poem she had written, which was reprinted in the third issue of The Baker Street Journal, as was Offord’s paper.
The Scowrers found their secretary when Clint Smith, an eighth grader from Berkeley, showed up. Clint owned a mimeograph machine and was appointed “Billy” and asked to prepare the scion’s minutes. The machine was small, and printed postcard-sized images, 3 ½” by 5 1/2”. Clint used this machine to print the minutes as well as the Scowrers’ first publication, Boucher’s Holmesiana Hispanica, dated March 1945.
Boucher did attend the January 1946 BSI meeting in NYC, taking the train across the country, and stopping to see legendary Sherlockian Vincent Starrett in Chicago.
However, there was a hiatus in San Francisco meetings until September 3, 1948. In a letter prepared for Joe Jackson’s column in the Chronicle in August 1948, Bodymaster Boucher states that he “has for the past two years shamefully neglected his duties, omitted to call meetings of the Lodge…”
Boucher gave up the office of Bodymaster in 1958, handing it over to Robert H. Steele. Steele himself stated: “Bless the Ladies! Bless the Molly Maguires! In the history of our very learned, scholarly, vital and liberated Scion Society, our most enlightened and distinguished achievement was to be the very first Scion to admit women to full and equal membership!”
Steele held the office for 40 years, turning it over in 1998 to Marilyn MacGregor, the Scion’s first woman Bodymaster. MacGregor enjoyed 22 years in that position, turning it over in 2020 to current Bodymaster Marc Kaufman.
The Scion has enjoyed fellowship and fun over the years, gathering for dinners or luncheons or teas or picnics and now gathering via Zoom. Some highlights include:
- The publication in 1965 of West By One And By One: An Anthology of Irregular Writings by the Scowrers and Molly Maguires and by the Trained Cormorants of Los Angeles County. Some of the contributors included Poul and Karen Anderson, Dean Dickensheet, Paula Salo and Stillman Drake.
- Fine printing done by John Ruyle, hand printed and hand bound books of Canonical parodies, “Turlock Loams Adventures” and collections of Sherlockian verse and various printings and greeting cards by Shirley and Dean Dickensheet.
- Stanford Sherlockian seminars
- Silver Blaze races
- The Scowrers Inn and Gaming Parlor
- The Dean Dickensheet Memorial Award, given for a paper judged outstanding.
If you’re interested in Sherlock Holmes and as Boucher said, “talk of the days when a rumble outside a Baker Street window was indubitably a hansom cab bearing a client,” join us.
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