AMHERST — At a time when the Amherst Rotary Club didn’t allow women in its ranks, based on Rotary International’s policy, and the Amherst Jaycees did admit women even though it was in conflict with the junior chamber’s rules, the Amherst Club became a service organization welcoming to business and professional women leaders in the community.

Established in 1983 and beginning to meet the following year, the Amherst Club quietly ended its 40-year run last year, bringing to a close an era in which it disbursed well over $360,000 for local service projects and scholarships. The Amherst Club was open to all genders from its inception and, during its peak years, had around 100 members, holding community fundraising events and weekly meetings.

Kent Faerber, one of the founders of the Amherst Club, said it was important to have a club where women would be allowed to have the same kind of regular exchange with their male counterparts, something that had not been previously available.

“Its weekly lunches educated dozens of us about the civic infrastructure that made Amherst such a lively place to live, and then provided an organization to raise tens of thousands of dollars to support it,” Faerber said. “It introduced all of us to the people who made Amherst work that we would not otherwise have known.”

Losing the organization, he said, reflects the current ways people interact.

“I suppose social media now plays that role, but it is difficult to imagine how it might do so with as much fun,” Faerber said.

Others who helped Faerber launch the Amherst Club, according to an article in the Gazette before its first meeting on May 22, 1984, were Frederick Rice, then executive director of the Valley Health Plan and Planning Board chairman; attorney and town counsel Robert Ritchie; and Norman D. Newell, owner of Newell Printing and a Finance Committee member. Faerber at the time said the service organization was “formed by several of us who are strong believers of a service club, especially the Rotary, in all respects save one — they do not allow women.”

By the early 1980s, the exclusionary practices of Rotary were a concern in town. In 1982, incoming Town Manager Barry Del Castilho was advised that, even though his predecessors in the role, A. Louis Hayward and Allen Torrey, had been Rotary members, he shouldn’t join or accept invitations to speak, a message conveyed in a letter from former Select Board member Diana Romer. Romer wrote the gender exclusion “is damaging to women’s ability to gain economic equality and to exercise community leadership.”

Then, in 1983, there was a request to the Select Board to deny a permit for Rotary to hold a flea market on the Town Common.

The first lunch for the Amherst Club was held at the former Lord Jeffery Inn, now known as the Inn on Boltwood. In later years, the Amherst Club began meeting biweekly, first at Amherst Brewing Co. and then at Bistro 63, as it continued to have speakers from a wide range of town and area businesses.

Even when the Rotary relaxed its restrictive membership in 1987, and the Jaycees shut down locally several years later, the Amherst Club remained strong throughout the 2010s, organizing popular fundraisers such as Love Notes and Spring to Life Cabaret and offering support for youth scholarships.

In recent years, with the Amherst Club down to fewer than 20 active members, the COVID pandemic took an even greater toll, preventing club meetings in person.

Joan Hanson of Shutesbury, who served as the president in the Amherst Club’s waning days, said that few members were left, there were fewer young members interested in joining and those who were part of it were growing old. That made fundraising and fulfilling its purpose difficult.

“We had a farewell celebration lunch and thanked Bistro 63 for hosting us for so many years,” Hanson said of the close-out event last October. “It was sad.”

Before ceasing all operations, though, Hanson wrote a letter to the Gazette explaining how during COVID the Amherst Club continued its mission, such as using an endowment fund to provide $1,000 to the Amherst Survival Center, $600 to All Out Adventures and $400 to the Amherst Senior Center, and giving to a number of other nonprofits. Members’ dues also went to purchase meals for those in need.

Hanson’s letter struck an optimistic tone. “And as we all have found, times change and we with time, but friendships continue.”

Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.