The Astrological Society of Connecticut

By Janet Booth

One of our most unusual parties was The Coyote Moon Howl! in July 1997. Board member Catherine Cummings hosted us in her home in South Windsor. Of course, there was a potluck picnic. In the afternoon, Catherine led a Weed Walk through the garden and grounds. As the Sun set, we lit a bonfire. As the full moon rose, we made music with all sorts of instruments including pots and pans. And did we howl? Oh, how we howled! It was a fun and crazy time. Some people even came in costume as various heavenly bodies or personifications of the signs.

Funny story when Debbie Corkindale was president (1995 – 1997). It seemed that the gavel used to call the board meetings to order disappeared. Debbie looked high and low and finally ran a horary chart that indicated the gavel was on top of the TV in the kids’ room – and so it was!

In the fall of 1997, thanks to a suggestion from past president Debbie Corkindale, we shifted our lecture location from the Rocky Hill Marriott to the Keeney Cultural Center in Wethersfield, where we still meet. In 2004, we changed our New Age Fair location to the Keeney Center, too, a move that’s been very successful. Everyone appreciates the air conditioning in the warm months!

Around 1997, Kathy Simpson, a board member and talented graphic designer, began designing our Lunar Quarterly newsletters, becoming the editor in the spring of 1999, following Janet Booth’s seven years or so. Kathy also created a whole new look for our annual season brochures, beginning with the 1998-1999 season. We’re still using a slightly modified version of her basic brochure design, updated by our printer after Kathy’s departure from the ASC.

We offered a program to the public at the spring equinox in March 1998. "Countdown 2000" featured lectures by Gloria Star, Alphee Lavoie, Jacqueline Lindley Janes, Bruce Scofield and Don Cerow. Sadly, the weather was bad and the attendance wasn’t big but the lectures were great, looking ahead to 2000, two years hence.

Since the 1998-1999 season, we’ve been offering "pre-lecture orientations" before our regular Thursday lectures. This was the brainchild of Janet Booth and Julianne Johnson, designed to help people better understand terms and concepts encountered in our lectures and thus encourage more newcomers.

In 1999, we amended our By-Laws to switch our membership renewal period for everyone to coincide with our season, from September through August. Prior to that, each member renewed at his or her anniversary, an administrative nightmare for our membership chair! It’s hard to imagine that we operated in such cumbersome fashion for over 20 years.

One of our biggest hassles for many years was doing mass mailings. We used to have big "mailing parties," where we’d have to sort everything by zip codes, see if we had matches to three digits or five digits, and bundle them accordingly, using certain coding stickers. What a relief sometime around the millennium when we began to outsource our bulk mail to a mailing service.

Another persistent hurdle over the year for the ASC was finding enough people to fulfill our by-laws requirement for ten board members in addition to our six officers. Achieving a quorum for board meetings was difficult, too. Over the past ten (or more) years, we amended our bylaws twice to reduce the number of board members, first to eight and now to six, making for an even dozen, like the signs.

In 1999, we had our first holiday potluck supper at our December lecture meeting, a practice we’ve continued since. Our summer picnic for members and guests has become a tradition too, kindly hosted by former president Denis Picard and his wife, Ollie, at their lovely place in Kensington.

During Laura’s terms, we began the task of re-compiling history items of the ASC. Our history had been stored in the basement of the home of longtime treasurer Lee Woodbury. We had our board meetings at her home for more than a decade. After she took ill and then died, unfortunately her children didn’t realize the import of those boxes in her basement and they were discarded. Laura Magnussen took over as society historian, and during Julianne Johnson’s presidency, the history files moved to the home of Debby Vincelett (First Vice President at that time), where they reside now.

In 2002, we celebrated 30 years with a banquet in Cromwell (whatever the Lord Cromwell Inn was called at that time – it keeps changing names). Bruce Scofield’s and Valerie Vaughan’s band, Saturn and the Outer Planets, performed. We also put on a skit about the founding of the ASC in 1972, in a hippie apartment in the west end of Hartford, with a scene where Doris Chase Doane helped with our wonderful election chart at a convention of the American Foundation of Astrologers. The actors were Peter Standaart, Agneta Borstein, Denis Picard, Julianne Johnson, Janet Booth, Linda Epstein, Debbie Vincelett and Dave Drinnan. The script was a joint effort by some of the actors and the soundtrack was from HAIR: of course, the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

At the beginning of James Santa-Mo’s presidency, we changed our board meeting location to the Pitkin Center in Wethersfield. Before that, we had our board meetings in members’ homes, often the home of the president or treasurer. Now we’re on neutral territory and amazingly (for an ASC event), food is not a feature of the meetings.

One of the coolest things about the ASC is our tablecloth on our welcome table, signed by all our speakers over the years. No other group has anything like it! Speakers always comment about it and are excited to sign it. For the past eight years, the names have been lovingly embroidered by Debby Vincelett (who, by the way, is the only ASC member to serve two different multi-year stints as our treasurer, also hosting board meetings for many years). Before her, Catharine Ziebka, a board member, had done the stitchery. The project and the tradition were initiated by an early ASC president, Alberta Benson.

One thing we haven’t done in the past 10 years is have a symposium. Our last one was "Cuspacho" in March 1996.

Throughout the years, we’ve managed to offer nine lectures and one to five workshops per season, bringing some of the world’s best astrologers to Connecticut.