In connection with the upcoming McCullough read, and talking about it to a visitor yesterday, it came back to me that this reading group, with a rather different venue and readership, started out in 1995 with McCullough! The Internet was in its infancy then as far as the average person was concerned, with that average person being on AOL, which at the time was rather community oriented and had quite a number of reading groups. I found one on history, and we soon discussed First Man in Rome. After that, half of the group wanted to continue with the series, the other half didn't. So we branched off, and I was "elected" leader . . .
Amazing that this thing now has been going for 12 years! With various transformations and chat room venues, as well as sponsors when those were needed. The first of these required every reading group to have a website, so I had to learn . . . And the 'average person' was still so suspicious of the Internet and stuck to 'safe AOL,' that I lost almost all AOL members when the last AOL deal fell apart and we moved to the Internet at large.