This Week in National Press Club History: Club bar gets DC's first liquor license

March 1, 2013: Women’s History Month is celebrated at the National Press Club with a panel of former female presidents of the National Press Club, including Vivian Valberg, the first female president of the Club (1982), Sylvia Smith (2008) and Donna Leinwand Leger (2009), and moderated by 2012 President Theresa Werner.

March 2, 1933: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the twenty-first Amendment that repeals Prohibition. The National Press Club bar is the first to reopen in the District of Columbia, and is granted Liquor License #1.

March 4, 1964: President Lyndon B. Johnson unexpectedly announces at a Women’s National Press Club dinner the appointment of 10 women to major positions in his new administration. Two of them were members of WNPC, with which Johnson had a cordial relationship during his many years in Congress. Seven years later, 24 women become the first female members of the NPC.

March 4, 1996: Michael Bloomberg, founder, chairman, and CEO of Bloomberg L.P. and future mayor of New York City, attends a reception for Vice President Al Gore and shows off his new NPC membership card.

March 4, 2013: The National Press Club thanks the Washington Post for supplying the historic newspaper mats and offset plates that now adorn the Club’s walls. The Post is the only newspaper that has both a mat and an offset plate of the same edition on the Club’s walls: the August 9, 1974 edition reporting President Nixon’s resignation.

March 8, 1914: The National Press Club moves to its third home in the new, much grander Albee-Riggs building at 15th and G Streets, NW. Most of the entire top floor is fitted out as the new clubhouse, including a sizeable lounge with working fireplace, a dining room, and “the snuggest, coziest bar in existence” (room for 12).

March 8, 2005: Actress and director Angelina Jolie and currently Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Refugee Agency, creates a media stir in her appearance at a Club luncheon, rivaling that caused by Audrey Hepburn some years earlier.

This Week In National Press Club History is brought to you by the History & Heritage Committee, which preserves and revitalizes the Club’s long history with lobby displays, panel discussions, events and an on-going oral history project.

For more information on the Committee’s activities or to join it, contact Gilbert Klein at [email protected].