BRIDGING THE YEARS: Local women celebrate decades of card playing, travel

LAZY MOUNTAIN — After doing their bidding in the Mat-Su for four decades, a group of local bridge-playing ladies is still up to their old tricks.

“This is like a walk down memory lane,” said group member Linda Menard-Post as she sorted through old bridge club contact lists and notes on a Tuesday game night last week.

That evening, Post’s home — which her husband Michael built on Lazy Mountain — was filled with sunshine and the laughter and chatter of eight women joined together by a card game.

“This group of women friends have such a diversity to ’em that I wouldn’t necessarily have met (them) if it wasn’t for bridge,” said longtime club member Rose Anderson.

As attorneys, nurses, small business owners, quilters, educators, non-profit executives and more, the current club members have brought a variety of anecdotes to each other from their professions and hobbies over the years. Even their individual connections to bridge range from traditional to humorous to somewhat shocking.

Leslie Mead — who co-owned Teeland’s Country Store with her husband, Julian, and friends Neal and Gail Bridgwater in the mid-1970s — said her family’s bridge tradition began with her grandmother. It was Mead’s grandmother, she said, who played the 18^th-century precursor to bridge, Whist.

Jeannie Snodgrass, whose husband’s grandfather moved to Alaska in 1907, said she wasn’t too keen on her in-laws’ card playing habits at first.

“My idea of what bridge was was some ladies in the South sitting around sipping mint juleps,” Snodgrass said. “I wasn’t interested.”

One of the newer additions to the club, Pat Mathias, on the other hand, said she was very interested in the game — perhaps too interested.

“I didn’t graduate from college because I was playing all through exams in my second year,” Mathias said. “I was addicted to bridge, and I wasn’t addicted to college.”

Though none of the other current members made quite the same claim, each attested to the “serious fun,” as Mead put it, that they’ve had playing bridge.

“We always played until after midnight,” Post said.

“Oh, that was the rule,” Anderson said.

Anderson, a former Mat-Su teacher, joked about “staggering to school” with bridge hangovers the following mornings, but on weekends the group would often host sleepovers as adults.

Mental health therapist Jo Werner, who now commutes to club meetings from Anchorage, recalled bidding for beds at one person’s house on multiple occasions, proudly proclaiming that she did get “the good bed” at least one time.

Good bed or no, well rested or not, Post said the unwritten rule on these occasions was that no one was allowed to leave the house of whoever was hosting until noon, after they’d played at least one more round in their pajamas.

Bridge, for many of the players, was a way of life.

“All we did was eat and talk and play bridge,” said club member CeeCee Barron.

Though the club was never competitive — they never played for money, Post said, but instead ask the host to purchase, compile or handcraft some kind of gift for the low and high point winners — the women did take to planes and trains to play bridge on occasion.

Linda Conover said she had particularly fond memories of playing with the club on the train to and from Fairbanks one summer (entertained by a live bluegrass band that stepped on at Talkeetna) and Snodgrass laughed about getting lost in the rain forest when the club went to Hawaii one year.

Nowadays, the club starts and ends earlier in the evening and meets monthly, rather than weekly. Group trips are fewer and farther between, but the women remain in touch, occasionally drawing on new players (and husbands) to fill in the gaps.

“It’s a commitment that you can kind of put aside (for a while). I think that’s what has made us successful,” Post said.

While the club is not currently seeking new players (members Candace “Candy” Kopperud, Lynda Hahn Senta, Bev Cutler, Ann DeArmond and Tara Logsdon were absent Tuesday, but the tables are usually full), Post said she hopes to see the game of bridge continue to be played throughout the Mat-Su community.

“It’s always fun,” Post said.

Contact reporter Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.