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Dull Men’s Club celebrates quiet exploits of regular guys

Some members of the Southborough chapter of the Dull Men’s Club, all happy to be just regular guys.
Some members of the Southborough chapter of the Dull Men’s Club, all happy to be just regular guys. Chris Christo for The Boston Globe

There are 22 names on the roster of the Southborough chapter of the Dull Men’s Club: three Arts, two Jims, two Bills, two Dicks, and 13 others, each one as common as a pair of khaki pants.

Dull men are not really dull, the club’s members say. Instead, they’re understated and subdued. They follow the Farmer’s Almanac and the local weather. They collect golf balls, model trains, and restaurant menus. And they appreciate life’s simple pleasures — raking leaves, looking at the clouds, watching grass grow, and paint dry.

At meetings, they leapfrog from subject to subject, uninhibited by rules or rituals, skipping jokes like stones and chasing after their curiosities like boys on a scavenger hunt.

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The Southborough chapter, one of three in Massachusetts and a handful in England, started meeting in January 2013, roughly 10 years after a chapter in Pembroke was launched at the town’s senior center as a bereavement support group, and a year before a Northborough chapter was organized.

The original group dates to the 1980s, when a small group of men, members of the posh New York Athletic Club, were looking for a way to distinguish themselves from the groups of skiers, boxers, and martial artists listed in the club’s magazine.

“We were yuppies sitting around at the bar, joking,” said Leland Carlson, the 70-something founding member who lives in England for part of the year, manages the club’s website, and is proud to have helped move “ordinary to a surreal extreme.”

“There were all these exciting groups and we were kind of dull, but we wanted to get our own page.”

There are links between the local chapters, with the Pembroke edition inspiring Southborough’s club, which in turn led to the Northborough branch, which was launched in February and meets at 10 a.m. on Wednesdays in the town’s senior center, 119 Bearfoot Road

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In Southborough, the local chapter meets at the senior center on Friday mornings from 10 to 11, but for a recent session the seats begin filling a half-hour earlier. Two white carafes full of hot coffee have been placed on a serving tray, and there’s a large box of Dunkin’ Donuts, sugary and man-sized, to go with the coffee.

The rectangular table seats about 14 comfortably. But today it will accommodate 17 men, average age 70-something, squeezed into spaces as tight as a mouth with too many teeth. Some will be dressed in the official Dull Men’s Club uniform, which features a black T-shirt with DMC printed in small, yellow letters inside a tastefully small oval, and a black baseball cap with the same logo above the brim. Others arrive wearing jeans and dark-colored shirts. Only one man is in a sports jacket, also black.

At 10 a.m. on the nose, Bill Harrington, 78, calls the group to order.

“There’s a fellow out there in a chair,” someone says before the conversation gets going. “I think he fell asleep.”

Harrington jumps out of his seat.

“Lenny!” he says, remembering the gentleman who arrived so early there was nothing to do but have him sit and wait until the others arrived. “He heard about us and in spite of that, he came.”

“This is Lenny from Marlborough,” Harrington says. “He heard about us and wanted to find out more. So, Lenny, tell us a little about yourself. What do you like? How many mistresses do you have?”

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“My wife just passed away and I’m learning to take care of myself,” says Lenny, whose scrubbed pink face and startled eyes make him look younger than his 89 years.

“What did you do?” Harrington asks.

“I drove a crane, I was in hydraulics for 22 years,” Lenny says.

“Thinking about going back to work?” someone asks.

“I tell you, I am, boy,” Lenny says, his face brightening. “My son-in-law has a workshop in my cellar. He makes wooden toys every Sunday.”

“Proof that the kids never move out,” says somebody else, rousing a chuckle.

The Dull Men like their jokes. Clean ones. Dirty ones. Silly ones. Clever ones. But a serious thread runs through the ribbing, and for some, including founder Carlson, there’s an actual divide between Dull Men, who “get it,” and Other Men, who don’t.

Dull Men, Carlson says, appreciate what others take for granted: clouds, apostrophes, mailboxes, milk bottles. At the same time, they eschew status symbols, pretense, and the accumulation of things.

“Wouldn’t people be OK if they simply enjoyed what they already have, where they already are?” Carlson asks on the Dull Men’s Club website (www.dullmensclub.com).

“We are not a 12-step program, trying to change behavior,” the website asserts. “We are not trying to change.”

Still, the club offers members two “steps” to membership: “We admit we are dull; and we are going to keep it that way.”

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The Dull Men in Southborough are all on board.

Why sit at home watching TV? Why keep all your best jokes to yourself? Why put on the dog when you can come as you are?

“It’s not dull. It’s just a name,” says Jim Urban, who is 72, retired, recently widowed, and a regular at the Southborough meeting. “If you think back to when you were 7 years old, you had someone, a buddy. We’re all retired and we all still need that kind of relationship where you’re accepted no matter what.”


Hattie Bernstein can be reached at hbernstein1@ hotmail.com.