At 79 R Street NW, at the home of Helen Webb Harris, an educator and the wife of a prominent Washington physician, 13 women congregated to form, of all things, a golf club. Each was married to a member of Washington's all-black, all-male Royal Golf Club, and they were tired of staying home on weekends while their husbands played golf.

"They wanted to play, too," says Winifred Stanford, who joined Wake Robin when she moved to the Washington area in 1970. "They weren't trying to raise a big fuss. All they wanted to do was play golf. They weren't trying to get into country clubs. They just wanted to get on the golf course, period."

COURTESY OF WINIFRED STANFORD Wake Robin founder, Helen Webb Harris, bottom left, seated with club members fro mthe '60s.

At the time, all but one of the District's public courses -- the long forgotten Lincoln Memorial, a nine-hole, sand-green layout in what is now West Potomac Park -- were off limits to black players of either sex. Country club gates across America were shut to almost all people of color, unless they were carrying golf bags, shining shoes, or serving food.

Like the purplish wake-robin wild flower abundant in the Mid-Atlantic region, the club named for that low-growing plant blossomed almost from the start -- though not without a few problems. There was some initial resistance from the men of the Royal Club, but not long after their first meeting, Wake Robin members were playing regularly at the Lincoln Memorial course, often enduring the taunts of men. They made frequent excursions to courses in Baltimore and Philadelphia that were more accommodating to blacks.

In 1938, the Wake Robin Club pushed the process of desegregating the District of Columbia's public courses. The group worked with the Royal Club to draft a petition, which was sent to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. To mollify the petitioners, Ickes approved the construction of a nine-hole course on the site of an abandoned trash dump. Thus was born Langston Golf Course, built in the shadow of Spingarn High School in Northeast Washington. It wasn't pretty, especially when players tried to retrieve balls from under the old tires or rusty tin cans strewn about the property. But, finally, black golfers had a place to call their own. Today, Langston is an 18-hole public facility that still attracts a predominately black clientele.

"It wasn't the best course," said Ethel Williams in a 1994 interview. At the time, she was Wake Robin's last surviving founder. She remembered that Langston had a sewage ditch running along one of the holes. "But we fought for it and won ...And if our balls, which cost 75 cents each -- a lot of money then -- went into a ditch, we went after them."

Both Wake Robin and the Royal Club continued to press Ickes to open up the city's other public facilities, and in 1941, he issued an order that did. When the doors opened at the city's other courses, Wake Robin members walked in, but not over a welcome mat.

"Some of our members were stoned," Williams said, recalling an incident at the East Potomac course. "White men around there harassed us, and the children who lived around there, when we'd hit the ball, they'd come out and pick it up and run with it. The dogs would run with it, and those stones would come flying. But we kept on. We paid taxes, too."

MICHAEL WILLIAMSON/TWP Current club members Lois Hall and Ruby Felix (back row) with Winifred Stanford and Betty Brabble (seated).

Wake Robin endured and prospered while its members battled to end the exclusionary heritage of golf. These days, there is still no fancy clubhouse, no driving range, no practice putting green for Wake Robin members. They don't even have a golf course to call their own.

But the club hasn't let those incidentals stand in its way. Wake Robin members, now numbering more than 50, play every week throughout the Washington area. There are regular weekend matches, monthly tournaments, and a club championship.

Most of the current members are aware of the noble history of their club. In addition to being an accomplished player, Ethel Williams was a meticulous record keeper, and Stanford inherited all of the club memorabilia Williams collected through the years, including Helen Harris's original postcard inviting her 12 friends to the first meeting in 1936. All of the club's records, photographs, and memorabilia have found a home in a wing of the Howard University library in Washington, D.C.

Stanford, 77, speaks animatedly about Wake Robin's role in helping integrate public courses. Still an active golfer, she took up the game more than 50 years ago in Philadelphia.

"You had problems when you played some courses because some white men felt you shouldn't be there," she says. "They'd hit into you or say things -- that kind of nonsense. People had it set in their minds that black women didn't belong on the course. You just accepted it, but it never got so bad that we were ready to give it up."

Betty Brabble, 68, the current club president and a retired university professor who took up golf at Penn State in the late 1960s, joined the club in 1976. She, too, remembers some bad times. "You'd go into the pro shop to pay your green fees, and you'd get less-than-courteous responses from the people working there. It was obvious they didn't want you around, but we prevailed."