Page 30 - Port of Baltimore - Issue 1 - 2023

ANNIVERSARY
Lisa Hubbard and Gloria Weber are the only mother and daughter who both served as Presidents of the WTTC.
A Club as Family Legacy
If the WTTC’s legacy is embodied
by its members, there’s no better example than Gloria Weber who,
at 90 years old, is the same age as the club. A member since 1963, she attended meetings alongside the club’s co-founder, Edie Bell.
Back then, Weber worked for Rukert Terminals Corporation and the
friend who took her to her first meeting “asked permission of Mr. Rukert to enroll me in the club,” Weber said. “At that time, we would meet downtown at the Park Plaza, and you didn’t come in jeans. You came dressed” — think heels, white gloves and mink stoles.
Though the industry was still heavily male at the time, Weber remembers encountering many women at the
club who were business owners. “There was Blanche Rogers of Rogers Harbor Towing, and Frances Mett of Powhatan Mining Company,” she said. “These girls, they operated their own companies.”
Over the years, Weber made a place for herself at the club, and she served as its President in 1970 and ’71.
Weber’s work at the WTTC made a big impression on her daughter, Lisa Hubbard, who joined the club herself in 1979 and served as President in 1984 and ’85 — all while moving up through the ranks at Orient Overseas Container Line.
“I can remember going with my father to pick Mom up after meetings downtown, and even at a very young age, I thought, ‘Woah, these women are very impressive,’” Hubbard said. “They were mature, professional women who worked hard and played harder.”
Weber and Hubbard are the only mother-daughter duo to both have served as the club’s Presidents.
‘We’d Be Dressed Up Like Umbrellas’
Of course, WTTC wasn’t the only women’s traffic and transportation club at the time. Many others were founded all across the country around the same time, and in 1959, Sara Seamer of the New York club organized the Eastern States Women’s Traffic Conference in an effort to unite the clubs around a common cause.
Eastern States consisted of 20 women’s clubs east of the Mississippi, including the WTTC. In fact, the first Eastern States meeting took place in Baltimore, and Weber and Hubbard each chaired Eastern States at various times. Both remember the annual conference as a highlight. It was always held in a different city, ranging from Hartford, CT to Fort Lauderdale, FL.
“The conferences would have a theme — it could be the 1950s, or ‘Putting on the Ritz,’ or a beach theme,” Hubbard recalled. “We’d be dressed up like umbrellas or coolers or beach balls.”
However, as the years passed, more and more of the Eastern States member clubs faded out of existence, and the conference eventually ceased operations too. “I believe we are the last club left out of the original ones,” Hubbard said.
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[28] The Port of Baltimore ■ ISSUE 1 / 2023