Further research has turned up some more material on Polly Lamb Goforth, and her background.

In the mid-1920s, Polly attended a short story class at Berkeley Evening High School.  The school was an experiment in progressive education, begun in the late teens or early twenties.  In addition to writing and arts courses, the school offered vocational classes in mechanics and typewriting, among others, most of them for free or a nominal fee.  Polly’s teacher in the short story class was Elizabeth A. Everett.  Everett was an active writer, publishing romance and westerns—and winning awards for them—as well as personal sketches and travel memoirs.  She was attached to the University of California Extension Service, and also was very active in the California Writer’s Club.  (It is likely that Everett influenced Polly to join that Club.)

The 1925 short story class went on to form The Scribbler’s Club, a group from Berkeley and Oakland who shared writing and encouraged one another’s efforts.  Polly was an active member, running the entertainment committee for many years.  The Scribbler’s Club annual festival occurred at Halloween.  (There were, of course, monthly meetings.)  Polly had the guests come as ghosts one year, and made a haunted house another.  These are not unusual but, given her interest in sorcery, they are worth noting.

It is also worth noting that the president for many years was William Naum Ricks.  Ricks was a middle-class black writer of some renown.  The Scribblers also produced David Duncan, a somewhat famous Berkeley writer.  So, Polly was surrounded by people of talent, but also by people not usually in leadership positions at the time—Everett, Ricks, and the California Writer’s Club, while presidented by men, was largely driven by women.  After BEHS she also attended the Williams Institute, another organization experimenting with progressive—read: low-cost—education, matriculating at their school of journalism and authorship.  These associations may have also led Polly to take up more unusual strands of American life.  Indeed, Polly became president of the Scribbler’s Club in 1936.

But still, she was involved with the standard, too.  She was part of the woman’s auxiliary of the United Veterans Council in Berkeley.   She was entertainment director for the All Arts Club.  She was a member of the Writers Workshop Guild.  In the early 1940s, when she was with Heath Dairy she joined a woman’s professional group.  And in 1942, when she was living at 1945 Berryman—apparently after she and George divorced—she hosted a going away party for a soldier joining the war effort.
 


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