At the American Mensa AG in San Francisco in July 1992, I spent a lot of my time wandering between the several Hospitality Suites. At one point, I encountered an older gentleman who was not wearing his AG badge, a violation of "The Rules." I mentioned to him that he must wear a badge in order to be in the Hospitality Suites. He noted that it would obscure his T-shirt, which displayed four Latin words. I continued to insist the he must wear a badge. He was equally obstinate and asked if I knew what the T- shirt said. The T-shirt did not concern me, his lack of a badge did.
In the hallway stood Skinner, founder and coordinator of the American Mensa party SIG, the Hell's Mensans, or Hell's Ms. I noticed he was wearing a giant security badge, so I told him about the rule- breaker in Hospitality. This annoyed him and presented him with a dilemma. First of all, he was in the middle of a conversation with an attractive woman, a conversation he was enjoying. Second, since he was in charge of security, it was his duty to deal with this person who was not wearing a badge. Duty won, and off he went.
At the time, I was Local Secretary of the Channel Islands Mensa group in California, so each month I received all of the newsletters from other Region 9 groups. In August, I received a number of newsletters containing photos of the very distinguished gentleman I had thrown out of Hospitality for not wearing his badge. He was none other than Dr. L. L. Ware, our founder. (I would eventually learn that Skinner did not know who he was either, and that the entire American Mensa Committee knew what had happened within five minutes of it happening.)
Over the Labor Day holiday weekend in early September, I attended the Asilomar gathering in Monterey. Who should I see in Registration but Dr. Ware. I approached him, properly introduced myself, and began to apologize for my actions at the AG. He insisted that I had been correct and apologized to me instead. But every so often at Asilomar I just had to nudge him and note that I was happy to see that he was wearing his badge. It was also at Asilomar that I heard him speak about the founding of Mensa.
This year, at the AG in St. Louis, Dr. Ware told me that he values our friendship, and that he enjoys the Creative Mischief SIG newsletters that I send him (as a sort of honorary member). He also asked how long we had known each other. I noted that we had met at the San Francisco AG. His response was something like, "Only that long?" I was happy to know that he had forgotten about the badge incident.
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