Monday, May 28th — Club closed for Memorial Day holiday
Tuesday, May 29th– Quarterback Roundtable, 12:30 – 1:30 PM
Alan Penziner is our quarterback.
Menu: Green Salad, Penne with Bolognese Sauce, dessert TBD
Thursday, May 31st– Luncheon Roundtable, 12:30 – 1:30 PM
Speaker is Benjamin Leavenworth, Honorary Consul of Chile in Philadelphia, who has over 20 years of professional experience in Latin America, from governmental roles to entrepreneurial ventures and finance. He is a partner of Afina International, founded in 2011, a private investment firm providing access to global investment opportunities, with a concentration in Latin America, primarily focused on managing and developing the firm’s relationships.
Prior to co-founding Afina in 2011, he founded Chispa Group LLC, an international consulting services firm, where he was involved in many different sectors and consulted on multi-billion dollar mining, energy, agriculture, and government projects. Previously, Benjamin developed the first Chilean branded beef program for the U.S. market, successfully establishing it as the largest supplier of grass-fed beef to Whole Foods Market. In addition, he co-founded Cono Sur, an affiliate of Chile’s largest wine company, where he developed distribution channels throughout Latin America and Canada. Cono Sur currently exports more than one million cases of wine per year and is one of the top four wine companies in Chile.
Benjamin also serves on the boards of the Chilean &American Chamber of Commerce, Global Interdependence Center, the Pan American Association, and the Consular Corps Association of Philadelphia. Benjamin graduated from Hamilton College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Latin American Studies. He was born in Mexico and is fluent in Spanish.
Menu: Carrot Soup, Greek Salad with Farro and Feta, dessert TBD
Monday, June 4th– Quarterback Roundtable, 12:30 – 1:30 PM
Palmer Hartl is our quarterback.
Tuesday, June 5th– Evening Buffet Dinner, starting at 6 PM
Speaker is Victoria Kirkham, newly retired Penn professor of Renaissance culture and Romance Languages. Her Power Point presentation will profile a highly talented couple in Florence. The husband designed the Pitti Palace and many more great buildings; the wife was a poet.
Success in the Sixteenth Century: An Italian Power Marriage
The forty-year marriage of Laura Battiferra (1523-89) and Bartolomeo Ammannati (1511-92), remarkable as a creative partnership, left a rich cultural legacy. She won fame in a pan-European community for hundreds of sonnets, some collected by Michelangelo. He won renown as both a sculptor and architect, designing monuments synonymous with Renaissance Florence–the Pitti Palace, Ponte Santa Trinita, and a colossal Neptune Fountain in Piazza della Signoria. This illustrated talk will show how, in their entwined lives, each promoted the other’s art and career. Professor Kirkham has wonderful slides to go with the talk.
Thursday, June 7th — Luncheon Roundtable, 12:30 – 1:30 PM
Speaker is Douglas Bohr, vice president for strategic initiatives at the Philadelphia Zoo. Title of his talk: “What is a zoo in the 21st century? How can the Philadelphia Zoo become increasingly relevant to a public whose perceptions of zoos in changing even as concerns about environmental issues and wildlife conservation is growing?”
Bohr came to the zoo after serving as the Director of the Philadelphia Program of The Pew Charitable Trusts. His particular focus was Pew’s support for arts and culture. He served as direct liaison to the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, which – through its funding programs for exhibitions and public interpretation, performance and the Pew Fellowships in the Arts – aims to stimulate a vibrant cultural community in Greater Philadelphia by supporting artists and cultural programs marked by excellence, imagination and courage, and connecting them to a broad spectrum of audiences. Doug also oversaw Pew’s Support for Regional Culture strategy which advanced three key strategies: commissioning research on audience participation trends; stimulating learning and collaboration among the region’s culture sector in areas of audience development & marketing and supporting the development and implementation of new tools to help arts organizations engage and build relationships with audiences. Previously, Doug was the Director of Public Programs and Exhibitions at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.
Monday, June 11th– Quarterback Roundtable, 12:30 – 1:30 PM
Roberta Kangilaski is our quarterback.
Friday, June 15th — Club Dinner, starting at 5:45 PM
Speaker is Thom Nickels on Philadelphia Mansions: Inside and Out.
Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia author/journalist, author of twelve books, including Two Novellas: Walking Water & After All This (1989); Out in History (2005), Philadelphia Architecture (2005) and Spore (2010).
Nickels was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award for Two Novellas (1990) and awarded the Philadelphia AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism in 2005. His poetry has appeared in the Van Gogh’s Ear anthology (Paris). He has written for Philadelphia Magazine. Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, Metro Philadelphia, Passport magazine (New York), Huffington Post, New Oxford Review and the Broad Street Review.
He is the theater critic at ICON Magazine, a weekly columnist for the Philadelphia Free Press, a writer for PJ Media (Los Angeles) and City Journal (New York). Literary Philadelphia: A History of Prose & Poetry in the City of Brotherly Love was published by The History Press in 2015. His essay on Agnes Repplier was the cover feature essay in the Winter issue of The American Catholic Studies Journal (Villanova University), 2015. He was the featured speaker at Walt Whitman’s 198th birthday celebration at the poet’s historic home in May 2017. His book Philadelphia Mansions: Stories and Characters behind the Walls was published in March 2018.
Monday, June 18th– Quarterback Roundtable, 12:30 – 1:30 PM
Bill Untereker is our quarterback.
Thursday, June 21st — Luncheon Roundtable, 12:30 – 1:30 PM
Speaker is Dr. Derick Dreher, the John C. Haas Director of The Rosenbach and Vice President for Special Collections at the Free Library of Philadelphia,.
His talk: Re-energizing one of Philadelphia’s hidden gems.
After a sleepy period, The Rosenbach—now linked with the Free Library—offers some 150 programs and public access to its notable collection of books. Dreher will give his talk a few days after his museum’s day long festivities on June 16, Bloomsday, celebrating James Joyce’s classic novel, Ulysses, that took readers through the streets of Dublin starting on that day in 1904-just two years after the Franklin Inn Club was founded.
Monday, June 25th– Quarterback Roundtable, 12:30 – 1:30 PM
Dick Goldberg is our quarterback.
Friday, June 29th — Club closes for July – August