08/22/2025
“I love the history of it,” says former WSU registrar Julia Pomerenk, who joined the club in 2011. “Any organization that’s 132 years old is pretty remarkable.”
The early roster reads like a Who’s Who of the founding of the university. Its membership rolls feature women who share names with buildings on campus: Nancy Van Doren, Ida Bohler, Helen Fulmer, Belle Waller, Charlotte Kruegel, Peg Eastlick, and, of course, founder Harriet “Hattie” Bryan, wife of the third—but first long-term—president of the small agricultural college that would become WSU.
“The story is that when they arrived, she thought, ‘We need some culture for women in this town,’” says Barbara Hammond (’80 MS, ’83 PhD Psych.), who joined the club in 2010, a year after she retired from WSU as the director of counseling and testing services. “I’m a newbie,” she quips.
Other current members joined in the 1980s and ’90s. Karen Kiessling, the first female mayor of Pullman, joined in 1972.
“When I was invited to join, I accepted immediately,” Kiessling recalls. “What could be better than being part of a club that stressed literary merit, assigned you a topic, required an hour-long presentation on that topic, and was made up of a remarkable group of women who could handle such assignments?”
“I think everybody really enjoys the tradition of it,” Hammond says. “It’s like a salon.”
https://magazine.wsu.edu/2025/08/07/and-ladies-of-the-pullman-club/
