Item #15-8683 Webster Quimmley Society Memorabilia. Webster Quimmley Society, Dixon Gayer, CA Orange County.
Webster Quimmley Society (Orange County, CA); Dixon Gayer.

Webster Quimmley Society Memorabilia.

New York: American Spectator, [1933]. Three Buttons and a Small Plywood Membership Badge. Very Good. Joseph N. Bell in the Los Angeles Times (Nov. 6, 1987) tells the story:

Webster Quimmley was a Midwestern transplant to Orange County. He avoided the freeways in his Essex touring car, but one day he had to go to Los Angeles, and so ventured onto the Santa Ana Freeway. He carefully established himself in the middle lane, then became increasingly frightened as drivers careened by him on both the right and left, cutting him out and shouting epithets at him as they passed. The speed and recklessness of the drivers on both sides of him were so excessive that Quimmley couldn't get off the freeway. So, finally, he simply stopped in the middle of the freeway, stood up in his car, and shouted: "Sanity and Freedom."

The police led Quimmley off the freeway and told him to take surface streets the rest of the way. When Quimmley returned from Los Angeles--shaken but still defiant--he moved back to the Midwest. But his legacy lived on, and in his memory, Gayer suggested founding the Webster Quimmley Society for people who preferred the middle road to the excesses of either right or left.

Gayer's editor thoughtfully put the story on the Associated Press wire, and it exploded all over the country. "All of a sudden," recalls Gayer, still a little awed, "the story began popping up with datelines from a dozen different cities. I knew there couldn't be very many people on either extremity, but they were making all the noise. We needed a voice for the 150 million people in the middle, and I had no idea how hungry they were for it. "Within a month, I had almost 10,000 letters from people who wanted to join." Item #15-8683

Price: $100.00

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