By Mike Ervin
The post also entails maintaining the official shrine of the Chester A. Arthur Clubs of America in the den of Wolfe’s Downers Grove home. That’s not much work, either. The shrine is, fittingly, as sparse as the legacy of Arthur himself. It consists of a framed portrait of Arthur on the wall, one Chester Arthur ashtray, and one Chester Arthur refrigerator magnet. In the portrait, Arthur resembles a stern headmaster with his 19th-century facial hair and his stodgy three-piece suit. He looks like the kind of guy who would be a tyrant about table manners. The official Arthur archive in Wolfe’s den is composed of a row of books that have something to do with Chester Arthur and some notebooks full of miscellaneous Arthur memorabilia.
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So Wolfe decided to make a hobby out of celebrating Arthur’s anonymity. It wasn’t until 1993, long after he began the fictitious clubs, that Wolfe learned there actually is something called the Chester A. Arthur Society. But nearly all of the 100 or so members live in Australia, where the society originated. It seems the Australian Arthur groupies hold an annual dinner to pay tongue-in-cheek homage to their hero. The main event of the evening is a knock-down-drag-out American presidential trivia contest. Participants, if they expect to win, have to know who was on just about every major-party presidential ticket, their shoe sizes, and their mothers’ maiden names.
Wolfe says, with somewhat of a huff, “They don’t talk about the good things he did. Sure he did bad things. But he was a moral character, true to his wife, and a few other things we don’t have too much of anymore.”
