Cannon Club welcomes 138

Cannon Dial Elm Club welcomed 138 members on Saturday, out of a total of 189 students who bickered. The students will be the first class of new members to take their meals in the Cannon clubhouse since the club closed its doors after the 1972-1973 academic year. Cannon was in operation between 1990-98 in the former Elm Club, which now houses the Fields Center. At the time, it was known as Dial Elm Cannon.

“It was a lot of fun,” Joe Goss ’14, a member of the Bicker Committee who has been involved with reopening the club since the very beginning, said of the bicker process. “We have a really good group of new members.”

The club held Bicker sessions on the nights of Monday, Nov. 28 and Tuesday, Nov. 29 and conducted pickups on Saturday evening. After pickups, the club held a members-only party.

“The Bicker Committee did a great job of planning the Bicker process in such a short amount of time and making it fun,” new Cannon member Dan Kang ’14 said. He added that some of the Bicker events included karaoke and fighting with foam swords.

“Everyone really bonded at Bicker,” Bicker Committee member Chris Pondo ’14 said. Pondo is running for vice president of the club and had been involved since the beginning with Goss.

Kang published a post to his personal blog and posted the link to Cannon’s Facebook page on the Sunday before Bicker called, “Why I’m Bickering Cannon.”

In the post, he explained that though he had been set on bickering Tower just a few weeks ago, he was attracted to Cannon’s “startup feel.” He said he also appreciated the opportunity to interact with athletes, who he said made up a large portion of the Bicker committee and the club’s membership.

“There were definitely a lot of athletes who bickered, but there were also a lot of non-athletes that came out,” Kang said.

This year’s Bicker was led by a Bicker Committee made up of members of the classes of 2014 and 2013 who were selected by Cannon’s graduate board after indicating their interest in serving on such a committee in their applications to the club.

Students interested in membership had to fill out an application by Nov. 13. Applicants then attended a series of interviews held later that week and the week before Thanksgiving break. The club also conducted tours for potentially interested students and held a pre-Bicker party on Nov. 12 for students who had filled out an application.

According to Pondo, 34 of the accepted students are upperclassmen, most from the Class of 2013. Though the club had primarily been recruiting current sophomores, graduate board chair Warren Crane ’62 announced a discounted fee option for juniors in the attempts to attract upperclassmen in October.

For the coming semester, all members will pay a social fee of $850 that includes two meals a week at the club, parties on weekends and access to the club’s facilities.

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Roland Persaud ’12, who had not previously been a member of an eating club, was offered admission to the club and said that a fair amount of other seniors and friends of his were as well.

“I just decided that I wanted to have some fun my last semester,” Persaud said.

The club fell well short of Crane’s stated goal of attracting 75-100 upperclassmen.

Meanwhile, the 109 sophomores accepted falls within the club’s initial target of enrolling 110 sophomores, give or take 10 percent.

“Selection’s a tough process, but we came up with a more competitive class for the best club on the Street,” Goss said.

Pondo said that graduate board vice chairman Bob Casey ’67 had indicated that there was no minimum number of students that the club had to accept, and that the committee should focus on admitting “quality people.”

Goss said he is not concerned about the possibility of students leaving in February to bicker or sign in to other clubs, noting the popularity that Cannon has achieved in a brief time.

“We were able to attract some of the best kids on campus in just two months of school,” Goss said.

Though Bicker Committee member Alex Polofsky ’14 said that the graduate board had decided not to hold a spring Bicker, Goss said that the members would consider holding another Bicker in February if they thought it would draw additional students.

“We’re very happy with the turnout for Bicker and with the results as well,” Polofsky said. “We’re looking forward to an absolutely stellar year.”