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Lynchburg’s Sphex Club Celebrates Its Centennial
Dr. Mosby G. Perrow Sr., Lynchburg’s director of health was one of the Sphex Club’s co-founders. Courtesy of the Hon. Mosby G. Perrow III
BY JAMES M. ELSON
The leading cultural organization for men, limited in number to thirty members, was organized October 5, 1910, by Dr. Mosby
G. Perrow, with attorney Armistead R. Long and Dr. Fernando
W. Martin, chemistry professor at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, as co-founders. Called the Sphex Club, it has had many of the leading citizens as members who in fortnightly meetings read papers and discuss them. At an annual dinner the members invite male guests to the capacity of the hall engaged, where a nationally distinguished speaker makes an address. Through the years the list of speakers reads like a small Who’s Who In America.
—Philip Lightfoot Scruggs, The History of Lynchburg Virginia: 1786-1946
Dr. F. W. Martin, R-MWC professor of chemistry and the college’s vice president was a Sphex co-founder. Courtesy of the Jones Memorial Library
that time. Now, as the Sphex Club celebrates its centennial year, his description of it needs amending only to the extent that the number of active members has been increased to thirty-five. And both members and guests at its annual dinner are now male and female.
“If you were to describe the club as a little bit like a dinosaur walking down Main Street, you wouldn’t be amiss,” Sphex secretary Ray Williamson told reporter Joe Stinnett in a 1981 interview for The Daily Advance. Today reporter Stinnett is editor Stinnett of The News and Advance and himself a member. Recently one of the children in the family of a Sphex member described his parent as belonging to the “nerd club.” The dictionary defines “nerd” as “an unstylish, unattractive, or socially inept person; especially one slavishly devoted to intellectual or academic pursuits.” Nevertheless,
it appears that over the years Sphex Club members have been able to overcome that aspect of their personalities (if it indeed existed) to achieve success in their chosen professions.
Academics have traditionally been suspected of being nerds. Therefore, it is not surprising that among the Sphex Club’s charter members in 1910 were four professors from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, founded seventeen years earlier. During succeeding years, there have been a total of sixty-four Sphex educators from a variety of institutions, including twenty-two R-MWC faculty (including five presidents), sixteen from Lynchburg College (also five presidents), and eight from Sweet Briar College (three presidents).
Charter members from the community in 1910 included a businessman, a physician, two attorneys, a state legislator, the editor of The Daily Advance, and Lynchburg’s director of public health. During the club’s second year, seventeen more
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two years old, and the author had been a member for almost half
r. Scruggs was certainly qualified to write a history of his home town. He served as an editor of one or the other of its then two newspapers, The Daily Advance and The News, for thirty-five years. When his book was published in 1972, the Sphex Club was sixty-